What is Salesforce Experience Cloud and what can you do with it?

You might hear people talk about “Community Cloud”…
You might be wondering how a Digital Experience is different to Salesforce Experience Cloud…
Or you might be asking yourself where a partner portal fits into all of this…

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered in this article!

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a set of functionality built on the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Experience Cloud enables you to build beautifully-branded “digital experiences” that are connected to your CRM with a key focus on engaging customers and empowering partners. You can use Experience Cloud to create multiple sites and experiences within your Salesforce org to address different purposes.

We’ve already thrown in a few tricky words so why don’t we take a quick pause to define some key terms.

Quick glossary:

Salesforce CRM platform: More than a database, this powerful software is your single source of truth for managing your customer relationships. It’s for you and your business.

Salesforce Experience Cloud: Formerly known as “Community Cloud”, it’s a set of functionality to deliver external-facing digital experiences (see below) that sit on top of your CRM. It’s for you, your business and your external stakeholders.

Salesforce Community Cloud: The old name for Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Digital Experience: The external-facing ‘site’ you can build with Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Site: Another name for a Digital Experience instance.

Partner portal: One example of a Digital Experience.

Help forum: Another example of a Digital Experience.

DXP: You might see Experience Cloud referred to by this acronym; it is Salesforce’s digital experience platform (DXP).

With those definitions in mind, Salesforce’s online learning platform, Trailhead describes digital experiences and Experience Cloud:

“A digital experience built using Experience Cloud provides a window into your Salesforce world.”
From Get Started with Experience Cloud

So hopefully we’ve cleared up some terms and their definitions. Now let’s investigate what this means in reality!

What can you build using Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a set of functionality built on the powerful Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Experience Cloud to build a digital experience, the world is your oyster!

You can create a digital experience for any situation where you want to present a beautiful external-facing interaction with your Salesforce CRM.

Popular examples include:

Partner portal
Account portal
Storefronts
Microsites
Industry solutions
Customer service hub
Help centres
Support site
Mobile app
Top tip: Salesforce has created Lightning Bolts. These are pre-built industry-specific Digital Experience templates (amongst other things!) created to help you go to market quicker.

Why should you use Experience Cloud?

With Experience Cloud, you’re giving stakeholders what they need. Not only this, but you’re doing this completely integrated with your CRM. This means you’re maintaining and cultivating a single source of truth with an even bigger picture of your business, your customers and your partners.

We keep repeating that it’s built on the Salesforce platform… but that’s because it’s important! By building on the Salesforce platform, you’re building your partner portal or support forum on world-leading software that is scalable, secure, customizable and centralized.

A few more perks to consider at a glance:

Go to market fast with industry-specific customizable themes
Create multiple experiences for specific needs
Design for every device since all digital experiences are 100% mobile optimized and fully responsive

Partner users cannot import data to Salesforce in a digital experience

Standard Salesforce does not allow users to import data in a digital experience.

We’ve seen that Salesforce themselves describe Digital Experiences as a “window” into your Salesforce world.

However, many businesses and organisations need more than a window; they need a door.

Salesforce Digital Experiences (Communities) built on Experience Cloud have been growing in popularity. It’s easy to see why they’re so popular, since digital experiences can be used in so many contexts: partner portals, e-commerce sites, help centres and even franchisee hubs.

With so many different digital experience audiences come lots of reasons why users need to import data.

It’s worth bearing in mind that standard Salesforce does not allow digital experience users to import data.

Experience Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

In case you can’t tell, we love Salesforce Experience Cloud. As a set of functionality, it adds tremendous value to your business by creating endless new opportunities for you to interact with your stakeholders.

However we’re not just fans of Experience Cloud; as a team of Salesforce experts who create data management solutions to save you time, we see the powerful potential of Digital Experiences.

We’ve created solutions that work seamlessly on Digital Experiences to:

Open up import jobs to partners and business users simply and securely
Empower external users to provide verified addresses at the point of entry

Empower external users to import safely and simply via a digital experience

Think partner deal registrations or subsidiary sales information. Safely empower users to import data into your Salesforce through preconfigured mappings using our two-step drag and drop wizard – introducing the ManagedImport component.

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Reduce cart abandonment and improve user registration with fast address verification

Think user registration portals and ecommerce checkouts. Create powerful user experiences with our Address Verification Flow Component that verifies address data at the point of entry in 5 key strokes or less.

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