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On tour date #4 on the Salesforce Essentials roadshow Salesforce’s head of product marketing for the APAC region Deeps De Silva asked delegates to re-imagine customer, partner and employee engagement. Why? Because engaging with these business stakeholders is simply not the same as it was two years ago.

We’re in the age of the "selfie" where people are happy to invest in a selfie stick to take and share that perfect shot. It’s the age of mobiles and tablets and “phablets” (phone/tablet - in case you were wondering) and of wearable devices, connected cars and bluetooth toothbrushes.

These are the environments where people are now engaging with each other . It's how your customers are now choosing to connect with you and other businesses. The question is, are you meeting them there? The advantages of connecting in communities have massive rewards for businesses.

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Typically, stakeholders operate well in individual groups – but they don’t necessarily talk to each other and that causes business roadblocks and revenue delays. Salesforce's vision for allowing companies to become customer obsessed is realised in the Community Cloud. It’s a place to connect with your customers, partners, and employees, at any time on any device.

According to Deeps we are all already familiar with the power of communities – Twitter is a popular community for marketers, LinkedIn fuels the recruitment industry, and Tinder manages 10 million love matches a day. We like them! Our first instinct is to jump online for answers, to have discussions, and to do transactions in our favourite communities.

The Salesforce Community Cloud is built on this successful model, so that all businesses can now reap the rewards of the customer’s instinct to congregate in digital hangouts, says Deeps. It’s mobile first, which means you get to interact with your stakeholders (and they with each other) on the devices where they most frequently consume information – their mobile phones. 

It’s all done with point and click configuration so you don’t even have to be a developer to launch a community that brings you closer to your customers or partners. And best of all, community members can self-serve which, as CEO & Founder of eWAY Matt Bullock told us earlier in the day during the main keynote:

You can get a 50% reduction in tickets just from having those knowledge articles available in your Salesforce Community

Who doesn’t love a fast win?