The 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 (Day Nine: Communities and Portals)
TL;DR: Here is my list of things you should be considering as you reboot your business for 2024, focusing on Salesforce generally and your Communities specifically.
Here’s the first post in this series, along with the idea that you can save $150K annually. https://medium.com/@kmcafeesf/the-12-days-of-salesforce-for-2024-day-one-dd8051e0adee
Day Nine (of Twelve): Community and Customer Portal Implementation
What you should consider: Create a community or customer portal to improve communication, self-service, and collaboration, reducing support costs.
What you should evaluate: Estimate cost savings from reduced support inquiries and improved customer satisfaction. Consider the impact on support costs.
Annualized cost savings (est. based on 30 users): $15,000.
How I would approach Day Nine and Communities/Portals:
Everyone has a community, that’s not in question here. What is in question is “do you (and how do you) engage with them?”
Of course that first answer is yes, but what about the How? The first follow-on question ought to be: “How do your customers want you to interact with them?”
Screen Size
Depending on what service you’re offering, or the technological comfort level of your customers, the How might change radically. Some millenials don’t want to talk to you if they have to use a browser, for instance. In that case, building the world’s best community in web-only form is a waste of time.
Ideally, your tool would allow you to build an externally-facing property that will operate in a browser or a mobile view, depending on how the customer wants to interact with you. For instance, a simple example like the Wix website editor allows you to configure each view in parallel, using the same components on each view, but perhaps organized differently for the screen size. It matters.
Content
You’ll want to decide what information to share with your communities as well. If you’re using a truly integrated portal, any records or objects that you work on internally could also be shared easily with your community.
One simple advantage can come from document sharing. If you routinely create documents for customers and then email them, posting them to a portal (where you click a button, the doc is shared, and customer receives an alert to log in securely) is an awesome upgrade. And if that customer needs to return other documents, the reverse can happen as well (you get alerted that they’ve posted something to their account, etc.).
Self-serving Community
The other side of this review is a Community, thinking about classic threaded forums, where users interact with each other. Typical uses for communities might be support groups, ideas exchanges like Salesforce uses, or just discussion forums.
You’ll know you’ve hit the jackpot when community members start helping you solve their problems. Much of this depends on whether the rest of the community can derive a solution themselves, which necessitates a solid knowledge base, and so on.
The holy grail of Communities is where they don’t require company-sponsored moderators or internal users to police the content, because some discussions, depending on what the topics are, can get heated… which brings us to…
Security
It’s important to impart to your communities the means to do some policing or reporting to help set and keep the guardrails of etiquette. Further, it’s critical to determine where you need and want authentication to prevent unintended data exchanges.
Having all parties authenticated, even with various levels of scrutiny, puts everyone on accountability notice, which starts the process of self-policing. Each of these devices also helps ensure that the trust your customers place in you is well placed, and that they can partake of and contribute to your community in good faith.
The Bottom Line
You need to be deliberate about your community design, how members interact with you, and how they interact with each other. Creating those methods with clarity helps reinforce expectations for each platform in use and each purpose from each party.
Communities are powerful and create massive efficiencies.
Go build them!
This is a part of the 12 Days of Salesforce for 2024 series. Here are links to the other initiatives you should consider, and as always, please reach out to me if you’d like some counsel or my approach via my team at Rule Six Consulting LLC.
Day One: Automation of Repetitive Tasks
Day Two: Data Cleanup & Deduplication
Day Three: Analytics & Reporting
Day Six: User Training & Adoption
Day Seven: Mobile Optimization
Day Eight: Artifical Intelligence
Day Nine: Communities and Portals
Day Eleven: Security & Compliance
Day Twelve (Hooray!): Improvement Cycles & Feedback
I appreciate you spending some time thinking about these topics with me, and I welcome feedback, suggestions and additions.
