Salesforce’s Lightning Customer Community Update: What’s In It for You?

Customers are no longer buying products and services – they are buying experiences delivered via the products and services. According to Salesforce, of the 86% of companies seeking to excel at customer experience, only 27% qualify as “good” in the eyes of their customers. The most critical brand differentiator today isn’t the product quality or price but customer experience indeed. Keeping that in mind, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) giant has come out with an update for the existing community cloud – establishing a new benchmark for web and mobile customer community experiences.

The purpose behind releasing this update is to empower companies to make customer experience better & more personalized and make the Salesforce Community Cloud more mobile friendly and personal based on profiles. The Lightning Customer Community integrates with a company’s Customer Success Platform – enabling it to seamlessly share data, files, and processes.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]

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Let’s take a closer look at the top new features of Lightning Customer Community:

Lightning Themes

With the all new Lightning themes, companies can create a visually-rich and highly personalized user experience. These creative and appealing themes can change the entire look and feel of any community – delivering a delightful, unique and branded experience across multiple user devices. It empowers companies to exceed expectations and build deeper relationships with their customers.

Drag-and-Drop Functionality

The update allows companies to drag-and-drop e-commerce modules into their community pages from third parties such as Magento, CloudCraze, and Demandware, with new partner-built Lightning Components, which includes

CloudCraze CartPlus: Empowering companies to drag-and-drop shopping cart anywhere in their community, allowing customers to buy products within one channel of engagement.

OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Demandware: Integrating Demandware’s B2C e-commerce services into any community – allowing companies to provide single sign-on capabilities to customers, sync customer data with Demandware Customer Service Suite and enable service agents to place orders on behalf of customers.

OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Magento: Enabling companies to link Magento’s e-commerce services into any community, synchronize customer records, orders and reviews from Magento directly in Salesforce and monitor customers’ shopping activity such as order value, number of orders and product reviews.

Rich Media Feed

With this feature, just like Facebook and Twitter feeds, users can embed high-quality rich media such as images, videos, illustrations, file link previews, code snippets, etc. into their community news feed. It also provides a Q&A environment structure similar to Quora – making it easier to find relevant answers to users’ questions.

Profile-based Access

This new feature allows companies to deliver distinctive user experiences designed according to the profile information for various member types. It also gives businesses greater control to provide uniquely tailored experiences to different types of customers.

Recommended Articles and Answers

Lightning Customer Community empowers companies to provide relevant articles and answers based on the search query with Recommended Articles and Answers feature – delivering a personalized experience for every customer.

Search Optimization

With the all new search optimization feature, companies can now exhibit their community content in search engine results more effectively and direct queries within the community. Search Optimization enables companies to understand what users are searching for and provide useful and relevant results based on their search. It automatically takes users to the location in a community where their question is most likely to be answered—either by the manufacturer, a subject matter expert or another related enthusiast in the community.

Smart Moderation

The update provides community managers with an effective moderation tool with which they can proactively identify and eliminate unwanted posts or spam messages. Moreover, it enables community managers to create cases in Lightning Customer Community and direct them to Service Cloud Lightning using intelligent routing, allowing them to respond to their customers in quick time.

Lightning Reports and Dashboards

The new update comes with 250 new Lightning Reports and Dashboards, which enables community managers to monitor customer trends such as community traffic, content & community engagement, purchasing patterns, escalations, etc. across multiple platforms – making sure that they deliver a personalized and rich customer experience.

Want to make the most of the latest Salesforce update?