Salesforce Launches Next-Generation Community Cloud

Community Cloud innovations include Targeted Recommendations, Lightning Community Builder and Templates and Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive

Now global companies like eWAY, KeyBank, Pono, PURE Insurance, Sky, State of Colorado and Unilever are empowered with new levels of intelligence, speed and engagement to connect with their communities

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Salesforce

May 21, 2015, 05:15 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, May 21, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM company, today announced the launch of the next generation of the Community Cloud. With new innovations including Targeted Recommendations, Lightning Community Builder and Templates and Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive, companies are empowered to connect with customers, partners and employees in a whole new way.

Comments on the News

  • "Communities have become the connective tissue linking customers, partners and employees to companies and each other," said Nasi Jazayeri, executive vice president of Community Cloud, Salesforce. "With the next-generation Community Cloud, companies have the intelligence, speed and engagement to strengthen these bonds like never before."
  • "Sky prides itself on delivering uncommon service to our customers, partners and employees. Central to this is changing the rules of engagement, which we have used as a strategic advantage for multiple years and Salesforce has been a key partner for us," said Nicola Band, community manager, Sky. "We see a bright future in leveraging knowledge to continue to differentiate our company, and Community Cloud will allow us to bridge the world of engagement and intelligence."
  • "Without writing any code, we launched customer self-service with Salesforce Community Templates in just a matter of days," said Matt Bullock, CEO and founder, eWAY. "Almost immediately, our service caseload was reduced by half while our customer satisfaction scores went even higher. The community is a great experience for everyone."

Before Community Cloud, companies found it difficult to engage customers, partners and employees in communities that were also connected to their businesses. With Community Cloud, customers can deliver better service, sell more through channel partners and create more engaged employees. Digital communities result in 48 percent faster case resolution, 48 percent increase in employee engagement, 45 percent increase in customer satisfaction and 43 percent increase in partner sales, according to recent research from Salesforce.

The next generation of Community Cloud enables companies to extend this success with new innovations, including:

  • Intelligence: Targeted Recommendations use powerful algorithms to analyze both structured and unstructured data to deliver the most relevant content including posts, resources, files and groups to each member. The new feature identifies experts by understanding the quality of a user's contributions, then surfaces her as a subject-matter expert and recommends her to other community members. Community managers can also suggest content with specific information or post an announcement into the feed and target it to a specific group, member type or individual. Now, a community manager can send a new employee a personalized note to connect her with an onboarding training course, or target a consumer with a coupon for running shoes within a community about fitness.
  • Speed: Lightning Community Builder and Templates enable any business user – not just developers and IT staff – to quickly and easily deploy a customized, branded and mobile-optimized community. Companies can use Lightning Builder to create their own custom community and even develop their own custom apps with Lightning Components and embed them into the community. For example, a nonprofit could quickly build an app to organize volunteer events and embed it into the homepage of their community. In addition, new drag and drop Templates allow customized design, usability and data integration.
  • Engagement: Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive accelerates engagement by enabling community members to easily collaborate and share any file created or stored in Google Drive. For example, a marketing team can share a Google file into a campaign planning group for easy access and collaboration. Files in Google Drive can also be attached to a record, such as a sales opportunity or service case, placing files into the flow of business and delivering the power of a centralized, universal file-sharing solution.

Global Organizations are Connecting with Customers, Partners and Employees in a Whole New Way
Today, businesses of all sizes and across industries use Community Cloud to transform how they connect with customers, partners and employees.

  • eWAY, the Australia-based online payments company, uses Community Cloud to provide an online self-service for its customers with a library of knowledge articles, direct access to eWAY experts and the ability for members to answer each other's questions. Within the first week of deploying the community, average service cases were reduced by 50 percent and service response times dropped to an incredibly low 16 minutes.
  • Sky, the leading home entertainment and communications provider in Britain and Ireland, uses Community Cloud to drive engagement among people. Sky is evolving its community from a system of engagement to a system of intelligence where topics are modeled from what is top of mind within the community.
  • Unilever uses Employee Communities to unite employees across hundreds of brands and functions from marketing and finance to supply chain management and facilities. Teams around the world regularly collaborate in "web jams," virtual brainstorms where participants collaborate on strategy development, competitive intelligence and campaign plans. Employee Communities connect internal marketing teams with external partners and agencies to easily collaborate and share resources, while security controls ensure that only approved external partners can access certain information.

Community Cloud enables companies to combine their business data and processes with the power of the world's #1 CRM platform to quickly create trusted destinations that are personalized, intelligent and mobile. Built on the proven Salesforce1 Platform, Community Cloud is connected directly to Salesforce CRM as well as third-party systems and data sources through the Connect API so companies can connect customers, partners and employees with tools and information they need to be successful. Today, demand for Community Cloud fuels a robust and expanding partner ecosystem including system integrators like Accenture and Deloitte and ISVs like CloudLock and Social SafeGuard.

Pricing & Availability

  • All new innovations of the next generation Community Cloud are included in existing Community Cloud licenses as the products become generally available.
  • Targeted Recommendations are generally available today; additional features will be introduced in the second half of 2015.
  • Lightning Community Builder and Templates are generally available today; additional Community Builder functionality including drag and drop components and integration of custom Lightning components are expected to be generally available in the second half of 2015.
  • Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive is generally available today for Chatter and Employee Community licenses; Salesforce Files Connect for Google Drive is expected to be generally available for Partner Community and Customer Community licenses in the second half of 2015.

Additional Information

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About Salesforce
Salesforce, the Customer Success Platform and world's #1 CRM, empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit: www.salesforce.com.

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

Safe Harbor
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information please visit www.salesforce.com or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.

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