Today’s customer spends more time online than ever before, so much so that the online experience is integral to the overall customer experience. This should come as no surprise - with the click of a button we can request a car ride, send money to a friend or order groceries. As a result, customer expectations of companies’ online tools are rising faster than ever. Customers want a mobile, engaging user experience, and self-service access to many of the actions that they previously would call a service desk for. In fact, 81% of customers prefer self-service in an online portal instead of calling a service desk.

The struggle to deliver a modern online experience

Companies are often unprepared to adapt to these ever-rising customer expectations. Legacy portal applications - which were built for transactions, not customer relationships - are not equipped to deliver a modern user experience, and have difficulty integrating an increasingly complex array of business processes.

The result:

• Customers get stuck calling a service desk for tasks that they expect to be able to do online.
• Businesses fail to deliver the online functionality that customers want and expect.
• IT is in the difficult position of maintaining legacy portals that are hard to integrate, update and customize, while trying to keep pace with rising business and customer needs.

Lightning Customer Portal:

Build a modern portal seamlessly connected to business process with clicks, not code

We are excited to release Lightning Customer Portal from Community Cloud. Built on the Salesforce Platform, Lightning Customer Portal is a turnkey solution for Community Cloud customers to extend Salesforce data and process in an engaging, mobile-responsive portal. Customers can access their account information, update their profile, order products or access any custom business process or app that has been built on the Salesforce Platform.

Lightning Customer Portal unifies the needs of the customer, business and IT into one modern solution:

• Customers are delighted with anytime, personalized access to their information, and can effortlessly complete actions in the portal.
• Businesses are able to provide customers with the online tools, apps and self-service experience that customers are demanding.
• IT is empowered to quickly and easily deliver an engaging, mobile portal that is seamlessly integrated with Salesforce CRM and third-party systems.

Out-of-the-box business integration and customization tools

With Lightning Customer Portal any company can build a modern account portal in days with out-of-the-box components and intuitive design tools. New features include:

• Lightning Customer Portal Template: This new mobile-responsive Lightning Template is designed specifically for the customer account portal use case and preconfigured with a new layout and drag-and-drop Lightning components. The template can be easily customized and branded with the click of a button in the Lightning Community Builder. The new template includes:
  • Tile Menu Lightning Component: Put business process front and center with an intuitive and visually stunning navigation experience, and fully integrated with the new Process Launcher (details below).
  • Streamlined Profile: A simplified profile enables customers to easily update their profile and set preferences.
  • Help Center: Use Salesforce Knowledge to give customers answers to their most pressing questions about a product or service.
• Process Launcher: Easily embed business process in the portal with a few clicks. In Lightning Community Builder, simply choose from a dropdown menu any global action, community page, record or external site you have configured in Salesforce, and instantly integrate that action into the portal. For example, if you associate the New Case global action to a menu item, customers can easily create a new case from the menu.
• Community 360: Enable call center agents to see what Knowledge articles, cases and records a contact last viewed in the portal. Embedded directly in Lightning Service Console, agents can make suggestions based on portal activity, and customers are happier with personalized service.

Lightning Customer Portal is available with the Winter '18 release and accessible to Community Cloud customers in Salesforce Setup. Contact an account executive for more information or to see a live demo.

Register for our webinar on September 21 to learn more about Lightning Customer Portal, where we will showcase all the new features and demo the product.