Businesses nowadays are using one or the other CRM tools to maintain their sales processes and sales pipeline. The way the businesses run is changing rapidly, so are the ways the customers interact with companies, as well as the ways the companies interact with their partners. And all this change requires something that has the capability to engage all these entities. What businesses need now is the right platform that can serve as an interactive bridge between businesses, customers, partners, and employees.
Salesforce Community Cloud is an online social platform that enables companies to connect customers, partners, and employees with each other and the data & records they need to get work done. This next-gen portal combines the real-time collaboration of Chatter with the ability to share any file, data, or record anywhere and on any mobile device.
Community Cloud allows you to streamline your key business processes and extend them across offices & departments, and outward to customers and partners. So, everyone in your business ecosystem can service customers more efficiently, close deals faster, and get the work done in real-time.
Because Community Cloud is built on top of the Salesforce platform, you can connect any external system or data directly into the community. Your organization gains the utmost flexibility to easily create multiple communities for whatever use case your business demands.
So, there are 3 types of communities that Salesforce offers:
- Partner Community
- Customer Community
- Employee Community
Employee Community
As the name suggests, this community is specifically for the company’s employees. This can drastically reduce the day to day work of HR and IT Help Desk who now can engage employees and deliver critical knowledge and instructions using this community. Employees can now help themselves to the information they need, 24*7 be it onboarding, payroll, or IT troubleshooting.
Employees find, share, and collaborate on content in real-time, and connect with others in the social intranet — beyond the boundaries of their department, office, or even country.
Customer Community
This community is based on customer Self-service idea. It empowers customers to find answers to their questions with a searchable knowledgebase and work together to answer one another’s questions and solve problems, dramatically reducing service cases while increasing customer satisfaction.
Community engagement leverages passionate consumers as “experts” within the community to be rewarded for helping other customers in need.
Partner Community
A partner knowledge portal allows you to give your channel immediate access to the resources and experts, such as critical sales assets and product information to keep your sales organization running smoothly.
A channel sales community connects your internal and external sales teams in real-time, so that channel partners can collaborate directly on sales records, track revenue, monitor sales pipeline to cut back deal friction — and make those deals happen.
How are Salesforce Communities Licensed?
Salesforce has three community licenses for external users relating to Customer Community and Partner community: Customer Community, Customer Community Plus, and Partner Community.
For Employee Communities Salesforce has Employee Apps Starter and Employee Apps Plus licenses. This is billed at 25 USD/user/month (billed annually).
Customer communities are best suited for the organization which has large number of external users. There are two licenses for Customer communities, namely:
- Customer Community — license for high-volume and can hold up to 7 million users without degradation of performance.
- Customer Community Plus — role-based Customer Community license. This community is best suited when there are unlimited number of logins for managing client Support.
Where ‘Customer Communities’ are good for B2C Community, ‘Partner communities’ are best suited for B2B Communities. Partner Communities allows for up to 300k users without degradation of performance or additional charges. It’s a “premium” license, having all the Customer Communities license capabilities plus access to sharing, roles, reports, and dashboards.
Each of the customer community and partner community licenses comes in two flavors: member-based and login-based.
- Users with member-based licenses can log in to communities as often as they want
- Users with login-based licenses consumes a login each time they logs in to the community
- Users on either license can access multiple Communities
Think of it like this:
- With member-based licenses, you are buying user seats.
- With login-based licenses, you are buying access capacity.
With login-based licenses, you purchase a particular number of monthly logins for your members. For instance, if you purchased 2000 logins, you can use 2000 logins every month. The logins consumed automatically reset to 0 at the end of each calendar month. A login is consumed each time an external user uses his username and password to log into the community. There’s a 1:20 ratio limit for login to user creation. For instance, if you purchased 100 monthly logins, you can create up to 2000 users.
Customers on Dev Edition orgs get 10 licenses of each Communities license type:
- 10 login-based Customer Communities licenses
- 10 member-based Customer Communities licenses
- 10 login-based Partner Communities licenses
- 10 member-based Partner Communities licenses
We are Mirketa have helped our numerous clients transform their businesses by implementing community solutions. We have worked with companies of all sizes and types, including Start-Ups, Fortune 100, and government agencies.
Questions? Do drop us your query on our website chat, we would love to help you out.