Best in class customer service is one of the dire necessity of this hour for any business to flourish. In today’s connected world creating a memorable customer experience is imperative. There has been a seismic shift from, when customers used to shop depending solely upon product features or price. Customers tend to convert depending upon the customer experience you deliver. Salesforce Community Cloud launches the Lightning Customer Community, endeavoring a rich and immersive experience to customers that can be deployed and adapted at a lightning speed.
The main motto being companies should be able to connect well to the customer profiles and business workflows from the CRM to create exquisite relationship building digital experiences at an individual level.
Timeline
Customer connectivity and interaction has always been of utmost importance and so customer cloud has kept on evolving with the ever changing needs of the situation.
Year 2013
It witnessed the first ever version of Community Cloud that aided the enterprises to incorporate records and data in social environment. Service cases could be created and escalated from the community and consumers can keep a track on the progress via the community itself.
Year 2015
This year saw the development of Lightning Community templates to accelerate an enterprise’s ability to set up communities and add new functionalities to keep pace with the undying needs of the customers.
Present
Customers seek for a more personalized and interactive experience with the companies they are associated with. Hence Lightning Customer community allows enterprises to incorporate the customer experience with a rich, immersive and intelligent environment.
Access to communities using Salesforce1
Community access through Salesforce1 mobile apps depends upon myriad factors which includes three important factors like types of templates that have been used to create the community, permissions granted to the community members and the licenses.
It is available in Salesforce Classic, also available in Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance and Developer Edition.
- Ensure Community users can access Salesforce1-
1. Goto Setup and type mobile administration in the quick find. Click on Salesforce1 settings and ensure Salesforce1 access is enabled.
2. Select Salesforce1 User on every external user record for automatic access to Salesforce1 mobile browser app.
3. If this Setting is not available then the external users with community licenses must append /one/one.app to the community URL to use Salesforce1.
4. You have to grant ‘API Enabled’ profile permission to external users with licenses for granting access via Salesforce1 downloadable apps. - On the other hand communities that use Salesforce Tabs and Visualforce templates gets supported in every Salesforce1 apps.
- Communities using builder templates like Koa, Napili which do not display Salesforce1 so the best shot for the templatized communities is to access them directly via mobile browser using community URLs.
- It also provides a comfort zone for external users who have a tie with multiple communities. They can make use of drop down menu at the top of Salesforce1 navigation menu to access the various communities.
Benefits of Customer communities
Lightning Customer Community helps to connect customers at a more personalized level giving them a rich experience at a lightning speed. The major benefits are as follows:
Business integrations:
You can infuse customer community with any data from any system. It also gives you the provision to allow members to create and update records from within the communities. Partners are also eligible to qualify leads, customers has all the flexibility to provide their product review. Even the employees can escalate the support cases.
Branding and Engagement:
Customer community is lucidly customizable and reflects your brand and also aids in extending the online customer experience. It also helps in creating a dynamic community by highlighting and rewarding the most active members.
Mobile:
You can access the community through the Salesforce1 mobile app or from any mobile browser such that you can deliver an immersive, branded and responsive mobile experience at any place and time.
Profile based access:
Organizations can now give a tailored community structure and look to different members. It will give you a greater control and more personalized experience.
Rich Media Feed:
Users now also have the power to embed various links, images and videos in any community feed, it’s more of a question and answer forum which helps find solutions easy.
Amongst the innumerable other advantages the brand new Lightning User Experience gives the provision of a fresh level of personalization and added opportunities to case your customers in an unmatched customer experience. Some of them like Lightning themes, profile based access and rich media feed are the icing on the cake. So go ahead and explore the power of lightning struck Customer Community!!
Don’t miss to check out – Lightning Out (Beta) – Adding Lightning Components To Any App Made Easy
References: salesforce.com
Ajeet Singh
