On 23^rd June 2016, Salesforce brought the Lightning Customer Community to the world. Aimed at “delivering a more intelligent, personalized and rich experience”, Lightning Customer Community is expected to break the ground and set new yardstick in the market of intuitive and outstanding customer experience (on web and mobile devices).

Slowly, as technology grows, human beings across the world are interconnected to one another. Brands are differentiated from one another on the basis of how they treat their customers on support and service. Product price and brand authorities are taking a backseat over live reviews of company support. Despite the fact that customer experience in support systems has become a major game changer, only about 25% of the companies which seek to provide good user experience fulfil the criteria. Companies which are striving to provide intuitive customer experience are often challenged by a huge gap between the online user experience and physically-served customer engagement. Even though companies have websites and forum, customers do not receive personalized information. Today, customers don’t look for only a long-lasting or reliable or well-looking product- every purchase is a reflection of who the customer is and for this reason, the users want to be treated as individuals in the support system and provided personalized advice. A brand can only manage to sustain its reputation provided it regulates and flourishes in personalized assistance to its users.

Lightning Customer Community

The Community Cloud joined the Salesforce family in 2013 where organizations could expand the experience of their brands by offering the customers a community. Within this community, the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data and social interaction information were put together to supply personalized information to every customer. The point of delivering such information was also scheduled carefully. For Salesforce, the mission is to allow users to feel at home in the brand page and post-2013, the next step in fulfilling this mission is the Lightning Customer Community.

As the name suggests, LCC has two main effects: it reaches the customer as a lightning would reach the Earth- at the quickest speed possible and it channelizes the customer data to provide the correct responses- much like harnessing lightning into electricity. Intuition and intelligence are the two Is which define features of Lightning Customer Community:

Aesthetic Sensibility with Rich-Media-Feed

Now, community feeds have the capacity to include images, code snippets, file link previews and videos in the user posts. With the Rich Media Feed, there is an environment of dialogue where you can ask questions and receive answers (much like Quora). This makes it easier for the users to find a reply suited for their queries.

The You Ask, You Get Air with Search Optimization

The Lightning Customer Community can identify search queries in web-search-results and transfer them to the relevant discussion boards. Consider that you ask “Which size coffee filter should I buy for the coffee pot XYZ?” on the web. Search Optimization will recognize your question and move you to the region within community where the question can be answered easily. This region could include the subject-matter specialist or the manufacturer or a coffee-pot lover!

A Treat for the Eyes with Lightning Themes

The user experience is designed to make comfortable and at home in the organization. Companies can build themes which would spell their brand motto. Designing the entire community experience around the brand, across devices will allow the companies to sustain interest of their customers and initiate greater participation.

Keep Out the Spam with Smart Moderation:

The managers on Community can recognize and pull out any unrequired and spam posts. Smart Moderation comes with intuitive routing for introducing cases in LCC and shifting them to Service Cloud Lightning when the customers require more detailed and swifter assistance.

Your Personal Lightning Shelf with Suggested Articles and Answers:

Each customer comes to the company page for a unique need. Lightning Customer Community acknowledges this and allows organizations to score the content-interest of customers and send across the most relevant answers.

The Over-250 Customer-Specialists with Lightning Dashboards and Reports:  

Lightning Customer Community comes with over 250 new Reports and Dashboards which give live insights into the customer engagement with brand. This includes statistics on factors like top content, purchasing patterns, community traffic and escalations. Once companies have real-time information about behavior of each customer on the brand page, they can send across personalized messages through live-chat like “Does ABC interest you? Check out these…” and “We see that XYZ interests you. Here are 10 more ways to..”.

Ecommerce to Electrify the Lightning Customer Community

Community Pages has welcomed Lightning Components that form part of the Salesforce Partner Ecosystem to direct customers to relevant Ecommerce pages quickly. Here are the three Ecommerce functionalities present within Lightning Customer Community:

OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Demandware:

Now, companies can bring in Demandware’s B2C ECommerce services to the community posts. This allows the companies to offer their customers: single sign-on capacity, syncing of customer data, a shopping cart that accompanies the customer through pages and embedding of Demandware Customer Service Suite (where customer service agents can put in orders representing their customers).

CloudCraze CartPlus:

With CartPlus, you can drag-n-drop the native shopping cart wherever needed in the community. This will make it easy for users to purchase products through a single channel.

OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Magento:

This capacity allows companies to equip the community pages with Magento’s ECommerce services. Organizations can sync the customer reports, reviews and orders from Magento within Salesforce itself. Companies can also build reports which gives them insights about the shopping experience of their customers (with information like number of orders, order value and product reviews).

Lightning Customer Community can be purchased today along with Community Cloud license. Check out the entire range of capacities built into the Lightning Customer Community here.

To know more about Suyati’s expertise on Lightning Platform, please write to services@suyati.com. Check out how we created an Integrated School Management System using Salesforce Community & VLE.