When you are urgently in need of help, you would probably reach out to a close friend. But what do you do when the issue is technical? The usual routes that come to mind would be the phone or website to contact a customer service executive. Wouldn’t it be great if the same easy option of contacting a friend or colleague were available for this situation as well? Salesforce users could now do just that with the power of Salesforce Communities!

CMSWire reports that as 2015 begins, Salesforce Communities remains one of the leaders in the rankings of Social Collaboration Software. This result was reinforced by different methods of evaluation, followed by Forrester Research, Gartner Research and G2 Crowd. Let’s try to understand what the buzz is all about, and how the use of the Communities’ products could benefit your organization:

1. Access all required data with ease

The implementation of Communities in Salesforce takes the concept of always-on-customer-service to a whole new level. Now you can reach the information and the experts that you need, to solve your problem, just by reaching out within the appropriate community. This is not just a customer-focused solution; it could be implemented for all employees and stakeholders in the organization as well. Depending on the issue at hand, you could reach out to your peers or any of the other groups depending on any required access permissions. Salesforce Community Cloud would also suggest connections to groups and experts based on your specific profile and behavior. This helps improve your participation in the community that assists in quicker resolution of any queries or issues you might have. If you are dependent on any third-party apps for specific actions, these could be integrated into your business processes seamlessly as well.

2. Use any interface

Depending on a phone call that puts you in queue to reach your customer care executive has now become old school! The web interface is already extensively in use, with most companies having a responsive online team to help with queries. Reach an even more convenient level of accessibility with Salesforce Communities! Use the Salesforce mobile app or the browser on your mobile to connect with your community without needing to wait to get to your computer. The device-specific implementation ensures that you will be satisfied with the user experience on any interface that you choose.

3. Keep your customers happy

Customers are now aware of how important social media has become to brands, and frequently turn to this medium for unresolved queries. It is, in fact, a sign of confidence of a brand that it can bring the concept of a community right to its customer. By enabling customers to freely exchange feedback and information, they might not even feel the need to browse the Internet or social media sites to come up with an answer to their query any more. First-hand feedback and valuable tips would be right at hand with their Salesforce Community. This helps to build a knowledge base that can be accessed anytime and anyplace, with customers reaching out to each other to solve known issues with ease. Customers could follow not just their groups or communities, but also specific topics, to help receive updates immediately.

4. Enable your employees

The successful implementation of Salesforce Communities by AT&T is evidence of the ease of integrating the product into the existing working environment. As employees did not treat it as a new technology or a task to be learned from the bottom up, the idea turned out to be a big success. Not only do Communities enable employees by helping them hear from and reach out to customers more easily, it has many other benefits as well. Since the community of experienced customers helps resolve most simple issues, this leaves the experts in the organization with more time to focus on tougher problems. Awards for most active experts and members could be great motivators in any company. Salesforce allows for diverse types of communities that ensure that the required assistance is available to everyone with ease. Some examples of the use of Communities within your organization are:

• An employee with a query would be enabled to solve it by reaching out to his Community. A testimonial from Brown-Forman is an example of how the product could be used to create a vibrant social platform to engage employees.
• A community consisting of players in your sales network such as distributors, retailers and other partners could lead to some useful knowledge sharing and improving the overall effectiveness of the teams. A team could also share relevant files within the team, which would get synced across all devices.

Many organizations have proved their confidence in Salesforce products, by entrusting it with their important data. With the introduction of Communities, Salesforce has provided another platform that enables interaction and quick resolution that would scale and grow with the needs of the organization.