Perficient discusses Salesforce Communities

Brendan Callum of Perficient’s Salesforce.com practice introduces Salesforce Communities and how clients can gain business value by injecting mobile and social features securely into their business processes.

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Communities go beyond portals by adding social collaboration, extensive branding, customization, and mobile access while retaining both enterprise security and tight integration with business processes.

Salesforce provides two general types of communities that can be used for a broad variety of purposes, from customer service to marketing or engagement of resellers, suppliers and partners.

Customer Communities deliver rich collaboration, mobile access and consistent branding for even the largest groups. For example, a service community enables customers to answer questions for other customers, quickly find the information they need, or work with service reps to resolve issues – decreasing time to resolution while increasing engagement and loyalty.

Partner Communities provide even greater ties to business process along with the added power of role-based security to segment the data that’s been shared with different members. For example, partner communities enable companies to manage reseller relationships by keeping some lead and funding information private, but enabling collaborative selling between partners, leading to more engaged partners and increased deal flow.

Key Communities features include:

• 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/Customization: companies can design their community to match their brand and website look and feel. 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.