Community Cloud is Salesforce’s newest and fastest growing cloud (until tomorrow). IDC has seen a huge jump in using social media to communicate with customers and respond to customer inquiries. The top 3 technologies that are planned to be used include discussion forums, public social networks, and online communities, which is where Community Cloud comes in.
Constant Contact
Constant Contact, an all-in-one marketing platform, has over 600,000 small business customers. Constant Contact uses over 9,000 partners to grow their business. They have built a partner portal on Community Cloud to support their partners, which will hopefully increase revenue.
Previously Constant Contact had at least four different places for partners to go to find information and work with Constant Contact. They also didn’t provide a good way for partners to get a good view of their customers. As they looked at how to improve relations with their partners, they turned to communities to provide one place to go for partners.
They focused on adoption, self serve, and partner productivity in the community to help grow partner revenue. Constant Contact already used Salesforce for CRM, so they had some expertise in the platform. They also used partners, including Perficient, to build the site.
From a technology point of view, they integrated Sales Cloud, Single Sign On, Site.com, Herokou and other systems into the community. By doing this, they are able to pass sales leads to their partners, manage their own users through self serve administration, present learning tools and more.
For project management, they used a phased approach, with Phase 1 focusing on easy access, leads and learning and single sign on. Future phases will include sunsetting multiple tools, adding content management, event management and social collaboration.
Early metrics – 150,000 log-ins in the first three months with over 60% of partners jumping on. They’ve also doubled the revenue from certification programs. They have been able to correlate engagement on the portal with partner productivity.
How about lessons learned by Constant Content:
- Manage scope – neither the partners, the business nor IT could take on all the desired features.
- Don’t comprise on the UI/UX – its easy to customize a community, but weigh the costs of future upgrades of the base SaaS platform with the custom UI
- Communicate and Manage Expectations for both internal and external teams
