When we think of the Salesforce Community Cloud, we traditionally think of a partner portal or an external-facing community. Salesforce is positioning the Community Cloud for employees. Key attributes of this vision are similar to what we expect as consumers. They include:
- Relevant, up-to-date information
- Effortless access to systems and apps
- Open, transparent collaboration
- Ability to take action from anywhere
Existing technology in most intranets limit these activities by making it harder to access via mobile, or difficulty with security across apps, or limited tools for collaboration.
An Employee Community on Community Cloud offers one platform to connect employees, access apps, collaborate and take action. This results in 48% faster decision making and a 48% increase in employee engagement.
Through the Lightning components and Lightning Bolt, you can now build meaningful intranets sites for employees. Lightweight content management components display news, and stories. Chatter is integrated to provide collaboration and discussions. Salesforce Files provide access to files and of course any other Salesforce capabilities are available, including case management, sales and marketing applications.
Groups are also available through which collaboration can take place. Within Groups you can have discussions, share files, and have group specific content.
Another added benefit of Community Cloud is that everything is available on mobile devices right way. The Salesforce1 app can easily display any community and now the app can be branded for your company.
Marc Fenner from Box.com talked about why and how Box created their employee community on Salesforce Community Cloud. Box has about 1,400 employees who are largely remote workers. About 1.5 years ago they started the journey to reimagine their internet – Boxernet. They didn’t want another central repository or a centrally administered and tightly guarded system. And they definitely didn’t want complexity. They did want social collaboration, ease of user, etc.
They chose Simpplr which is built on Salesforce. It is easy to manage sites, news, pages, events, files and videos. It met Box’s goal of a cloud solution and is pre-integrated with Workday, Box and other cloud apps. It took 2.5 months to implement the solution. The site is personalized based your location.
Marc described three uses cases:
- Announcements – The homepage contains announcements, news, external news, executive blogs
- Self Service for HR resources – they have static content in Boxernet and links to content on Box. They have Chatter feeds embedded into the site.
- Expert Search – every user has a profile. Apps include org charts, mapping to find people, contact details.
Success metrics they wanted to meet:
- Reduction in email – they achieved a 15-20% reduction
- Monthly employee engagement should rise – they achieved 80% employee engagement
- Positive impact on company engagement scores
- Significantly improve onboarding experience, especially for remote empoyees
Marc elaborated on guiding principles they used at Box during this implementation:
- Innovate continuously on content, format and features
- Update the carousel on the home page many times per week
- Remove access to barriers
- Tag your content so it can be found
- Ensure executive engagement to increase adoption
- Respond to inquiries and feedback quickly
Hi Mark:
We’re a nonprofit on a small budget. Not all of our staff have employee licenses. If they have a chatter license, will they be able to submit cases?
I meant to say “chatter free” license