For those of you who don’t have time to read the Salesforce Spring ’15 Release Notes, here are the top three new Salesforce Communities features that you need to know about:
- Create a Case from a Question in your Community
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Let’s say that a member of your self-service community posts a question about a product that has a known defect. With the new Question-to-Case feature in Spring ’15, your support team can now create a case from a question and from that case, can post a response back to the question so the rest of the community can see the resolution. Even better, if a question goes unanswered for too long, you can automatically create a case and assign an employee to answer the question. Making sure no question goes unanswered is key to building a thriving community. This feature is available in both Communities built on Force.com and the Community Builder templates.
- Prevent Spammers from Creating Cases
Are you allowing customers to submit cases without logging in to your self-service community? If so, you could be an easy target for a malicious bot to mass create a lot of bogus cases. This is where the new reCAPTCHA widget comes in. The reCAPTCHA widget forces users who have not logged into the community to enter a code before submitting a case to ensure that a real person, not a computer, is creating the case. - More Gamification Features in the Napili Community Designer Template
The Napili Template is the most popular of the Community Designer templates, offering a public knowledge base along with a forum that allows users to ask questions of the community to get answers fast. I covered the importance of gamification inside of a community in my blog Does Your Salesforce Community Live up to its Name? If you’ve read my blog, you will not be surprised to learn how excited I am about the new reputation leaderboard widget that shows the top rated community members in the Napili template. This is just one of the enhancements; read this section of the release notes to learn more.
These three features really show the commitment that Salesforce has towards growing the Communities product, especially in regards to the Community Builder. There are some exciting Communities features now in Pilot, such as the Communities Custom Lightning Components Pilot which Perficient is part of, that will make the Community Builder even more powerful in the future, hopefully one day just as flexible as Force.com Communities. I truly cannot wait to see what new features are released in the Summer ’15 release and beyond! Safe harbor, of course.
