Salesforce Experience Cloud is a robust platform that enables you to create engaging and personalized customer portals for your business. Whether a small startup or a large enterprise, you can create a customer portal in Salesforce Experience Cloud to enhance customer relationship management and deliver a seamless and satisfying customer journey.
In this article, you will have the chance to get to know everything that the Salesforce Experience Cloud has to offer- from customized self-service help portals to third-party apps you can use to make customer relationship management even better. This article also focuses on what to consider when you create a customer portal in Salesforce and how to create a customer portal in Salesforce using Experience Cloud in a few simple steps. Lastly, you will discover some best practices for designing a stunning self-service portal that caters to your business goals and users’ needs. If you want to take your customer relationships to the next level, read on.
Importance of Customer Portals
Customer portals are online platforms that allow customers to manage their relationship with your company securely and conveniently. They can access information, communicate with your team, and perform various actions related to your products or services. Customer portals provide your customers, partners, employees, and other stakeholders with personalized, engaging, and self-service digital experiences. With Salesforce, you can create customer portals using the Experience Cloud platform, which allows you to build, manage, and optimize branded sites and apps for any device.
Salesforce Experience Cloud
In this digital-first world, Salesforce wants to help businesses reorganize their operations around the customer and connect with them in new ways. From launching the Community Cloud, Salesforce has since moved on to upgrade its customer relationship management operation by building a product that allows businesses to connect with customers and offer an elevated digital experience by providing mobile apps, knowledge bases, and customer portals. If you want to know more about the Salesforce Experience Cloud, here are some insights that might interest you:
- Salesforce Experience Cloud is one of the fastest-growing products in Salesforce’s history, with a 158% year-over-year growth rate in Quarter 2 of 2021.
- More than 10 million digital experiences have already been created with Salesforce Experience Cloud
Salesforce Experience Cloud empowers businesses to build and customize digital experiences with low-code tools, templates, and components. - Salesforce Experience Cloud integrates with other Salesforce products and services, such as Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and MuleSoft.
- Salesforce Experience Cloud has a 4.4 out of 5 rating from 1,022 reviews on Gartner.
- Salesforce Experience Cloud is used by 4,963 live websites and 1,949 historical websites, according to BuiltWith.
Creating an Experience Cloud in Salesforce lets you create customized help portals, communities, and support sites for your organization. These online spaces can improve teamwork, simplify support workflows, and increase customer satisfaction.
Salesforce Help Portal with Experience Cloud
With Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can also offer self-service customer portals that allow your customers to access information, communicate with your team, and resolve issues independently. When you create an Experience Cloud in Salesforce, you get an opportunity to build a solid Salesforce self-service community, which can enhance your customer support quality and strengthen your customer bonds. Some of the advantages of creating a Salesforce Help Portal with Experience Cloud are as follows:
- Being able to purchase products like Lightning Bolt solutions for free on the AppExchange. (Lightning Bolt Solutions like Supplier Relationship Management, Patient Portal, and Volunteer Self Service Portal are all templates supported by the Salesforce Experience Cloud that are used to create customized portals, support sites, and communities for your business.)
- ‘No Code’ drag-and-drop
- Customize your customer portal according to your business design and brand.
- Enhanced knowledge through the Customer 360 data. Integrates easily with third-party tools available on the AppExchange
Planning and Considerations Before Implementing a Support Portal on Salesforce
In today’s digitally native environment, having a self-service customer support platform is imperative. Over half of clients would use self-service portals instead of calling someone on the phone.
Constructing a self-service, customer-friendly support center is a practical and economical means of expanding your company. It only needs to be done correctly. The following are some pointers that will help you create a fantastic self-service portal through the Salesforce Experience Cloud:
- Map out your business goal. Identify the problems you want to solve when you create a customer portal in Salesforce. Before you create a customer portal in Salesforce, you need to have a clear business goal. What are the main challenges or pain points that you want to address with your portal? For example, do you want to reduce support costs, increase customer satisfaction, or improve customer retention? By defining your business goal, you can align your portal strategy with your business objectives and measure your success.
- Customize your Salesforce Help Portal with Experience Cloud. One of the important aspects of creating a customer support portal in Salesforce is customizing your portal design and functionality. You can choose to use one of the standard Salesforce templates, which are pre-built and ready to use, or you can create a custom design that suits your brand and business needs. Using a standard template can save you time and effort, but you may need more flexibility and uniqueness. Creating a custom design can give you more control and creativity but may require more skills and resources. You need to weigh the pros and cons of each option and decide what works best for you.
- Security and Access to your website. Community access options are an essential factor to consider. You can grant equal Access to pages and data for all community users or assign different access levels to different user types based on your business needs. Moreover, you can use Salesforce Experience Cloud’s personalization features to create customized experiences for different user segments.
- Registration process for the Salesforce Customer Portal. User registration is the process of allowing new users to sign up for your Salesforce self-service portal. You can choose from different types of user registration processes, such as:
- Standard registration: Users fill out a form with their basic information and create a username and password
Social - registration: Users sign up using their existing social media accounts, such as Facebook or Google
- Invitation-based registration: Users receive an email invitation with a link to join your portal
You need to consider the pros and cons of each type of user registration process and select the one that best suits your business needs and users’ preferences.
How to Create an Experience Cloud in Salesforce to Build Customer Portals
Step 1: Enable Digital Experiences and Choose a Template
To create a customer portal in Salesforce, you must enable digital experiences in your Salesforce org and choose a template matching your use case. To select a template, click Setup > Digital Experiences > All Sites and click New. You will see a list of templates that you can use to create your customer portal, such as Customer Account Portal, Customer Service, Partner Central, and more.
Step 2: Customize Your Customer Portal with Components and Pages
After you create your customer portal, you can customize it with components and pages to add functionality and content to your site.
Components are reusable elements that you can drag and drop onto your pages to create your layout and design. You can use standard components, such as headers, footers, menus, forms, charts, or custom components you create or install from the AppExchange. To add components to your pages, click the Components tab on the left panel and drag and drop the components you want onto your page. You can also edit the properties and settings of each component by clicking on the gear icon.
Pages are the individual web pages that make up your customer portal. You can use standard pages, such as Home, Account, Orders, Cases, and more, or create your custom pages with the Experience Builder tool.
Step 3: Configure Your Customer Portal Settings and Permissions
After you customize your customer portal, you need to configure your customer portal settings and permissions to control how your site works and who can access it.
Step 4: Enable Customer Portal Users and Assign Them to Accounts
To allow your customers to access your customer portal, you need to enable customer portal users and assign them to accounts. Customer portal users are external users with limited Access to your Salesforce data and functionality through your customer portal.
To enable customer portal users, you need to create a user profile that defines the permissions and settings for your customer portal users.
You can use a standard profile, such as Customer Community User, or create a custom profile that suits your needs.
To assign customer portal users to accounts, you must create a contact record for each customer and associate it with an account. You can also enable self-registration for your customer portal, which allows your customers to create their user accounts and contact records.
Repeat these steps for each customer you want to enable for your portal.
Step 5: Salesforce Experience Cloud Implementation
Before you launch your customer portal, you must test it to ensure it works as expected and meets your quality standards. You can try your customer portal by using different browsers, devices, and user accounts to check your site’s functionality, design, and performance.
Conclusion
Customer portals are a great way to foster trustworthy and long-lasting customer relationships. They can help you deliver a seamless and personalized customer experience while improving your operational efficiency and profitability.
In this article, we talked about creating a customer portal in Salesforce using Experience Cloud, a platform that enables you to build customized and engaging online spaces for your customers. The article covers the importance of customer portals for your business and customers and how they can improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
We also elaborated on its features and benefits and how it can help you create customer portals that suit your brand and business needs. Lastly, we tackled the steps to create a customer portal in Salesforce using Experience Cloud and how to use the tools and templates available on the platform.
Now, we want to hear from you. What are your thoughts on customer portals and Salesforce Experience Cloud? Have you tried creating a customer portal in Salesforce? If yes, what were the difficulties and advantages you experienced? What are you waiting for, if not?
Click here to explore and learn more about Salesforce and its products if you want to learn more about the Salesforce Experience Cloud.
