THE SECRET SAUCE TO CREATE AN ENGAGING ONLINE COMMUNITY WITH SALESFORCE
EMBRACING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Digital continues to transform almost every facet of our personal lives and has now begun to impact the world of business as well. We have evolved beyond simply having a mobile-first mentality and entered into a new era of engagement in which building an enterprise strategy around the core components of becoming a digital business is a must. Embarking on a digital transformation journey is critical; if you miss the boat you risk becoming a digital laggard watching your digitally savvy competitors pass you by. THE DAWN OF NEXT- GENERATION DIGITAL ENGAGEMENT What s the next opportunity for you to engage with your customers, partners and suppliers, or employees? There s a shift in the way organizations are approaching communication and brand interactions moving away from one-way, portal-centric conversations with an audience towards a more socially engaging model. In fact, 40 percent of all types of portal initiatives fail to gain adequate adoption by all of those using them, according to Gartner. Research shows that customers trust other customers. The social aspect of connecting and engaging with people that share a common interest can be a powerful business collaboration tool. Think about how many times you ve polled your Facebook friends looking for product or service 40% OF ALL PORTAL INITIATIVES FAIL TO GAIN ADEQUATE ADOPTION BY ALL OF THOSE USING THEM providers or the hours spent scouring a support site troubleshooting a problem with a product you ve purchased. Customer reviews, word-of-mouth referrals, and peer-to-peer problem solving carry their weight in gold when it comes to selling, but is your business maximizing these untapped lines of social communication and enterprise collaboration opportunities? Companies need to break down the silos that exist today to connect, engage, and extend relationships with partners and suppliers, customers, or employees. Putting the power to sell and serve others in their hands will help you compete in today s competitive marketplace. The answer build an online community.
WHAT IS AN ONLINE COMMUNITY? An online community is a gathering of people interacting and collaborating toward a common goal. Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest are known as social networks but are also examples of an open community. While there are reasons for companies to have a presence on these social channels, many brands lack the social listening capabilities to properly monitor and control the brand. Companies looking to build an online community have their own properties, business processes, branding, and member data. While social networks have their value, owned online communities provide a more controlled and flexible environment for brands to enable and engage with members based on a company s objectives. According to IDC, spend on collaboration tools is forecasted to grow to $3.5 billion from 2013-2018, framing the massive market for communities. TO BE SPENT ON ENTERPRISE COLLABORATION TOOLS SOURCE: IDC
WHY SALESFORCE FOR COMMUNITIES? Salesforce is leading the way for how companies can reimagine the customer, employee and partner experience with its Community Cloud solution. This shift in engagement is not only transforming sales, service, and marketing processes, but fundamentally changing the way we view CRM today. According to Gartner, CRM will be at the heart of digital initiatives to enhance the user experience. Customer service reps are looking to evolve customer engagement centers (CEC) as the next generation of the contact center. Marketing technology is also a hot area for IT investment right now. All of these drivers and technology demands need to be tightly integrated, and CRM will be at the core of these decisions. Community Cloud goes beyond the confines of the traditional portal solution that many businesses have adopted to integrate Salesforce s cloud-based CRM platform and tie in social collaboration, extensive branding, customization, and mobile access while retaining both enterprise security and tight integration with your core business processes.
KEY FEATURES OF COMMUNITY CLOUD There are six key features that differentiate Salesforce Communities from traditional portal solutions and other social collaboration tools: Business Process Integration: Members can create and collaborate on support cases, sales opportunities or campaigns from within the community. Social Collaboration: Members can interact, collaborate on goals and form groups to support their interests. Branding/Personalization: Companies can design their community to match their brand and website look and feel. The content and navigation structure is highly customizable. Mobility: Members can access the community from any device, anywhere. Social Intelligence: Relevant content and resources are suggested to each member based on their interests and behavior. Security & Scalability: Leveraging the trusted Salesforce platform, all data and member information is always safe no matter how many members you have.
KEY SUCCESS DRIVERS: START WITH BUSINESS OUTCOMES Now that you understand what an online community is and why you need Salesforce to build a thriving community, you need a clear roadmap to success. A clear understanding of business outcomes and how the Salesforce platform brings all these pieces together will help you meet your goals and objectives, and help you get your community up and running quickly. It is imperative that companies transform their business models and pursue next-generation enterprise collaboration solutions to close the multi-channel divide and engagement gaps that exist today in order to prepare for the customer experience and digital business demands of tomorrow. Before you jump on the bandwagon and migrate your portal, focus first on the business outcomes around building a community. This will require multiple groups and functions within your organization to come together and set the community strategy for your business. With the Salesforce Community Cloud enterprise platform, you can build a community around your network that connects people directly to the information, apps, and experts they need. It s time to reimagine the customer, partner and employee experience for your business. CUSTOMERS PARTNERS EMPLOYEES
ENGAGE AND SERVE CUSTOMERS DIGITALLY Customer Communities deliver a full set of rich collaboration capabilities, mobile access, and consistent branding for organizations of all sizes. There are two primary business use cases for Salesforce Customer Communities customer engagement and customer service. Customer Engagement Marketers are leaders in helping to drive digital transformation within an organization. Social, mobile, and cloud are driving digital disruption, but these emerging technologies are also fueling new marketing strategies that facilitate brand advocates and peer-to-peer collaboration to achieve business outcomes. While these digital engagement discussions often originate within the marketing department, marketing s role now spans the entire customer engagement lifecycle, and as a result, investments in building an online community not only benefit marketing objectives but address a business-wide shift to rethink the customer experience as it relates to your customer experience and product teams, support agents and even senior leadership. MORE THAN 50% of all customer interactions occur during a multi-event, multi-channel journey And the number of digital touch points is growing 20% annually The marketing role has quickly evolved to be one of the most data-driven functions. Community Cloud opens up new doors for forward-looking marketers to understand customer behaviors and gain valuable insights from their digital footprints that can be used to effectively target and engage customers in a whole new way. Community Cloud should be thought of as an extension of your CRM and the next platform for digital engagement. Customer Support Similar to expectations on the sales and marketing side, customers have higher expectations for customer service. Customer experience (CX) trends like channel preference, mobile access, multichannel service, personalization, and always-on service make customer support a core component of enabling digital transformation for the enterprise. Salesforce Customer Communities engage customers as an extension of your customer service team, enabling them to answer questions from peers. Communities also allow members to quickly find the information they need through self-service knowledge bases and groups decreasing time to resolution and support costs while increasing engagement and customer loyalty.
Client Spotlight MedAssets is a healthcare performance improvement company focused on helping providers realize financial and operational gains so that they can sustainably service the needs of their community. The company was looking for a more mature solution to replace existing portal technology used primarily for case management with its network of 15,000 customers. MedAssets needed a more holistic platform to support the entire customer engagement lifecycle. They chose to build a Salesforce Community to provide customers with a secure way to share documents and collaborate with both the product management and implementation teams, engage with other healthcare customers, facilitate service requests, provide feedback, and enable more self-service access to the various knowledge bases MedAssets maintains. With this new cloud environment centered on customer engagement, MedAssets is able to more quickly connect with clients as soon as a project begins using a Project collaboration site which gives the team visibility into the health of the project and major implementation milestones. The Salesforce platform also offers an efficient way to share relevant and member-specific news and product announcements, crowdsource new product features and ideas using an app available on AppExchange, as well as create a user-friendly customer service tool for more than 150 Client Services users to help decrease case volume and increase CSAT scores.
EMPOWER YOUR PARTNER NETWORK We ve entered into an era where partner program performance and productivity are the two primary business drivers for rolling out a Salesforce Partner Community. Partner communities provide even greater ties to business processes along with the added power of role-based security to segment the data that s shared with different members. Managing reseller relationships with communities gives you the power to enable collaborative selling between partners, leading to more engaged partners and increased deal flow. With Salesforce Community Cloud, businesses can onboard, train and support indirect sales channels to increase partner engagement. The ability to manage marketing development funds and co-branded marketing campaigns for partners will also ensure the channel is equipped to perform.
Client Spotlight Constant Contact offers an all-in-one online marketing platform to help small companies drive repeat business and find new customers. In order to meet targets for partner-influenced revenue, Constant Contact s channel team needed to both grow its partner base and enable its existing network of more than 10,000 partners to sell more successfully. Partners used a variety of applications to manage their relationship with Constant Contact and access sales enablement materials. Many of the systems were not integrated, which led to a number of process inefficiencies. From an internal perspective, having many disparate systems made it hard for partner marketing and account managers to obtain a 360-degree view of their partners. Not only was this frustrating, but the model would not scale with the business as it grew. Perficient migrated Constant Contact s existing partner portal and several legacy systems to Salesforce Communities using single sign on (SSO), gave the company greater visibility into partner engagement, and enabled upsell or cross-sell opportunities in the indirect channel.
FOUR STEPS TO BUILDING AN ENGAGING ONLINE COMMUNITY To foster a sense of community inside your Salesforce Community you need to create deeper connections between your company and the community s members. Define Your Digital and Social Strategy The first step in building an online community is to identify the key business objectives that you want to achieve and ensure that your social strategy is framed around driving those objectives. Your community should never be social for social s sake; it should be driving tangible business goals such as case deflection or partner engagement. Second, look at the different audiences within your community and identify how to engage with them differently; within a single community, you may have multiple audiences that need to be engaged differently or users will never participate. Understand the User Experience In order to better understand your users and their online experience, creating a journey map is an important step to creating an engaging online community. For example, with the Customer Community use case, there are a variety of touchpoints throughout all phases of the customer lifecycle. In order to develop a more seamless online experience to support your digital strategy, you need to ensure each interaction is interconnected and contributes to the overall customer journey or user experience. Drive Adoption and Participation There are many ways you can drive community participation. The first time a user logs into your community, capture information about their interests to automatically add them to Chatter groups. Use marketing automation software like ExactTarget to send targeted messages to community members based upon their actions inside your community. For example, if a new Communities member fails to join any Chatter groups during their first week of membership, automatically email them several ways they can get the most out of your community. Do not underestimate the amount of effort you will need to put into encouraging and monitoring social interactions in your community; this is not something you can set and forget. Use Gamification There are many ways to use gamification in your community. For many companies, a subtle form of gamification works best. One of the easiest ways to reward community users for participating in conversations is to use reputation levels; who doesn t want to be labeled an expert for contributing a lot of mindshare to a community? Having a way to reward your most active participants is key to keeping them engaged. Are there ways that you can reward them with something special such as access to special offers or events for having reached a certain reputation level?
TAKING YOUR COMMUNITY TO THE NEXT LEVEL Your job does not end after your business has rolled out Community Cloud. Look for ways to make your Community work better for you and your customers and/or partners. Try using Salesforce Visual Workflow to capture data from your customers in a more visually appealing way. What s the end result? Happier customers or partners and better quality data. Here are three great ways to improve your Salesforce Community user experience: Deal Registration Break a lengthy deal registration form into several pages (i.e. Partner Information, Customer Information, Deal Information). Include more copy around the kind of information that you d like to receive from partners to ensure that you are getting the information you need to successfully qualify deals. Case Submission Ask your customers targeted questions when they submit a case. Capture the product they are logging a case against and then ask only questions relevant to that product. Are they able to power the device on? If yes, what color is the pilot light: solid red, flashing red, solid green, flashing green, or no light is visible? If no, is the device plugged in? Customers can log cases faster, and you can improve support response times and customer satisfaction ratings. Custom Surveys Give customers a way to provide you feedback without investing in a third-party survey application. This works extremely well for simple surveys that include rating something from 1-5 or responding to short answer questions. However, if you want to ask more complex questions, you ll want to invest in a survey application. (We re big fans of Clicktools.)
JUMPSTART YOUR SUCCESS WITH PERFICIENT We re not only a leading Salesforce Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner but we re also portal and communities experts. As a systems integrator and implementation partner, we ve delivered more than 3,000 successful Salesforce engagements for our clients. Perficient was an early adopter of Community Cloud and has deployed over 25 Salesforce Communities in the past 18 months and 100+ Salesforce Portal projects for brands like MobileIron, Constant Contact and Splunk. Our combined expertise with the Salesforce platform and years of experience delivering cloud solutions enables us to provide a proven methodology, reusable assets, and solution accelerators to jumpstart our clients success implementing Salesforce Community Cloud. COMMUNITY CLOUD QUICK STARTS APPEXCHANGE Perficient offers both a Partner Community and a Customer Community Cloud Quick Start solution that will ensure your implementation has all the features you need to engage your customers and empower your partners to sell! One of the biggest benefits of Salesforce and the cloud platform is the ability to integrate any one of the thousands of business apps available to you on AppExchange. These apps can help you unlock the power of Community Cloud and help you solve unique business problems taking your community from good to great. CUSTOMER COMMUNITY Branded & Customized Homepage Social Widgets Standard Tabs for Customer Interactions User Registration, Cases, Knowledge Case Deflection PARTNER COMMUNITY Branded & Customized Homepage Social Widgets Newsfeed & Announcements Deal Registration Accelerators Chatter Collaboration
ABOUT THE EXPERTS Kara Allen, Community Cloud Practice Lead, Perficient Kara Allen is a Senior Solutions Architect focused on delivering business-process driven Salesforce Communities solutions. She has over four years of experience delivering Salesforce Portals and Communities, as well as four years of channel and direct-to-consumer marketing experience bringing both business and technical expertise to the table. Elizabeth Dias, Salesforce Marketing Manager, Perficient Elizabeth Dias is an experienced technology marketing strategist focused on the enterprise cloud space and the Salesforce platform. With over ten years of experience as a professional B2B technology marketer, Elizabeth has expertise in customer experience, digital transformation, social and digital marketing strategies and has extensive experience marketing and a wide range of enterprise technologies across a variety of industries that Perficient serves. She is also an active blogger and thought leader on Twitter (@techmktggirl). SOURCES: 1 Gartner Portals, Collaboration, and Content Summit 2014. 2 IDC (2014) Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks 2014-2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares [Research paper]. Retrieved from http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerid=249846 3 Gartner Says CRM Will Be at the Heart of Digital Initiatives for Years to Come. February 12, 2014. CONNECT WITH PERFICIENT: PERFICIENT.COM LINKEDIN.COM/COMPANY/PERFICIENT @PRFTSALESFORCE
ABOUT PERFICIENT Perficient is a leading technology and management consulting firm serving Global 2000 and enterprise customers throughout North America. Our digital experience, business optimization, and industry solutions enable clients to improve productivity and competitiveness; strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers and partners; and reduce costs. BLOGS.PERFICIENT.COM TWITTER.COM/PERFICIENT FACEBOOK.COM/PERFICIENT PERFICIENT.COM/WHITEPAPERS