Do you want to tell your customers or partners more about your business, and you decided to create an "About Us" page? Or maybe your online store is growing, and you want to add pages about new products there? Use Experience Cloud in such cases to create a new page or portal and integrate it with an already existing Salesforce organization.
What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?
Salesforce Experience Cloud (also known as Community Cloud) is a digital platform that allows users to create branded web portals based on Salesforce to share information and collaborate with people. The modular Community Cloud platform includes templates and components to simplify the creation of a high-quality portal in the shortest possible time. Created portals might be fully integrated with your data and existing Salesforce-based organization.
Benefits of Salesforce Community Cloud
Branding
Personalize the Experience Cloud to make it perfectly match your brand identity and particular needs
Security
Extend your Salesforce data on the secure online portal and set up the specific security levels for various users
Community
Provide customers with access to the site and build a database for your employees and partners
Privacy
Impose the level of privacy for different users; change, develop and manage user configurations
Speed
Build a portal/website from ready-made components without any development of code, and launch it in a matter of days.
As we now know what is Salesforce Experience Cloud it's time to talk about its licences, components and deisgn.
Salesforce Experience Cloud Licenses
Like any other Salesforce product, Experience Cloud begins with the choice of license. Each license has an individual feature set, so users can choose the license according to their business needs.
Salesforce Experience Cloud licenses differ in price, access levels to objects, and functions.
You may also like: "What is Salesforce Service Cloud and how it will improve your business outcomes"
In addition to the licenses, Salesforce allows unregistered users to access data. For these cases, a Profile is used instead of a license. Access is configured using the Guest User Profile.
However, access for these users is limited by the number of viewed pages and depends on your organization's version:
Enterprise Edition - 500,000 / per month
Unlimited Edition - 1 million / per month
Themes for Experience Cloud portals
After you have chosen the licenses, you can proceed to choose the theme for the portal. Salesforce provides several ready-made themes that you can install for your portal and use out of the box, saving a lot of development time. Themes define the functionality and purpose of the portal:
Customer Account Portal is a portal where customers can access knowledge articles, view and update their accounts, create and manage cases and other Salesforce records. The portal easily integrates with your third-party business processes.
Partner Central is a PRM solution that grows at the speed of business with Lightning components, preconfigured workflows, and data from any source to help partners sell faster and more efficiently.
Customer Service is a feature-rich site that will allow members to post questions, access related content and posts, view articles, collaborate, and create support cases.
Help Center allows customers to search and read articles in this portal and contact the support team to resolve their problems. Organization’s articles in Help Center can cover various topics, such as products, customer locations, or FAQs.
Aloha is an application launcher that allows users to quickly find and access applications using single sign-on, including social logins.
Build Your Own (Aura) is a customized solution for businesses' unique needs. Aura includes basic pages (homepage, error, search, and login) and the complete set of Lightning components.
Build Your Own (LWR) is powered by the new Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) framework. The custom template delivers unparalleled page performance and improves developer productivity. Quickly create pixel-perfect pages and Lightning web components, and choose Lightning themes that match your unique brand.
Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce is a separate site that uses the standard layout and Salesforce tabs, which can be fully customized using Visualforce. Salesforce Tabs requires advanced settings and allows flexible settings.
Theme Layout
In addition to the theme, there is also a Theme Layout. This component defines the disposition of elements (such as header, footer, search, etc.) in your portal. Each layout has ready-made slots for placing elements and components on the page.
EMBER is a clean and versatile theme that adapts to any site and its content.
CYPRESS is a minimalistic theme focused on the brand.
STELLA is a stylish theme designed to showcase the website content at the forefront.
WEBSTER is a visually powerful, search-driven design for customers to get all the information they need about an organization and its product as quickly as possible.
JEPSON is a modern theme designed to showcase the website idea and promote content and activities.
CITIZEN is a vivid theme perfect for showcasing your brand.
Take a closer look at themes layout here.
Portal pages
Any site/portal consists of pages, and Salesforce Experience Cloud (Community Cloud) is not an exception. You can create a regular page and place any information on it.
However, another interesting feature is that you can create a set of pages for any object, depending on your license type. In such a set, you get three pages:
List
Detail
Related List
Thus, you get a complete set of pages for displaying information about the object.
Page Components
Components are the foundation of your portal/website. These building blocks allow you to display information to your customers. Salesforce provides a massive set of different types of components:
Analytics
Commerce
Content
Feeds
Files
Gamification
Messages
Process Automation
Records
Sales
Support
Topics
Custom Components
Custom Components is of particular interest as it allows you to create your component, which can be done with two frameworks - Aura and LWC.
So, what is Salesforce Experience Cloud? Experience Cloud is a digital platform that provides users with access to the integrated set of technologies that help organizations to share information with customers, partners, and inside the team. The features of Salesforce Experience Cloud allow businesses to structure information and customize sites and apps and design them in the way to match the brand.
If you want to have more benefits from your Salesforce, you’ve come to the right place. We can help you to find customized solutions and make Salesforce suitable for your brand. Contact us if you need to upgrade your Salesforce!