Salesforce Customer Portals Vs. Communities: What to Choose?

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Salesforce Customer Portals Vs. Communities
What to Choose?
When we talk about CRMs or portals the first
thing which comes to our mind is Salesforce.
They are and have been ruling the industry for
more than a decade now. The reason for their
success is that they understand their market
deeply and have been known to launch products
that complement their CRM creating a perfect
flow for customer communication for their
clients.
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• The complimentary products that we are talking
  about here are portals and communities. If
  youve been following Salesforce or have been
  using it for a long time now, then you might be
  aware of what they are, their functionalities,
  and how they benefit organizations.
• In this blog, we are going to discuss
• Types of Salesforce portals and their
  functionalities
• Salesforce communities
• Difference between Salesforce Portals and
  Communities
• Which one to choose?
• Today almost every organization we interact with
  is through Portals. Believe it or not, its
  true.
• These portals have taken up the market and
  revolutionized the ways people interact with
  companies and vice versa. According to research
  done by Nuance, 67 of people prefer to use
  self-service portals instead of getting on a call
  or emailing with company employees.
• Portals not only changed the way users interact
  with the companies but they also gave users a
  chance to learn and explore things on their own.

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And these portals are not limited to customer
interactions. They go beyond. Three major types
of Salesforce portals Self-service portal
Nowadays customers prefer to solve their problems
even the technical ones on their own.
Self-service portals help them by redirecting
them to the right FAQs, blog posts, technical
documents, videos, etc. so that they can resolve
the issue on their own. This reduces the
communication between your customers and
customer support while creating a win-win
situation for both. Your support can work more
productively and customers don't need to wait to
get their answers.
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Customer portal Salesforce.com Customer Portal
provides customers with an online channel to
communicate with customer executives and solve
their issues. They help to streamline
communication and provide easy and fast
solutions. Portals are also helping companies to
provide 24/7 support to their customers
regardless of time zones and geographic
shortcomings. Their customer portal is somewhat
similar to the self-service portal except that
youll be providing your customers with a
different interface to interact with you rather
than doing it directly from your website or web
app. Partner portal S alesforce partner portal
is for your sales and channel partners. They
have access to the core features of Salesforce
CRM. The partner portal also provides partners
with leads and customer conversion
opportunities. Portal is a neat way to
communicate with different entities associated
with your business. But, this is not all where
Salesforce stopped. They wanted to make portals
more branded, collaborative, and bring a change
in the way users and companies interact with
each other.
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• Hence in 2013, Salesforce introduced Community
  Cloud with an aim to share information and
  collaborate with people more effectively. It
  provides companies with the tools to create
  online communities by connecting with customers,
  external partners, and employees.
• Salesforce Community Cloud is available in three
  tiers. They are
• Customer Community
• Customer Community Plus
• Partner Community
• Depending on your companys requirements you can
  purchase any one of the licenses. The customer
  community is useful for support and feedback.
  For online collaboration, handling internal
  employee communities, HR, or IT teams, the
  customer community plus is useful. Lastly, the
  partner community is useful to B2B businesses as
  you can create a flow for qualifying leads,
  tracking revenue, and providing product
  training.
• Community clouds are taking over the market due
  to its high scalability, no coding requirements,
  libraries filled with rich scalable templates,
  easy third party integrations, and custom made
  components, and more.

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You can build communities based on the entities yo
u interact for different purposes.

• Now lets look at the differences between
  Salesforce customer portal and Communities
• Portals and community clouds have the same
  structural features but differ in the way people
  interact with them.
• Portals provide external users the ability to
  access Salesforce whereas community clouds
  connect the internal users together in
  Salesforce.
• External users like partners or customers can
  communicate via Chatter in Communities. While on
  the other hand, portals don't support Chatter.
• Communities are visually appealing and have easy
  to navigate user interfaces while portals user
  interface might look a little outdated.

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- Cost-wise portals are Salesforce community
cloud.
reasonable as compared to

• Portal is an extension of your CRM and users can
  access or view information limited to their
  account. Whereas, communities reside inside your
  organization and can be accessed globally.
• Various portals like knowledge portal,
  self-service portal, customer portal, partner
  portal, etc. are used for different purposes.
  Whereas, communities provide one platform to
  share knowledge with users, easy communication
  between users, employees, and partners, drive
  more sales by connecting with distributors and
  resellers, enhance user engagement, workflow,
  and content all from one place.
• Community cloud comes with the integration of
  site.com

for content management, android and iOS
integration of Salesforce Einstein, Chatter,
version, enhanced
security, and many more. Now, comes the main
question, what should you use Salesforce
Customer Portal or Communities? Even today
Salesforce portals are the most searched and
most used products. But, over the course, they
will soon be replaced with Community Cloud. So
if you are a company
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using a customer portal for a few years now, then
it might be time to start looking to switch to
community cloud. But if you are a company thats
just starting out or is just starting to scale
then the Salesforce portal is the right
option. Portals and communities are the same in
some ways and a lot different in others. The
right decision lies with knowing your
requirements, the stage your companys at, and
especially, what your customers expect from you.
Source h ttps//www.crmjetty.com/blog/salesforce-
customer-porta l s-vs-salesforce-communities/
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