Today, Community Cloud launches Lightning Customer Community, delivering a rich and immersive experience to customers that can be branded, deployed, and adapted faster than ever before. This news represents not just an evolution in personal interaction, but a revolution in the way businesses build genuine relationships with their customers.

Deliver a Best-in-Class Customer Experience

In today’s connected world, creating a memorable experience is more important than ever. That’s because customers are making their purchase decisions based on the customer experience you deliver. This is a seismic shift from the days when your customers made their purchase decisions almost purely on the basis of features or price. Many companies struggle to deliver a truly engaging experience because their business systems and processes are isolated from customers. In fact, 86% of companies seek to excel at customer experience, but only 27% even qualify as “good” in the eyes of their customers. Just building a great looking website isn’t good enough. Companies must be able to connect customer profiles and business processes from their CRM to truly create personalized and relationship building digital experiences.

Community Cloud has constantly evolved to keep up with the increased customer demands for connectivity and personalization. In 2013, the first version of Community Cloud allowed companies to embed files, records and data into a branded, social environment. For example, service cases could be created and escalated from the community, and customers could see progress on their case from within the community. In 2015, Lightning Community Templates were developed to radically accelerate a company’s ability to set up new communities and quickly add new functionality to meet emerging customer needs.

But today, customers have come to expect highly personalized and uniquely engaging experiences with the companies they do business with. This is why we are launching Lightning Customer Community — in order to allow companies to reimagine the customer experience with a rich and intelligent environment. We’re excited to highlight the revolutionary new Lightning User Experience that will capture customer interest with a visually stunning environment, and Community Intelligence, which will deliver the precise information your customers need

Lightning User Experience

The all-new Lightning User Experience provides a new level of personalization and additional engagement opportunities to envelop your customers in an unparalleled customer experience. Some of the highlights include:

• Lightning Themes: Companies can now create a visually rich and highly personalized user experience. The entire look and feel of any community can be completely customized to deliver an immersive, unique, and branded experience on any device.
• Profile-Based Access: Companies can now deliver a distinct community structure, content, and look to different member types. This gives businesses greater control to provide uniquely tailored experiences to different types of customers.
• Rich Media Feed: Users can now embed video, images, file link previews, and even code snippets into any community feed. The new Rich Media Feed also provides a Q&A-like environment that makes it easier to find the answer a user is looking for.

NewCommunity Intelligence

Community Intelligence helps businesses to instantly deliver the precise information customers need. Some of the highlights include:

• Recommended Articles and Answers: Recommended Articles and Answers uses intelligent scoring to instantly deliver the most relevant articles and answers based on the search query - delivering a personalized experience for every customer.
• Smart Moderation: Community managers can proactively identify and eliminate any spam and unwanted posts. Additionally, Smart Moderation uses intelligent routing to create cases in Lightning Customer Communities and direct them to Service Cloud Lightning, enabling agents to respond to customers immediately.
• Search Optimization: Companies can more effectively surface community content in web search results and direct queries to relevant community discussions. For example, if a customer is searching the web to learn what size coffee filter to buy for a new coffee pot, Search Optimization can better surface links that bring the customer to the location in a community where his or her question is most likely to be answered — either by the manufacturer, a subject-matter expert, or another coffee enthusiast in the community.  

New Partner Lightning Components to Extend the Community

Powered by the Salesforce Lightning platform, companies can now drag and drop new e-commerce functionality into community pages faster than ever with three new partner-built Lightning components:

• CloudCraze CartPlus enables B2B companies to offer recommended products via catalogs and product showcases, and gives these companies control over how and where products are displayed within a community.
• OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Demandware integrates Demandware’s B2C e-commerce services into any community, allowing companies to provide single sign-on capability, a persistent shopping cart that is always present wherever the customer is, and the ability to embed the Demandware Customer Service Suite — allowing customer service agents to place orders on behalf of customers.
• OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Magento connects Magento’s e-commerce services into any community, allowing companies to synchronize customer records, orders, and reviews from Magento directly in Salesforce. Additionally, companies have access to built-in reporting that provides insight into customers’ shopping activity, such as order value, number of orders, and product reviews.

Please check out our guided tour to learn more about how Community Cloud and Lightning Customer Community can reimagine your customer relationships.