Today, almost every company has a customer community of some type. For some, it’s not much more than a help desk where you submit tickets. Others might go a step further and allow you to place orders. The questions to think about are:
- Does your customer community help drive your business?
- Does your customer community help you retain and grow your existing customers?
The Benefits of Intelligent, Self-Service Communities
If you’ve seen our blog posts, demos, and webinars around customer retention, you’ll know that we’ve done some interesting things for our customers with AI models to drive their actions to retain and grow customers. But beyond that, self-service communities allow you to remove the constraint of having an employee reach out directly, and can help scale to all your customers and really leverage the investment in an intelligent system.
You can leverage your customer community to drive intelligence in a few ways:
Feeding the Tracking Data into Your Models to Provide Better Insights
First and foremost, your community is a treasure trove of data about your customers. Their activity in your community can provide insights about them and what they need. Adding this information into your models can help make them even more accurate and drive better actions for you to take.
Incorporating Einstein Chatbots into Your Customer Community
Add chat and Einstein Chatbots to your community. We’ve got a great blog post about how chatbots can significantly increase customer retention. It’s a way to get answers to your customers quickly and with virtually infinite scale.
Personalizing Content for Customers
Both of those are great, but they require your customer to drive the interaction. What if you could drive that interaction automatically as the customer logs into the community? Yes, I’m talking about targeted promotions to your customers. (Okay, your customer might call them “ads.”)
Think about it. You’ve already spent the money to build an intelligent system that can give your sales team the next actions to take with a customer, whether it’s to retain them or grow their business with you. What if you could expose this to your customer and get their attention? Well, in Salesforce Community Cloud you can — through the use of the personalization options built into Community Cloud.
Customizing Community Cloud
Community Cloud allows you to define audiences that users automatically get assigned to. These can be defined based on location (from their browser) and data in Salesforce. The data in Salesforce can be as simple as their profile or could be a set of custom fields on the associated contact object with specific values. This gives you the ability to create very specific audiences.
With an audience, you can then have components in the customer community be visible only if the user is a member of that audience. This allows you to provide targeted promotions to the user based on their data. And the great thing — none of this requires any code.
Of course, as you get into complex situations, such as including a decision tree for which audience gets priority to show, Salesforce developers can work their magic and use Apex and the Personalization API to pull targeted content records for each audience and figure out which one to display (based on some type of decision tree).
Think about the end result: You take the output of your AI model and build the promotions (or maybe reuse your existing marketing campaign content) to be shown based on the action. Suddenly you are now driving the conversation with your customer — without them even realizing and without you having to initiate direct contact. That’s called scale, and gives you the ability to get the right message to the right customers at the right time.
Learn more about our services and how we can help you streamline the customer experience.
