Salesforce offers the chance to prove your Experience Cloud knowledge by becoming a Certified Experience Cloud Consultant. The certification will test your knowledge along the Experience Cloud spectrum ranging from what template to use to what licenses cover what features and objects.
In this exam guide, we will take a tour of the features and functionality that may come up in the exam to make sure you are prepared!
Who’s the Ideal Candidate?
As a consultant, you should have already implemented Experience Cloud a number of times – ideally for different use cases to expose you to a range of different features and functionality. The suggestion is that you should have had at least six months of experience administering, developing, or implementing digital experiences.
Although this exam is aimed towards consultants, it may also benefit you as an architect, designer, business analyst, or administrator. In order to take the exam, you’ll need to be a Certified Salesforce Administrator, which is a prerequisite for most of the consultant exams.
Key Topics
1. Experience Cloud Basics: 8%
This unit is about unlocking the value of Experience Cloud to work with either customers or partners. As part of this, you are expected to know about the different types of personas involved in the day-to-day management of a site and how to design a digital experience from the ground up.
You should know what an Experience Workspace is and common use cases for Experience Cloud.
2. Sharing, Visibility, and Licensing: 17%
As well as being a master of sharing sets, sharing rules, and sharing groups, you need to know what a super user is and how to leverage account relationships.
You should know the key differences between the types of licenses available, as a scenario could come up where you have to pick the correct license. Where roles are available, you should be able to articulate how these work and how they can aid record sharing.
3. Branding, Personalization, and Content: 15%
Within the Experience Builder, you should know the options available to declaratively modify the experience.
In this section of the exam, you could also be tested on search within your site, how to use CMS to deliver external content, and how to make articles available to your external users.
4. Templates and Themes: 10%
Within Experience Cloud, a template defines what pages are available on creation of a new site. A theme is used to style the pages to match your brand identity or marketing guidelines.
You should know what template to use for key use cases and how to import or export a theme.
5. User Creation and Authentication: 13%
For this part of the exam, it’s important to remember that Experience Cloud users are related to a Contact. There are different ways to manually enable contacts as users, including:
- Data Loader
- Self-registration
- Just-in-Time Provisioning
Users can use Single Sign-On (SSO) or utilize Login Discovery to access the system if you set up these features.
Don’t forget to enable profiles and permission sets as “members” of the site and the options available to customize the system-generated emails from your site.
6. Adoption and Analytics: 5%
For this section, you should be familiar with the moderation tools Experience Cloud provides, including moderation rules and banned keywords. You may also be quizzed on the gamification element of digital experiences or how to track the success of your site using reports and dashboards.
7. Administration, Setup and Configuration: 25%
This section will dive into the options for self-registration and login. If you are running a public site, you should know how to secure records via the Guest User Profile. Also, be familiar with other security measures, including Content Security Policies (CSP) and Lightning Locker.
8. Customization Considerations, and Limitations: 7%
As a consultant, Salesforce expects you to consider scalability so the system can adapt to future needs and growth.
This section may touch on how the Content Delivery Network (CDN) can improve performance and when to consider Account Role Optimization (ARO).
Study Strategy
Be sure to go through the complete exam guide and group your notes by section. This can help you organize your studying and ensure you cover the full breadth of the exam.
From my own ‘Experience’ (pun intended!), this exam requires much hands-on experience, and you may be quizzed as to where a particular setting or function is.
If you are not confident in a particular area, be sure to work through any hands-on challenges on Trailhead, as they are a great way to get exposed to lesser-used tools or features. You could create some flashcards to help with your study, form a study group, or reach out via the Trailblazer community.
Lean into whatever study strategy has worked for you in the past, as we are all different types of learners!
Exam Strategy
As an administrator, the structure of this exam is very similar, with the same number of questions and timing as before.
With more people taking exams online than ever, be sure your machine is set up correctly for your exam beforehand and that you are ready for identity checks. Approach the exam in a calm and methodical manner, and be sure to mark any questions for review to come back to at the end.
Summary
Before you set a date for your exam, make sure you’ve adequately prepared and are confident about the topics in the exam guide.
You should have plenty of hands-on experience building and maintaining different types of sites and the core aspects of the system. To ensure your study plans stay on track, set yourself a deadline and stick to it. You’ve got this, Trailblazer!