The Community Cloud keynote at Dreamforce 2016 presented tons of great insights from some of the world’s leading companies.
Here are some statistics on Community Cloud:
- 90 million members on Community Cloud in 3 years
- 10K active communities
- 240K Chatter networks
- In 2016, Community Cloud delivered more than 100 new features.
What are these people doing with Community?
- Customer Service Community at Logitech. B2B eCommerce Portal at Addidas
- Employee Community at American Express
- Trip Planning Portal at REI
- Channel Sales at Schneider Electric
- Customer Account Portal at Farmers
What makes Community Cloud different?
It is part of the core customer success platform, so it connects sales, service, and social with analytics. Now, Salesforce Einstein is adding Artificial Intelligence to the platform in the form of recommendations, case escalation, personalized news feed and expert identification.
Salesforce started with portals back in 2007. They added Chatter in 2010 and intelligence in 2011, which added a level of collaboration to the cloud. Communities became real in 2013 with by adding branding. In 2015, mobile became a reality through Lightning templates and in 2016 Lightning Components.
Now, Salesforce Lightning Bolt is the way to build mobile communities and portals even faster. It is a framework to allow customers to build solutions by combining components into specific solutions. Many Salesforce Partners have already built Lightning Bolt solutions that are available in the Salesforce App store.
Toan Huynh spoke about Accenture’s use of Lightning Bolt to build an insurance solution for agents. She talked about best practices for deploying a portal, which includes three major things:
- Modern and easy to use/understand
- One Stop Shop
- Extensibility
All of these practices are embedded in Lightning Bolt.
Community Builder now includes the ability to implement themes for the site. Themes provide the branding, color scheme, and page layouts.
During the session, we had a panel of CIOs talked about Lightning Bolt and Community Cloud. Kristin Darby is CIO at Cancer Treatment Centers of America and George Scott is Client CIO at GE.
Cancer Fighters’ Community helps support cancer patients through stories, support resources, events, connections, and articles. The primary goal for this community was the ability to provide more advanced information to patients and personalize information for the patients during each part of their journey.
Ally Bank talked about a mortgage application community to help people go through the process. Typically, the process is call-center heavy and this community helps create a partnership between the customer and the service center. The portal gathers information from a lot of sources across the bank and provides information back to the consumer to display their mortgage help.
At GE they use Community Cloud to help customers self-serve on orders. GE salespeople already had this information and this extends these same capabilities to the customer.
All the panelists talked about how Community Cloud allows them to solve multiple problems through one platform. Lightning Bolt is a big win in this area because it lets you build reusable components.
