4 Common Mistakes to Avoid When Implementing Salesforce Experience Cloud

Let’s face it: we all make mistakes. It’s the truth we all know that hardly anyone recognizes. While it’s one thing to buy a cup of cappuccino with skim milk when you meant full-fat (a mistake I’ve definitely made!), the stakes are much higher when you’re building a digital experience for your customers, partners, or employees with Salesforce.

Of course, you want to get it right. Here’s the good news: hearing lessons learned beforehand when implementing Salesforce Experience Cloud can save you time, money, and a whole lot of frustration. In this article, we’ll explore four common pitfalls to avoid when designing an Experience Cloud site. Time to shape a thriving community and achieve your business goals!

Why Choose Experience Cloud?

Before coming down to bedrock, you might ask yourself: why do I even bother? Well, the answer is obvious: Salesforce Experience Cloud opens up tons of opportunities for your business – and it isn’t just about a pretty interface.

• Skyrocket customer experience by offering them branded, personalized, and engaging online hubs where they can find any answer faster on their own, without waiting for a live support agent to respond (e.g. a knowledge base, support resources, community forums, etc.).
• Improve customer support with self-service sites – you can deflect tickets quicker, cut wait times, and free your support agents to concentrate on the issues requiring greater attention. 
• Empower partners with the essential tools and information they need to drive sales, providing a dedicated partner portal so that they can share resources, collaborate, and manage leads.
• Streamline internal collaboration with coworkers with the help of an internal portal, which makes it easier for them to connect, work together on projects more efficiently, and have access to company news and training materials, regardless of their location.

4 Common Mistakes to Avoid Building an Experience Cloud Site

Salesforce Experience Cloud promises better collaboration and stellar experiences for customers, partners, and employees. Even with this understanding, common pitfalls might still trip you up. With that in mind, here are the four most widespread mistakes (aka misconceptions) to omit.

1. “It’s Just an Ordinary Website”

A site built with Experience Cloud is far from being ordinary. To begin with, it’s a dynamic and interactive digital platform that fuels engagement and provides unmatched value.

Take full Salesforce integration. Unlike other websites, the one designed on Experience Cloud can access and leverage customer data (that is, to act as a CRM). It manages, synchronizes, and unites all the data and content within one Salesforce platform. This way, you don’t need to manually enter the user’s data into the system after they register – it’s already at your fingertips.

Personalization? Yes, please! With Salesforce Experience Cloud, you can tailor the site’s content, choose a pre-built template from the library – or create one from scratch with a Build Your Own (LWR) template – and fine-tune the whole layout based on the user’s preferences and past interactions, and behavior. Will you be able to achieve such a level of personalization with a standard website? I doubt so.

2. “Security Is Overrated. I’ll Ignore It!”

The rule of thumb is that many businesses make a rather critical mistake with Salesforce Experience Cloud, underestimating the importance of security. On the one hand, you can easily get caught up in the aesthetics and lucrative features. On the other hand, you forget to segment your audience properly and, as a result, face some serious problems.

What will happen when, for instance, a potential customer from New Jersey lands on your Experience Cloud site and sees a calendar for your upcoming events in the Bay Area? Probably nothing much; that’s a wasted touchpoint. Though, they will almost certainly churn.

But what if there is sensitive information on your site that you don’t want to disclose or want to show only to certain users? Say internal HR documents meant for the employees or pricing packages available for qualified leads. 

That’s the beauty of Salesforce: there is no need to create dozens of different sites for all of those purposes. Just set up various segments for certain components of your site, specify what content you would like them to catch within the very same site, and publish it! 

A few words on how to set this up: in the Experience Builder, click the component on the site’s layout you’d like to create an audience for, then hit the down arrow → Audience → Assign. After that, you build a new audience, specify preferred conditions, and voilà. 

By taking various segments into account, you allow the right people to see the right information. With this approach, you protect sensitive data and maintain a targeted experience.

While having audiences on your Experience Cloud site goes a long way, correctly setting up access to it is also vital. A risk exists where external users might be granted more permissions than intended. This could allow them to see fields they are not authorized to view, even while they correctly have access to other permitted fields on the same record.

3. “Gamification Is for Video Games”

This statement is partially true. Gamification has video game mechanics and is part of nongame environments, such as community forums, learning systems, etc. It stimulates a user to navigate through a product or service and motivates them to achieve certain results (for instance, badges).

Ignoring gamification when implementing a Salesforce Experience Cloud might be a missed opportunity. Because gamification works! Here is why:

• It increases user participation in your community’s life, makes them contribute content, and engage with the platform.
• It rewards users for sharing their expertise and knowledge.
• It allows you to create training modules or challenges (but it depends on your business goals) and brings about better user adoption.
• It shapes the sense of community through leaderboards and badges.
• It can drive specific actions you as an admin might set up (for instance, commenting on a community to earn a shiny new badge, visiting community-wide events, or completing a profile).

Key Considerations! When setting up gamification for your Experience Cloud site, you should think of your audience first. Target the gamification elements to their behavior and interests, specify your objectives, and strike the right balance. That is, don’t make gamification too easy or too difficult. Either way, users might wave you goodbye. 

How to set everything up in Salesforce? In your community workspaces, choose the Gamification tile, make sure gamification is enabled on your site, and unleash your creativity.

Create specific missions for users (e.g. write a comment), recognition badges, and challenges to motivate them to explore your community. Besides, you can lure them with tangible or intangible rewards for achieving milestones or reaching the top of the leaderboard. Think of discounts, exclusive content, early-bird event tickets, etc.

4. “Experience Cloud Requires Building from Scratch”

As you have probably guessed, this is not the case. Salesforce is a highly flexible platform with a declarative nature (point-and-click tools) that can cover all your out-of-the-box functionalities if you lack any. You can fine-tune it to your unique business needs.

First, Salesforce provides AppExchange – a marketplace where you can search through thousands of pre-built apps and download one (or several) to fulfill any functionality your Experience Cloud site might need. You don’t have to build or code anything from the ground up!

Second, Salesforce has a cloud-based infrastructure that can easily scale to adjust to the growth of your business. As your data volume and user base increase, Salesforce covers the load without losses and significant investments.

Third, in Salesforce, you can choose from a wide array of products and solutions, not only Experience Cloud. You can implement Marketing Cloud, Nonprofit Cloud, Agentforce, and many others – they can work in a bundle to sustain your project’s specifics and drive better results.    

Final Thoughts

It’s vital to be aware of these common mistakes we’ve described. Before you begin your Experience Cloud implementation, just remember a few simple truths:

• Salesforce Experience Cloud is all about personalization and customization.
• You can specify different audiences for just one site.
• Gamification is still a thing.
• Salesforce is flexible at its core, offering out-of-the-box solutions for any of your needs.

Any thoughts? Don’t forget to leave them in the comments below!