Investments in digital experiences and communities are expected to skyrocket to more than 230 percent. Rapid growth like this rarely goes unnoticed, as is the case with salesforce.com’s newest Community Cloud.

Community Cloud marks a significant shift in the way companies interact with customers, providing a powerful platform that combines the best of what CRM does—sales, service, and marketing processes—into a continuous system of engagement that drives customer moments and collaboration with partners and employees. 

At last year’s Dreamforce, I spoke about “Why Communities is the new CRM.” That idea is today’s reality; technology is no longer the barrier to business transformation and salesforce.com is no longer just an internal data process. It’s become the digital engagement platform to maximize the customer experience, minimize chaos, and drive business growth.

Double your engagement and you will double your brand’s growth. Collaborative, social models like Community Cloud are driving this digital experience, combining customer interaction platforms with business processes that makes it easier to connect customers and brands in new meaningful ways, outside of the traditional face-to-face interaction.

If a company wants to increase engagement, this requires reducing friction in the customer experience. Community Cloud enables frictionless customer experiences, inherently increasing the ability for both internal and external collaboration through social and mobile, removing technical and departmental barriers within a business and bringing people together to connect, collaborate, and spread knowledge.

Leading organizations are unlocking new use cases, and Community Cloud helps companies identify their customer advocates and provides more data insight into customer behavior, building further visibility between partner and customer ecosystems. We’re seeing salesforce.com pioneer the future of CRM and how companies will understand users in years to come. Self-service features, collaborative dialogues, and heightened engagement will allow users to generate their own data of “needs” and “expectations” directly to companies for curation and tailoring.

A big next challenge is helping organizations understand and make use of this data in insightful and meaningful ways. Companies will no longer have to predict the “wants” of a customer—they will intimately know them because the customer has left digital footprints that will allow organizations to track and work proactively to deliver a personalized experience. 

Forward-thinking enterprises recognize that being “customer-obsessed” is today’s path to growth and profitability. Business viability and success is dependent on how engaged customers are with your brand, and Community Cloud empowers Bluewolf with another innovative solution to help marquee brands distinguish themselves with their increasingly discerning customers.