Using Experience Cloud to Create a Community Portal

As you establish your business’s Digital Foundation—and transition from attracting to converting customers—creating new ways to retain and engage your users is crucial. Creating member communities or self-service portals is a powerful option for nurturing relationships. 

As a Salesforce development agency, LaunchPad Lab builds beautiful digital experiences and community portals by leveraging Experience Cloud. If you’re interested in exploring your company’s potential for a community portal, keep reading for our top recommendations. 

What’s Experience Cloud?

Experience Cloud is a Salesforce tool used to create beautiful digital experiences for customers, employees, and professional partners. The platform features a mix of powerful out-of-the-box components that can be easily paired with a custom development framework. 

Experience Cloud is particularly suited to building templated portals, such as: 

A self-service partner portal to access marketing materials or log sales opportunities. Empower your partners to sell your products with Experience Cloud by sharing leads and opportunities with specific partners. This type of platform enables partners to engage with other employees at any point during the sales cycle through Chatter, an enterprise social network powered by Salesforce. By leveraging a partner portal, you can manage your partners more effectively, set up dashboards, and create customized reports based on community data. 

A customer portal to manage subscriptions or services. Experience Cloud is a great option for building an authenticated, personal experience that allows your customers to access their data, make payments, or manage subscriptions. Similar to a self-service knowledge hub, this self-service management platform helps to boost customer satisfaction and differentiate your firm from the competition. 

A digital training or knowledge hub: Self-service knowledge hubs are a community of resources that customers can use to find articles and resources that answer their questions. These types of portals drive customer satisfaction and help resolve problems without escalating everything to their customer service teams right away. If a user isn’t able to find the answer they need, Experience Cloud allows users to create forum discussions where they can crowdsource answers to their questions and vote on the best-suggested resolution. 

An employee portal to access key company information: Whether it’s HR resources, onboarding materials, or payroll information, build an easy-to-access employee portal by using Experience Cloud. Employees can use Chatter to collaborate on important projects and involve stakeholders. This experience is also completely personalized to the employee through Experience Cloud’s ability to connect to other Salesforce products or other business systems. 

Why Build a Community Portal on Experience Cloud?

Curious if building a community portal on Experience Cloud is right for your needs? Great question. 

• Do you use Salesforce as your CRM? If your business currently stores key customer data in Salesforce and wants to easily give customers access to Salesforce data, leveraging a community portal—and integrating it with your existing Salesforce CRM—can be a powerful opportunity to optimize and extend Salesforce data. 
• Do you need to communicate with partners or resellers? Building a community portal is particularly helpful for businesses with partner or reseller relationships. You can give your partners a streamlined opportunity to connect with leads and opportunities—without giving full access to your organization’s internal CRM. 
• Do you want to manage a community without a full development team? By leveraging Experience Cloud, your Salesforce admins can manage your community and deploy changes to the portal without an in-house development team.

If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to these questions, then Experience Cloud may be the perfect solution for building a community portal and further engaging your users in a meaningful, personalized manner.

Additional benefits of building a community portal on Experience Cloud include: 

• Integrated data. With Experience Cloud, access out-of-the-box access to Salesforce data. Third-party and legacy sources are available with development assistance. 

• No-code and custom solutions. With Experience Cloud, elevate your relationship with your users with a branded platform. Combine no-code with custom solutions. 

• Advanced sharing. Experience Cloud makes it simple to configure and share different types of content and protect sensitive data.  

• Chatter collaboration. With Chatter, external and internal users can collaborate on projects, connect with subject-matter experts, and foster conversation via discussion boards. 
• Best-in-class security. All Experience Cloud components are isolated through Lightning Locker. Clickjack Protection comes out of the box, disabling iframes from pointing to your pages. Content Security Policy (CSP) can also be enabled as an out-of-the-box configuration to protect your Experience Cloud site from any cross-site scripting attacks.

See Experience Cloud in Action

For over 30 years, Flexco has served as a leader in automotive remarketing services, providing customized services for today’s fleets—from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. 

LaunchPad assisted Flexco in building their products on Sales Cloud and Experience Cloud, two powerful Salesforce products. All products in the Salesforce ecosystem integrate seamlessly to provide a 360-degree view of Flexco’s customers and a single source of truth for all employees.

Read more about the Flexco project in this case study!

Let’s Work Together

If you’re looking for a partner to take your digital experience to the next level, LaunchPad Lab is here to help. 

With nearly a decade of experience building on the Salesforce platform, our digital product agency is eager to help companies differentiate themselves with powerful digital experiences. Schedule a chat with our team to learn more!

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