Enhancing Salesforce Community Engagement with Profile Progress Bar

We hear a lot about personalizing user experience in online communities. Many community managers try different methods to achieve it but do they all succeed? The first step to personalizing community experience lies in understanding your users. User information is the cornerstone of understanding user behavior, which is crucial for the success of your customer/partner community and, ultimately, your business. 

Getting that crucial user information in the first place is the hardest part. You really can’t expect that you ask your users and they will share it with you right at the get-go. That’s why businesses resort to various methods to encourage their users to share the required information. 

A progress bar is one such method. A progress bar is a usability feature, also called a Completeness Meter, that is employed to inform users of the percentage of completion of tasks along the way. It is used to encourage users to add personal information or perform activities to develop a richer user experience.

A progress bar can also be employed for user profiles in communities. If your community is hosted on Salesforce, the Profile Progress Bar is a sure-fire way to gather user information effectively. 

What is a Profile Progress Bar?

It is a custom solution to show the profile completion percentage of community users on Salesforce. This Lightning-compliant utility helps in tracking the progress of the profile completion by the community users. It can be deployed to three Salesforce objects: 

• Contacts 
• Accounts 
• Users

It informs the community users of how close they are to completing their profile by showing percentages of completion along the way. 

Don't forget to check out: Salesforce Winter'21 Release Notes Overview for Community Cloud

Why Do You Need a Profile Progress Bar?

1. To encourage users to complete their profile and provide them with information that community managers can use to create their next plan of action in managing the community.
2. To give users a sense of accomplishment by bringing a psychological element into play. As and when the user answers the question, they will be psychologically motivated to take the progress bar to 100% by answering the rest.
3. To compensate for the absence of a standard progress bar functionality in Salesforce.
4. To foster user-engagement within the community by motivating users to provide relevant information about them. To add a touch of gamification to the community, you can use various gamification elements or rewards like a profile completion badge, user profile points, levels on the user journey map, etc. 

Key Elements of Profile Progress Bar

Since the main functionality of the Profile Progress Bar is to fetch information from users, Salesforce Admins or Community Managers have the liberty to decide upon the elements (questions) that they want answers for based on their requirements. 

Since this component works for Accounts, Contacts, and Users, you can add multiple questions and define their percentile weightage according to the importance of questions.  As soon as the user answers a question, the percentage on the progress bar increases accordingly. 

Benefits of a Profile Progress Bar

A profile progress bar helps you:

• Gather User information Effectively

According to research by Lightspeed Research and Kantar, 75 percent of respondents in a group with no progress bar said that they would have preferred an indicator of their progress. It is because progress bars exploit the user’s need to complete goals and remove stress. Users become psychologically driven to fill it, thus, leading to a higher completion rate which makes the admins or community managers gather information better. 

• Formulate Engagement Strategies

Based on the information that community users fill in the fields, admins can work on new strategies of engagement for users. The analysis of user information and behavior plays a vital role in chalking out various motivational factors to enhance user participation in the community.

• Foster User Participation and Personalization

The main motive of adding the Profile Progress Bar utility in the Salesforce community is to foster user participation and to use new techniques or methods of offering personalized content to users based on their information. The Profile Progress Bar effectively enables that.

Check out an amazing Salesforce video tutorial here: Build an Experience with Salesforce Community Cloud: 4 Steps

Conclusion

With user behavior as the backbone of community engagement in Salesforce, the Profile Progress Bar ensures that you collect the user information in the best possible way by giving a sense of accomplishment to users as and when they answer the questions. This technique of gaining information by bringing psychological aspects of users into play helps enhance the engagement, personalization, and participation of the users.

Gaining information is one of the most effective ways of enhancing the engagement, personalization, and participation of the users.

To know more about the technical aspects and usage of the Profile Progress Bar in Salesforce, read here. 

Want to enhance user experience in your Salesforce community using the Profile Progress Bar? Talk to us!

The team at Grazitti has hands-on experience working with Salesforce cloud platforms and has helped companies maximize their Salesforce investment. For more information, just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.