Experience Cloud – the most underrated Cloud in Salesforce

The title may seem a bit controversial, given the number of products available in the Salesforce ecosystem. However, this assumption is based on real cases that we encounter every day in our work with our clients.

Experience Cloud is designed to create personalised communities and comprehensive portals for customers, partners, and employees. It is a more specific tool than universal solutions such as Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. The advantages of Salesforce Experience Cloud include the ability to build stronger relationships with customers through interactive platforms and increase partner and employee engagement. Companies that do not need to create external interactions may not appreciate this tool because its benefits are not always directly noticeable.

Some of you may know Experience Cloud as a Community Cloud. Community Cloud was introduced in 2013 and allowed companies to create online communities for their customers, partners, or employees. At the time, Community Cloud allowed for creating forums, self-service portals, knowledge bases, and platforms for sharing ideas and solving problems.

In 2020, Salesforce changed the name of Community Cloud to Experience Cloud. As a curiosity, I would add that if you type “community” into quick find in Setup Home, you will see the Digital Experiences menu. Did revolutionary changes in the product itself dictate the name change? Definitely not. Instead, it reflected the platform’s evolution towards more complex and personalised experiences that could be delivered to customers and partners.

Experience Cloud now allows not only for creating traditional communities, but also for building fully personalised portals, applications, and websites.

Clients usually come to us with a standard business case: the desire to integrate an emerging or existing website with Salesforce. The simplest examples are displaying a list of products or a list of specialists. Another example is the need for a main contact page and creating service requests that go directly to Salesforce. There are, of course, more examples.

The first question we ask during meetings with clients is: “Are you familiar with Experience Cloud?” The most common answer is “no”.

The first reason Experience Cloud is underestimated is the lack of awareness. Compared to more recognizable products, such as Sales Cloud or more trending systems like Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud, Experience Cloud is less popular – and not only among new Salesforce users.

Even if clients are familiar with Experience Cloud, their knowledge is often superficial. They usually think it is “only” a community-building tool. This is another reason: a misleading image.

Added to this is the lack of knowledge about licensing and the fact that the product is mainly available in the existing package. For internal users, standard Salesforce licenses are sufficient. For external users, the Customer Community license is usually enough. I won’t go into the licensing details in this article, so I refer anyone interested to the official documentation: Types of User Licenses. The most important information is that you can save a lot by using what you already have.

There are many benefits of using Experience Cloud. The key ones include:

• scalability,
• flexibility,
• integration with Salesforce.

Experience Cloud is, in simple terms, a platform for building web portals. We can create small and complex, fully branded websites using available components.

Is there a need for a portal available only to internal users and company employees? No problem.

Is there a need for a portal available to everyone? Why not?

A portal for partners available only to registered users? By all means.

We are limited only by the business need and the justification for using Salesforce. Here, we come to the most significant advantage: integration with Salesforce. The word “integration” is a bit of an exaggeration here because when creating a portal, we operate in one ecosystem. Everything is based on the appropriate writing of controllers and Apex services serving data. We do not have to additionally integrate or authorise systems, significantly affecting the development process.

Another benefit of working in a single ecosystem is the ability to use the same human resources. Programming in Experience Cloud is nothing more than creating Lightning Web Components and APEX classes. What else is needed? A front-end developer with knowledge of LWC, CSS, WCAG and a UX/UI designer. When we publish our portal to the world, we want it to meet all the requirements, both in terms of usability and accessibility – just like in any other internet project.

Real-life examples of successfully implemented portals will serve as the best summary. Please see them below.

Workflow management platform.

The first part of the solution is configurable forms and multi-step approval processes defined on standard Salesforce layouts. The systems enable the creation of common processes – from simple keyboard and mouse ordering to multi-stage approval of purchase and service contracts. The second part is a portal available to internal users, where, depending on the role, you can start a selected process or have access to a panel from which you accept processes in which you are the approver.

A portal for customers to handle service requests.

This use case is an example of a quick integration of data existing in Salesforce with Experience Cloud. The client uses the ServiceMax package. We created a portal to improve communication and customer service where current customers receive their accounts. After logging in, they can check what service requests they can order. Of course, ordering and tracking work progress is also available.

A multilingual portal for specialists in the consumer goods industry.

A portal serving many different markets, fully branded and meeting the requirements of WCAG 2.1 at level AA. Specialists register for the portal by providing their representative number. After logging in, they receive access to the expert advertising materials. The central part of the system is product training, which ends with quizzes. A passed quiz allows completing a survey, and a completed survey gives tokens that can be exchanged for physical vouchers. The adoption of the system reaches several thousand logins for each market.

Some organisations may not realise the full potential of Experience Cloud. Often associated with social portals, the solution offers much more:

• the ability to create complex self-service portals,
• integration with various systems,
• personalised experiences for customers
• or platforms for business partners.