Here we are looking at
another release from Salesforce! It is the Spring 18 release!
In this article, I would
like to talk about what is new with Communities in the Spring '18 release that
is exciting to us.
I would like to list out
the top 7 things that we believe are exciting to us based on the kind of work
we do with our clients.
1) Journey Builder for communities - Sales
funnel across channels.
In the last release the effort to integrate Communities and Marketing cloud was underway, this feature lets you create a journey for your users to engage more and have a seamless way to onboard or update information.
This is akin to a Sales funnel but across multiple channels !
In the last release the effort to integrate Communities and Marketing cloud was underway, this feature lets you create a journey for your users to engage more and have a seamless way to onboard or update information.
This is akin to a Sales funnel but across multiple channels !
Pros and Cons: This feature is exciting to bring abroad new users and increase engagement, however, it requires you have Community as well as Marketing cloud license.
2)
Security related changes
a) User Self Deactivation
A lot of times you need to provide your users the ability to deactivate their user id in a community, now we can enable this feature within the community and a new link will show up to enable users to self deactivate.
A lot of times you need to provide your users the ability to deactivate their user id in a community, now we can enable this feature within the community and a new link will show up to enable users to self deactivate.
Pros and Cons : Less call in to support to deactivate a user, however , users might do it by mistake instead of changing their email preferences or subscriptions.
b)
Device Validation and different Login policy for
Salesforce Community userssd
Now you can enable the feature for
a user to validate his device if a new login comes from a different device.
This is available for non-community users, now we can enable this for all
customer community users.
Pros and Cons : This is an excellent
feature for users enabling communities for partners who are extra conscious of their
security protocols and would like to fine tune their policies, however,
creating additional configuration and policy management for admins and additional
verifications for users accessing via multiple devices.
3)
New and Enhanced components for communities -
Update Now!
1. Case
deflection components
This is a two part component, when
you use the ‘Contact Support Form’ and the ‘Case Deflection’ components, The
case deflection component will show possible solutions from your articles or
discussions.
Pros and Cons : As a call center head, this great, as this reduces users from creating new cases for already existing solutions. The users are deflected naturally to use those articles rather than creating new cases, However, if you are a new community and you don’t have enough articles or if they are not classified or tagged correctly this feature will not help much.
2. Enhanced
Navigation
If you community is catered towards
product support and If your product catalog is much deeper than just 3 levels,
no worries! You can now create articles and their navigation as deep as your
product categorization goes.
It goes 8 levels deep. No kidding!
To a total of 2775 topics and sub topics J
Pros and cons:Ability to match your community and its content to the way your product is structured, however, users might get overwhelmed with the nested navigation and choices. Be careful with your new navigational powers!
3. Member
Profile and settings component
Ok this is not a new component; however, this component has
been enhanced and made available for the Customer Account portal.
4. Survey
Component
This I believe is one of the most used feature in any
community, the core of customer interaction is feedback and this component
makes it easier for us to now integrate surveys from the Community without an
external App exchange product.
This component is available for Lightning Apps as well as
Community Builder.
Pros and Cons
This allows us to easily create custom surveys and collect feedback easily. However, Survey components have been around for a long time and with a lot of features built in. The current component is not as sophisticated as the established products.
5. Keep
Track of Events with Community Calendars
Now you
can share your calendar in your community! WhooHoo!.
What
more, if you have customer community plus of Partner Community license, your
community users can also create events.
4) Creating Multi lingual communities are much Easier!
So this
feature is cool, it is available in the Lightning community Builder, as opposed
to the Sites setting and creating a multilingual community.
So, pop
open the gear icon and choose languages and you can setup
another language right there.
The
users will start seeing a Language switching icon on the main navigation.
Pros and Cons: This is an easy way to enable multi language support for all users. However, this does not preclude us from maintaining the correct verbiage and grammar in the secondary language.
5)
Sentiment
Analysis Dashboard (Pilot)
So, this borders on insights and AI for your
community. Here is what happens, this feature, go through your community’s feed
items and comments and marks each comment as
a. Positive
b. Negative
c. Neutral.
There is a new dashboard available that we can
enable to show how the whole community is doing based on the aggregate
sentiments with pretty graphs too J
Pros and Cons: I believe this a step in the right direction to show how well your community users are engaging and how well people are reacting to your organization and its interactions with your community base.Cons : I hope this features comes with some customization other than , positive, negative or neutral. This is still in pilot and there is lot more ground to cover. So, more to come later on this topic. This is a pilot feature,(ie. Not a GA feature)
6)
Files and folders
Needless to say, every community aspires to provide its users
with as much information as possible, this includes files in a very organized
structure(folders).
So this feature is not new for communities,
however there a so many new enhancements that were provided in this release for
files and folders. I am just excited about these 3 components.
1. Upload
Component and Cloud Flow Designer
Lets say, you create new flows for your community users, in
those flows, you need your users to upload a file(s). Now this component allows
you to include a screen that allows user to do just that! As easy as drag and
drop.
2. File
preview on the Go!
Now you can access
files on your mobile device as well as your laptop/desktop with the same user
experience.
3. Let
user navigate all your public files in a new component!
Now you can expose all
your folders and files in an easy to navigate component (again OTB!) . This new
component is great to share the way you have structured your document. This can
also be controlled by role-based licenses.
7)
Bye bye
Branding.. Hello Theme-ing!
So, you know how we can change the way our community looks with
custom colors and layouts and such. You know how we have to go to the Branding
section of the Builder, and how it is kind’a kludge to do these changes. Well,
now you can do them all and more using the new “Theme” section of the builder.
So, what is new? It’s easier to navigate these things, not much
scrolling, now much of the items are more easily accessible, better builder
experience.
Pros and Cons : The new themes section of the builder is easy to navigate and follows similar to the Wordpress customization mechanism. Cons!? not much, I like the way the themes behave now, however, I know branding did not used to be so easy as themes.
One other
thing to note is the way to Quickly See Which Theme Layout a Page is Based On.
Though
this feature is not great, but as a person making changes on a day to day
basis, this is quite useful, so I like it.
Well, that is a quick rundown of all the features we like in
the new release Spring ‘18 for Communities.
For more information, please visit.
Also visit
Rebecca Saar’s post at
