What are the advantages of making community users in salesforce?

[Vikas Kumar]

Hi sushant,

Here are five benefits of connecting with customers through communities:

1. Save Time

By creating a community platform for customers to share, you give your customers access to not only your knowledge base, but other community members thoughts, as well as those of your employees and partners, offering the ability to combine your existing resources with crowd sourcing tips for much faster customer service outcomes.

2. Save Money

By connecting your customers to other highly engaged customers, you’ll decrease the amount of tough questions coming into your customer service center. Customers will answer each other’s questions. Every call not connected to a live agent is a penny saved.

3. Enhance Products

Include product developers with engaged customers for product ideation, feedback and beta testing.

4. Strengthen Loyalty

By having a stronger connection to your customers’ likes, wants, and purchase histories, you can tailor future product offerings and content to them. Getting that first sale is one thing, keeping them coming back as a matter of brand loyalty; that takes work.

5. Drive Sales

Being connected is about switching from offering services to offering solutions.  A stronger connection with a potential customer involves knowing more about them, their wants, their needs, their past purchases, their likely next purchases. You’ll be offering them solutions tailor-made to their needs so closing deals is more frequent.

[shariq]

Hi,

The benefits of Salesforce Communities Web portals include:

1. Accelerated development – deploy a Community in as little as 30 days
Yes, you can build a portal in as little as 30 days. Previously, portals between companies would be built individually by programmers who would need time to learn the intricacies of each stakeholder in order to develop the right application using Java, PHP or .NET. The Salesforce Cloud platform has the multi-corporate portal technologies built into its structure.

2. Affordable, predictable pricing and support
The Community Cloud is a pre-built framework that offers a lot of value over developing a custom application that must be maintained and improved over time with your own internal resources or development shop. Custom in-house solutions also increase the cost to integrate with CRM, your customer service solution and marketing automation programs. Ongoing support of a SaaS-based Community Cloud will require less resources and can be handled by a Salesforce administrator rather than IT.

3. Mobile enabled
The Community Cloud is already mobile enabled, meaning you don’t need to build a separate mobile component that can significantly increase the cost.

Keep in mind that the you may need to optimize for mobility with responsive design when considering your customized branding, user experience and processes specific to your requirements. Hiring a Salesforce Consulting partner with expertise in mobile and Community Cloud deployment is critical to your application’s success.

4. Integration friendly – close the loop on marketing and sales
Use the native integration to Salesforce or build a custom API to other backend system to connect data in disparate systems so the right users can access the right data in real time. You need a 360-degree view of your customers and partners in order to provide the best service at the appropriate time and report on performance in a closed-loop approach.

5. Differentiate your business, products and services
Streamlining the processes your stakeholders take to do business with you is a key way businesses are differentiating themselves in a competitive environment. Use technology to your advantage by creating a delightful experience that facilitates the success of all parties involved.

6. Collaborate and connect like never before
Partner Channel Sales
Use Salesforce Communities to Streamline Channel Partner Communication and collaborate for mutual success. Connect directly with resellers, distributors, and partners to increase sales. Enable partners to find the information and experts they need, register new leads, update records, and manage funds.

Customer Service
Use Salesforce Communities to provide a rich, self-service experience that also enables them to connect with each other to troubleshoot issues and share resources. This also enables your service agents to concentrate on the most complex and impactful issues.

Employees
Reasons to build employee communities in Salesforce are much the same as partner channel sales and customer service. Salesforce Communities provide a one-stop-shop for employees to ask questions, review their schedules, log cases, log tickets for IT, manage expense reports, find training materials, search knowledge databases and collaborate with co-workers.