OREANDA-NEWS. February 19, 2016. Here at Salesforce, we use Community Cloud to power our 2 million-member-strong Success Community — one of our key differentiators as a business. Erica Kuhl, Vice President of Community, hosted a webinar that explained the power of a community, as well as how we use the Success Community at Salesforce to further the company’s goals.

The journey to creating the Success Community started with Salesforce’s recognition that businesses must engage a broad ecosystem in order to be successful, including customers, vendors, employees, suppliers, and so on. The vast majority of these interactions are no longer taking place in person, or even over the phone. Businesses need to rely on technology to communicate with their customers and partners, but most options fall short.

Websites, portals, and social communities all offer different strengths and weaknesses to businesses. While a website is branded, open, and easily-accessible, it doesn’t offer the interactive discussions like a social community. Additionally, a social community doesn’t connect back to your business data like a portal, but a portal lacks the easy access of a website or social community.

A community from Community Cloud combines all of the strengths of these three technologies, without the respective weaknesses. Community Cloud creates a personalized, fast, connected experience for your customers and your partners: A completely unique experience for each user and a fast, easy way to set up the community using templates. Community Cloud is also completely connected to your other business processes, including the customer service department, so the key customer interactions within the community are never siloed from the rest of the business.

The Success Community has had a long journey to becoming the powerful, inspiring community that it is now. What began in 2005 as a single web page that housed presentations and documentations without interactive capabilities has become a hub for peer-to-peer collaboration, customer service, and even a place for our customers to make valuable contributions to our product roadmap via the IdeaExchange.

Basically, the Success Community has everything you need to be a thriving Salesforce super-user, and it enables Salesforce to deliver personalized content that we can ensure is relevant to each user.

When a customer asks a question in the Success Community, 98 percent of these questions are answered by other Success Community members. However, for the rare question that the community members can’t answer themselves, the question is escalated automatically to the Lightning Service Console, so one of Salesforce’s support agents can answer the customer directly within the community. Since the community members are answering the vast majority of questions asked within the community, service agents are freed up to tackle the tougher cases.

To learn more about how Erica and her team were able to drive massive Success Community adoption and the metrics they look at to determine success, check out a recording of the webinar here. You can learn more about how you can incorporate a customer community into your business strategy by downloading the free Salesforce e-book: Customer Community 101.