THE SECRET SAUCE TO

CREATE AN ENGAGING
ONLINE COMMUNITY
WITH SALESFORCE
EMBRACING DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION

40%
Digital continues to transform almost every facet of our
personal lives and has now begun to impact the world of
business as well. We have evolved beyond simply having
a mobile-first mentality and entered into a new era of
engagement in which building an enterprise strategy around
the core components of becoming a digital business is a
must. Embarking on a digital transformation journey is critical;
if you miss the boat you risk becoming a digital laggard
watching your digitally savvy competitors pass you by.

OF ALL PORTAL INITIATIVES

THE DAWN OF NEXT- FAIL TO GAIN ADEQUATE
ADOPTION BY ALL OF THOSE
GENERATION DIGITAL USING THEM

ENGAGEMENT providers or the hours spent scouring a support site

Whats the next opportunity for you to engage with
your customers, partners and suppliers, or employees?
Theres a shift in the way organizations are approaching
communication and brand interactions moving away from
one-way, portal-centric conversations with an audience
towards a more socially engaging model. In fact, 40 percent
of all types of portal initiatives fail to gain adequate adoption
by all of those using them, according to Gartner.
Research shows that customers trust other customers.
The social aspect of connecting and engaging with people
that share a common interest can be a powerful business
collaboration tool. Think about how many times youve
polled your Facebook friends looking for product or service
troubleshooting a problem with a product youve purchased.
Customer reviews, word-of-mouth referrals, and peer-to-peer
problem solving carry their weight in gold when it comes
to selling, but is your business maximizing these untapped
lines of social communication and enterprise collaboration
opportunities?
Companies need to break down the silos that exist today to
connect, engage, and extend relationships with partners and
suppliers, customers, or employees. Putting the power to
sell and serve others in their hands will help you compete in
todays competitive marketplace.
The answer build an online community.
WHAT IS AN ONLINE
COMMUNITY?
An online community is a gathering of people interacting and
collaborating toward a common goal. Facebook, LinkedIn and
Pinterest are known as social networks but are also examples
of an open community. While there are reasons for companies
to have a presence on these social channels, many brands lack
the social listening capabilities to properly monitor and control
the brand. Companies looking to build an online community
have their own properties, business processes, branding, and
member data. While social networks have their value, owned
online communities provide a more controlled and flexible
environment for brands to enable and engage with members
based on a companys objectives.

According to IDC, spend on collaboration tools is forecasted to

grow to $3.5 billion from 2013-2018, framing the massive market
for communities.

TO BE SPENT ON ENTERPRISE
COLLABORATION TOOLS
SOURCE: IDC
WHY SALESFORCE FOR COMMUNITIES?
Salesforce is leading the way for how companies can
reimagine the customer, employee and partner experience
with its Community Cloud solution. This shift in engagement
is not only transforming sales, service, and marketing
processes, but fundamentally changing the way we view
CRM today. According to Gartner, CRM will be at the heart of
digital initiatives to enhance the user experience. Customer
service reps are looking to evolve customer engagement
centers (CEC) as the next generation of the contact center.
Marketing technology is also a hot area for IT investment
right now. All of these drivers and technology demands need
to be tightly integrated, and CRM will be at the core of these
decisions.
Community Cloud goes beyond the confines of the traditional
portal solution that many businesses have adopted to integrate
Salesforces cloud-based CRM platform and tie in social
collaboration, extensive branding, customization, and mobile
access while retaining both enterprise security and tight
integration with your core business processes.
 KEY FEATURES OF
COMMUNITY CLOUD
There are six key features that differentiate Salesforce
Communities from traditional portal solutions and other
social collaboration tools:

Business Process Integration: Members can create

and collaborate on support cases, sales opportunities or
campaigns from within the community.

Social Collaboration: Members can interact, collaborate

on goals and form groups to support their interests.

Branding/Personalization: Companies can design

their community to match their brand and website look
and feel. The content and navigation structure is highly
customizable.

Mobility: Members can access the community from any

device, anywhere.

Social Intelligence: Relevant content and resources are

suggested to each member based on their interests and
behavior.

Security & Scalability: Leveraging the trusted

Salesforce platform, all data and member information is
always safe no matter how many members you have.
KEY SUCCESS DRIVERS: START
WITH BUSINESS OUTCOMES
Now that you understand what an online community is and why
you need Salesforce to build a thriving community, you need a
clear roadmap to success. A clear understanding of business
outcomes and how the Salesforce platform brings all these
pieces together will help you meet your goals and objectives,
and help you get your community up and running quickly.

It is imperative that companies transform their business models

and pursue next-generation enterprise collaboration solutions
to close the multi-channel divide and engagement gaps that
exist today in order to prepare for the customer experience and
digital business demands of tomorrow. Before you jump on the
bandwagon and migrate your portal, focus first on the business
outcomes around building a community. This will require
multiple groups and functions within your organization to come
together and set the community strategy for your business.

With the Salesforce Community Cloud enterprise platform, you

can build a community around your network that connects
people directly to the information, apps, and experts they need.

Its time to reimagine the customer, partner and employee

experience for your business.

CUSTOMERS PARTNERS EMPLOYEES

ENGAGE AND SERVE CUSTOMERS DIGITALLY
Customer Communities deliver a full set of rich collaboration
capabilities, mobile access, and consistent branding for
organizations of all sizes. There are two primary business
use cases for Salesforce Customer Communities customer
engagement and customer service.
Customer Engagement
Marketers are leaders in helping to
drive digital transformation within
an organization. Social, mobile, and cloud are driving
digital disruption, but these emerging technologies are
also fueling new marketing strategies that facilitate brand
advocates and peer-to-peer collaboration to achieve
business outcomes.
While these digital engagement discussions often originate
within the marketing department, marketings role now
spans the entire customer engagement lifecycle, and as a
result, investments in building an online community not only
benefit marketing objectives but address a business-wide
shift to rethink the customer experience as it relates to your
customer experience and product teams, support agents
and even senior leadership.
The marketing role has quickly evolved to be one of the
most data-driven functions. Community Cloud opens up
new doors for forward-looking marketers to understand
customer behaviors and gain valuable insights from their
MORE THAN digital footprints that can be used to effectively target and
50%
engage customers in a whole new way. Community Cloud
should be thought of as an extension of your CRM and the
next platform for digital engagement.
of all customer
Customer Support
interactions occur Similar to expectations on the sales and
during a multi-event, marketing side, customers have higher
multi-channel expectations for customer service. Customer
journey experience (CX) trends like channel preference, mobile access,
multichannel service, personalization, and always-on service
And the number of
make customer support a core component of enabling
digital touch points is
growing 20% annually digital transformation for the enterprise. Salesforce Customer
Communities engage customers as an extension of your
customer service team, enabling them to answer questions
from peers. Communities also allow members to quickly find
the information they need through self-service knowledge
bases and groups decreasing time to resolution and support
costs while increasing engagement and customer loyalty.
Client Spotlight

MedAssets is a healthcare performance improvement

company focused on helping providers realize financial
and operational gains so that they can sustainably service
the needs of their community. The company was looking
for a more mature solution to replace existing portal
technology used primarily for case management with
its network of 15,000 customers. MedAssets needed
a more holistic platform to support the entire customer
engagement lifecycle. They chose to build a Salesforce
Community to provide customers with a secure way to
share documents and collaborate with both the product
management and implementation teams, engage with
other healthcare customers, facilitate service requests,
provide feedback, and enable more self-service access to
the various knowledge bases MedAssets maintains.

With this new cloud environment centered on customer

engagement, MedAssets is able to more quickly connect
with clients as soon as a project begins using a Project
collaboration site which gives the team visibility into
the health of the project and major implementation
milestones. The Salesforce platform also offers an
efficient way to share relevant and member-specific
news and product announcements, crowdsource new
product features and ideas using an app available on
AppExchange, as well as create a user-friendly customer
service tool for more than 150 Client Services users to
help decrease case volume and increase CSAT scores.
EMPOWER YOUR
PARTNER NETWORK
Weve entered into an era where partner program
performance and productivity are the two primary
business drivers for rolling out a Salesforce Partner
Community. Partner communities provide even greater
ties to business processes along with the added power
of role-based security to segment the data thats
shared with different members. Managing reseller
relationships with communities gives you the power to
enable collaborative selling between partners, leading
to more engaged partners and increased deal flow.

With Salesforce Community Cloud, businesses can

onboard, train and support indirect sales channels to
increase partner engagement. The ability to manage
marketing development funds and co-branded
marketing campaigns for partners will also ensure the
channel is equipped to perform.
Client Spotlight
Constant Contact offers an all-in-one online marketing
platform to help small companies drive repeat business
and find new customers. In order to meet targets for
partner-influenced revenue, Constant Contacts channel
team needed to both grow its partner base and enable its
existing network of more than 10,000 partners to sell more
successfully. Partners used a variety of applications to
manage their relationship with Constant Contact and access
sales enablement materials. Many of the systems were not
integrated, which led to a number of process inefficiencies.
From an internal perspective, having many disparate systems
made it hard for partner marketing and account managers to
obtain a 360-degree view of their partners. Not only was this
frustrating, but the model would not scale with the business
as it grew. Perficient migrated Constant Contacts existing
partner portal and several legacy systems to Salesforce
Communities using single sign on (SSO), gave the company
greater visibility into partner engagement, and enabled up-
sell or cross-sell opportunities in the indirect channel.
FOUR STEPS TO BUILDING AN ENGAGING ONLINE COMMUNITY
To foster a sense of community inside your Salesforce
Community you need to create deeper connections between
your company and the communitys members.
Define Your Digital and
Social Strategy
The first step in building an online
community is to identify the key business
objectives that you want to achieve and
ensure that your social strategy is framed
around driving those objectives. Your
community should never be social for
socials sake; it should be driving tangible
business goals such as case deflection or
partner engagement. Second, look at the different audiences
within your community and identify how to engage with them
differently; within a single community, you may have multiple
audiences that need to be engaged differently or users will
never participate.
Understand the User Experience
In order to better understand your users and their online
experience, creating a journey map is an important step
to creating an engaging online community. For example,
with the Customer Community use
case, there are a variety of touchpoints
throughout all phases of the customer
lifecycle. In order to develop a more
seamless online experience to support
your digital strategy, you need to ensure
each interaction is interconnected and
contributes to the overall customer
journey or user experience.
Drive Adoption and
Participation
There are many ways you can drive
community participation. The first
time a user logs into your community,
capture information about their
interests to automatically add them
to Chatter groups. Use marketing
automation software like ExactTarget to send targeted
messages to community members based upon their actions
inside your community. For example, if a new Communities
member fails to join any Chatter groups during their first
week of membership, automatically email them several
ways they can get the most out of your community. Do not
underestimate the amount of effort you will need to put
into encouraging and monitoring social interactions in your
community; this is not something you can set and forget.
Use Gamification
There are many ways to use
gamification in your community.
For many companies, a subtle
form of gamification works
best. One of the easiest ways
to reward community users for
participating in conversations is
to use reputation levels; who doesnt want to be labeled an
expert for contributing a lot of mindshare to a community?
Having a way to reward your most active participants is
key to keeping them engaged. Are there ways that you
can reward them with something special such as access
to special offers or events for having reached a certain
reputation level?
TAKING YOUR COMMUNITY TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Your job does not end after your business has rolled out
Community Cloud. Look for ways to make your Community
work better for you and your customers and/or partners.
Try using Salesforce Visual Workflow to capture data from
your customers in a more visually appealing way. Whats
the end result? Happier customers or partners and better
quality data.
Here are three great ways to improve your Salesforce
Community user experience:
Deal Registration
Break a lengthy deal registration form into
several pages (i.e. Partner Information, Customer
Information, Deal Information). Include more copy around the
kind of information that youd like to receive from partners
to ensure that you are getting the information you need to
successfully qualify deals.
Case Submission
Ask your customers targeted questions when
they submit a case. Capture the product they are
logging a case against and then ask only questions relevant
to that product. Are they able to power the device on? If yes,
what color is the pilot light: solid red, flashing red, solid green,
flashing green, or no light is visible? If no, is the device plugged
in? Customers can log cases faster, and you can improve
support response times and customer satisfaction ratings.
Custom Surveys
Give customers a way to provide you feedback
without investing in a third-party survey
application. This works extremely well for simple surveys
that include rating something from 1-5 or responding
to short answer questions. However, if you want to ask
more complex questions, youll want to invest in a survey
application. (Were big fans of Clicktools.)
 JUMPSTART YOUR SUCCESS WITH PERFICIENT
Were not only a leading Salesforce Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner but were also portal and
communities experts. As a systems integrator and implementation partner, weve delivered more
than 3,000 successful Salesforce engagements for our clients. Perficient was an early adopter of
Community Cloud and has deployed over 25 Salesforce Communities in the past 18 months and
100+ Salesforce Portal projects for brands like MobileIron, Constant Contact and Splunk. Our
combined expertise with the Salesforce platform and years of experience delivering cloud solutions
enables us to provide a proven methodology, reusable assets, and solution accelerators to jumpstart
our clients success implementing Salesforce Community Cloud.

COMMUNITY CLOUD QUICK STARTS

Perficient offers both a Partner Community and a Customer Community Cloud Quick Start solution
that will ensure your implementation has all the features you need to engage your customers and
empower your partners to sell!
APPEXCHANGE
One of the biggest benefits
of Salesforce and the cloud
platform is the ability to
integrate any one of the
thousands of business
apps available to you on
AppExchange. These apps
can help you unlock the power
of Community Cloud and help CUSTOMER COMMUNITY PARTNER COMMUNITY
you solve unique business Branded & Customized Homepage Branded & Customized Homepage
problems taking your
community from good to great.
Social Widgets Social Widgets
Standard Tabs for Customer Newsfeed & Announcements
Interactions Deal Registration Accelerators
User Registration, Cases, Knowledge Chatter Collaboration
Case Deflection
ABOUT THE EXPERTS
Kara Allen, Community Cloud
Practice Lead, Perficient
Kara Allen is a Senior Solutions Architect
focused on delivering business-process driven
Salesforce Communities solutions. She has over
four years of experience delivering Salesforce
Portals and Communities, as well as four years of channel and
direct-to-consumer marketing experience bringing both business
and technical expertise to the table.
CONNECT WITH PERFICIENT:
Elizabeth Dias, Salesforce
Marketing Manager, Perficient
Elizabeth Dias is an experienced technology
marketing strategist focused on the enterprise
cloud space and the Salesforce platform. With
over ten years of experience as a professional
B2B technology marketer, Elizabeth has expertise in customer
experience, digital transformation, social and digital marketing
strategies and has extensive experience marketing and a wide
range of enterprise technologies across a variety of industries that
Perficient serves. She is also an active blogger and thought leader
on Twitter (@techmktggirl).
SOURCES:
1 Gartner Portals, Collaboration, and Content Summit 2014.
2 IDC (2014) Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks 2014-2018 Forecast and 2013 Vendor Shares
[Research paper]. Retrieved from http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=249846
3 Gartner Says CRM Will Be at the Heart of Digital Initiatives for Years to Come. February 12, 2014.
PERFICIENT.COM LINKEDIN.COM/COMPANY/PERFICIENT @PRFTSALESFORCE
ABOUT PERFICIENT
Perficient is a leading technology and
management consulting firm serving Global
2000 and enterprise customers throughout
North America. Our digital experience, business
optimization, and industry solutions enable clients
to improve productivity and competitiveness;
strengthen relationships with customers, suppliers
and partners; and reduce costs.

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