It is not always easy for organizations to stay in touch with customers, partners and employees through home communities. With Salesforce’s new Community Cloud, companies can create their communities, in the LinkedIn style, but for their customers, partners and employees.
Built on the Salesforce Community Cloud Platform – via Connect API – companies can directly connect to Salesforce CRM and data sources and third-party systems. In this way, companies can deliver better service to their customers, more sales through partners and increase employee engagement. Salesforce research shows that digital communities guarantee 48 percent faster problem resolution, a 48 percent increase in employee engagement, 45 percent more customer satisfaction and 43 percent increase in sales through partners.
Community Cloud has a new feature called Targeted Recommendations which seeks to promote user engagement on these sites. The new feature, which is based on algorithms that analyze structured and unstructured data, is designed to bring members of the community the most relevant content, as inputs, resources, files and groups. The community managers can suggest content to specific information or an ad in the news and direct it to a group member type or a specific individual.
The second new feature now available is called Lightning Community Builder and Templates, and allows any business user community to deploy a customized, branded and optimized for mobile devices without the need to seek the help of IT. Companies can use Lightning Builder to create your own custom communities with custom applications. For example, a non-profit institution could build an application to organize volunteer events and incorporate it into the home page of your community.
Finally, Salesforce Connect for Google Drive Files is a new feature that allows community members to share any file created or stored in Google Drive. Thus, a marketing team could share a file from Google with the campaign planning group to easily access and work on it. You can also attach files within Google Drive to a record, as sales opportunities or service case.
According to IDC, the enterprise collaboration market was $1.24 billion in 2014, and the market expected to reach $ 3.5 billion in 2018, an annual growth of 23.1%. The sector as defined by IDC includes software for collaboration internally and externally. Other major players such as IBM Connections, Microsoft Yammer, Jive Software, Tibco Tibbr, Zimbra and SAP Jam also have a foot in this market.
Last year, Microsoft and Salesforce have signed a strategic partnership to create new solutions that will enable you to connect the platform and the CRM app to Windows and Office apps. The agreement provides that the Salesforce CRM solution is integrated with the Windows OS, the Azure cloud platform and the office suite Office 365.
[Source:- Cloudtimes]
