Communities in Salesforce are social platforms that allow you to collaborate, connect, and communicate with people who are essential to your business. They are key to your company’s business processes (i.e. your business partners and customers).
How to use it
Think of communities as a kind of social platform. It’s a way for your employees to interact with customers and work with business partners. Users can exchange data and images, chat, and it allows screen sharing as well.
You can create more than one Salesforce community according to your needs. Just remember that each community in your organization should serve a different purpose. Each community you create will have its own branding, login page, and its own set of members.
Create a partner community where your employees can provide support. A customer community allows customers to interact with one another. This can also be used for sales. You can also create a support community as another channel to provide customer support.
Features
- Customers and partners (i.e. the external users) can use Chatter.
- The user interface for external users is quite similar to the interface used by internal users (i.e. your employees).
- The licensing model for Communities in Salesforce is the same as the one that was used for Portals, which is now defunct.
Minor Downside
Users will pay a slightly higher fee when using Communities. You’ll be paying an annual fee and you will have to pay for each community you create.
Chatter Questions
The Chatter social CRM platform allows internal and external users to have real time conversations via chat, screen sharing, and data exchange. It’s your go to tool You can use it in two ways:
You can use it internally so that your employees can have a referendum answering current issues and customer concerns.
It can also be used to reach out externally so your employees can interact with customers.
Ideas
You will find several Ideas tabs on your Communities interface. There’s a tab for the most popular ideas and recent ideas. Consider it as a way to obtain customer feedback where customers can submit their ideas and vote for the ones that are relevant to them.