Branding Your Salesforce Community - Community Part 3

Branding is a like a MAGNET that draws people to your organization for collaboration, innovation, excellence, continuous learning, belonging, creativity and empowerment. Branding is very powerful and vital to a community because it can influence people’s decision to invest in your company, campaigns, programs, events, products etc. It is a platform where diverse group of people speak in one voice. It makes your community go from good to great. It is the most distinct advantage that you have in your own competitive sectors of the market place. Earn more opportunities to increase your organization share of dollars by making a strong brand. With this you can inspire people to make difference, make connection with your customers, spread out the company’s mission. 

With Salesforce personalize the community user experience by selecting and customizing different colors for the Tabs, header background, page background, Tab, top border, background color etc. Upload pictures, company logo for the header and footer section of your community. 

Add Tabs to your Community

You can add the tabs that you want your community members to access from the tabs section. If the tabs are grayed out then you might want to go to Administration > Miscellaneous >select show all settings in Community Management. 

With Salesforce personalize the community user experience by selecting and customizing different colors for the Tabs, header background, page background, Tab, Top border, background color etc. Upload pictures, company logo for the header and footer section of your community. 

Login and Registration

In this section you can customize the login process for the community users. The login page that will be selected in this section will override any other login assignments. Community login page can be customized using visual force.

More Links-

Salesforce Communities - Part 1

Managing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 2

Branding Your Salesforce Community - Community Part 3

Implementing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 4 

Managing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 2

Community is a collaborative platform component that allows us to expose data to the external as well as internal employees. This is a one page stop for the admins to manage and monitor the community activity. With communities you can increase branding, loyalty, get customer feedback from chatter, ideas, reduce your cases by enabling knowledge articles and promote employee collaboration

Let us study in details how to manage Salesforce Community-

To manage community go to Build-> Customize -> Communities->All community

  

1: Status: Manage the status of your community to active or inactive.

2: Customize Template: This section will show the current selection of the template for your community. You can always switch the template if required from customize template section.

3: Select Dashboard: Dashboards provide vital information on memberships, logins, and activity. Select customize and map the dashboards that you want to view to the community managers. You can also download salesforce dashboard package from the App Exchange.

4: Create Reputation Levels: Reputation levels are set to promote the activities in a community and motivate the community members. Members who are more active in the community gain more points. In this section you can set the points, range and levels. Users can move up in the level by earning more points

5: Select Members: Restrict the community access by limiting the profile, similarly users can be provided access by permission sets.

6: Dashboard Settings: Dashboard Mapping can be done here to display the selected data.

7: Topics: Topics is grouping of records around a common theme.

8: Reputation: Reputation is directly proportional to your activity in the community. The more you share, post, comment, help others by answering questions the better your reputation level becomes.

9: Administration: This is the integral part of the manage community where you can set various options like branding your community, customizing tabs, members etc. 

Provide access to the community Members:

Salesforce has consolidated all the required settings for the communities under “Manage “which makes it so much easier for admins to do their jobs. Let us provide access to the users to our community. Users can belong to various roles and profiles. 

Get your community URL from Build > Customize > Communities > All Communities and get the network id. Now get the profile id and create a csv file with columns (networkId, parentId) as shown in the screenshot. 

Parent id can contain permission set, profile id, role id etc. Once the file is uploaded members will be able to access the community management section. To find the network id of your salesforce community 

As we know that the manage options displayed in the manage section of the community changes with the template selection. The options that we see on the on the left Palette is tailored to the Napili template and these might change once you change the template for your community. Please refer the below screen shot to know the Napili Miscellaneous options in detail. 

Manage Topics in Communities

There are three options available under topics- New topics can be created and more than one can be combined to merge into one. Articles can be added to the navigational topics for users in communities. The main topics that you want to display on the community home page can be managed here. 

More Links-

Salesforce Communities - Part 1

Managing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 2

Branding Your Salesforce Community - Community Part 3

Implementing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 4 

Territory Management Part-2

Stay tuned...

Salesforce Communities - Part1

Communities are formed by the people who share and are engaged in collective learning. The members have a common passion for the things that they do and interact on everyday basis to make the experience even better.

A community can be incredibly valuable for your organization. Salesforce communities are online platform/space where internal, external employees, customers, partners can collaborate.The main advantage of communities is it lives inside your organization and you can decide which salesforce data you want to share with the community members. Customers can ask for help from online communities and internal support can assist them. They can also access online help from FAQ’s, knowledge, articles, ideas etc.

Security model for communities work in the similar fashion like your internal members. A separate profile can be created for partner portal members and the customers to provide access to apps, tabs, records and objects. 

With communities you can:

• Get real time feedback
• Ability to brand and customize your own experience with specific colors pictures etc.
• Incorporating idea of social intelligence
• Provide efficient self service
• Educate partners to sell effectively
• Give your customer more power and choices
• Stay connected with your customer 24/7
• Self-service for partners, customers and employees
• Blend communities and business process on a single platform
• Share documentation, files and collaborate.
• Partners can get answers, engage post ideas and log cases
• Find resources, answers, best practices and experts
• The most powerful way to collaborate
• Portals has been replaced by communities

Steps to Implement the Community in Salesforce:

Use Case:

1-2-3 SFDC Org would like to implement Communities in salesforce for their customers and partners. The Partners and customers should have following access in the community- Chatter, people, groups, accounts, contacts, cases, content, knowledge, libraries, badges, recognition etc. 

Step1: Enable Salesforces Communities and select the domain:

Go to Customize > Communities > Settings and enable communities,the very first step of implementing communities in salesforce is to enable a community for your org. As soon as you check the enable box, salesforce will prompt you to select a unique community domain name. It will automatically prompt if the domain name is available. 

Once you enable the community it cannot be undone. 

You are now ready to create your community

Step2:

Choose an appropriate template from the given options below. We will be using NAPILI template for our use case because we are planning to provide the access to the knowledge that we implemented in our previous posts. Salesforce provides various types of templates- Kokua, Koa, Napili, Aloha and Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce. 

Step 3: Let us enable the global header

You might want to provide access to the global header for the internal users to easily switch back and forth between internal and the external community. This can be done by providing custom permissions to the users -Setup, click Manage Users > Permission Sets or by providing “View Global Header” access from the profile. 

Community Management Page

Community Management page is used by the admins to do the configurations settings required for the community page. The options available in Community Management are based on your community template selection, permissions, and preferences. Following options are all limited to the Napili template. 

Community Management Page can also be accessed from the global header, to access this page you must be logged into the community. All the options that you see in the community are based on the selection of the community template permissions etc. 

Now that we have selected the template,we are all set to manage our community options,In our next post we will learn the various options available under Napili template in salesforce.

More Links-

Salesforce Communities - Part 1

Managing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 2

Branding Your Salesforce Community - Community Part 3

Implementing Salesforce Communities - Communities Part 4 

Salesforce Knowledge Part-4

How to use an article on a case

Post in progress.........

A company with excellent customer service gets repeated business from customers. No matter how big or small your business is, customer service is the heart of your business model. The significance of a good and fast customer service is essential for a healthy business. Integrating article management  with cases in Salesforce can maximize satisfaction and drive repeat business with customer. Use Salesforce knowledge base to share solutions and product related details with your customers as well as internal team members.

In our previous posts we learned how to enable knowledge and create articles. In this post we will learn how to use articles on cases. Let us began by creating a case on a sample record. In 1-2-3 SFDC org select a contact to create a case. Pick a random contact say  “Jack Rogers” go to the related list section on the contact and create a case. Our intention is to create a case related to the article that we published to see if the related articles are automatically suggested on a case when we hit find articles. 

Specify all the details on the case page like status, case origin, subject and description and hit save. Now go to the related list section and select “Find Articles” if you do not find articles in the related list section then you probably have to go back on the case page layout and add articles on the related list. 

 

Go to the related list section and select “find articles”

 

You will find your newly published article for Dell Inspiron in the suggested articles list.

 

Select the dell Inspiron article from the list and observe the page. On the top you can rate this article from 1 star to 5 stars. Follow this article in case you would like to have regular updates if there any version changes.

 

Go back to knowledge and attach this article to your case.

The newly created article has been attached to the case,since we found the right article for our case we are all set to close it. While closing the article you can select the case close reason as existing problem because we already had an article in our knowledge base.