If you are looking to create a custom online community to serve the needs of a number of different user groups, then Salesforce Experience Cloud is your answer!
Formerly known as Salesforce Community Cloud, this platform gives you the ability to tailor a digital community experience, portal or site, that matches the specific needs and preferences of every individual. It’s a powerful toolset for personalization, moderation, and analytics, leading to greater engagement and relationship building.
As you’d expect from Salesforce, this is a no-code product, empowering admins everywhere to get started. However, getting started for the first time can still be quite challenging!
Things That Make You Go “Hmm…”
It doesn’t need to be a bad experience, though. If you are working solo on your first Experience Cloud project, there are a few time-consuming gotchas that could be easily avoided with a little friendly advice upfront.
Let’s take a look at the nine areas of Experience Cloud that could have you scratching your head when you could be serving your users, and learn how to resolve them.
Component Visibility
I think the most crucial piece of advice I would give any Experience Cloud newbie is do not jump straight into the job of making the site look pretty – instead, start with the profiles.
It’s not just profiles, though. The same principles apply to the whole data model. It really pays to take a ‘Salesforce-first approach’. Think carefully about the data already in Salesforce, for example, the visualizations you can make out of this data and the valuable updates you can surface.
Experience Cloud comes with two default profiles: one for your guest-like visitors and one for your authenticated users. You can clone these two profiles and then customize them to your requirements. The great thing about the guest user is that it comes pre-set with a ton of useful data protection features.
Similarly, does it really make sense to create new custom objects just for your Experience site? Probably not. Look at what objects are already in use and the relationships with other objects, and leverage that.
Site User Visibility
I assume you want your users to be able to speak to one another? This is a community, after all. If you have a forum-based site, collaboration is pretty critical. The important thing here is to enable Site User Visibility in Setup. It’s a little tricky to find, so below, you can find the screenshot with the precise location.
Style Customizations
Setting up a customized page constructed from individual components is super simple. Just use the drag-and-drop editor to create the layout you want. If you want something a little more customized, that’s when things get a little more tricky.
You will need a solid knowledge of CSS if you want to make changes within an individual component. But even with CSS on your side, you’ll still need to know how to pinpoint that specific component to manipulate elements within.
My recommendation? Stick to out-of-the-box styling available and leave the customization options for the CSS experts.
Testing as a User
Any good admin will want to test the different types of community users. It pays to be aware that along with the Experience Cloud implementation guide, there is a whole separate guide on user management. Testing as a user is covered here.
The important thing to know is that logging in and testing as a site user is perfectly possible as long as you can find that oddly named permission in profiles and add the action to the contact and/or person account page. Unfortunately, this action is not available for person accounts.
Page Layouts
Now it’s time to think about making things pretty. If you want your community to look nice, then flexible page layouts are your friend.
It makes a lot of sense to avoid object pages. Instead, it’s much easier to customize and enhance a record detail component rather than exposing an object.
Depending on your use case (of course), this may not be possible. For example, if you need your users to see multiple records of the same object, then please be my guest and create that object page. But be warned, it will not look pretty – it will just look like Salesforce.
Reports
Experience Cloud reports can be tricky. For example, reporting on specific profiles gets super-complicated very quickly.
To make sure everyone is getting the community metrics they need, Salesforce provides a managed package of reports. Rather than starting from scratch, I highly recommend you take those reports and customize them to fit your needs – this will give you a great head start.
Custom Domain
It can be a real time-suck. If you are not a custom domain expert, I would actually recommend logging a case with Salesforce Support as the most efficient way forward.
External Link
If you are lucky enough to choose an originating template that contains a button to external sites, then you can customize the link and send it wherever you want. What you can’t do, however, is just pop a button in later as a component and have it direct to an external site.
As a workaround, you can insert a link into a rich text component and then use this image, etc., to link to the external site.
Ready to Publish
When it comes to publishing your Experience Cloud site, it’s all or nothing. You don’t get to pick and choose what goes live. If one page is not ready, that’s too bad. You could take that not-yet-ready page and remove it from the navigation, but it’s still going to get launched.
Summary
I trust this guide has been helpful and hope you have a wonderful first experience on Experience Cloud! Don’t forget to share your thoughts in the comments below.