Those of you who have been involved in standing up customer portals/communities/etc. what is an abso

Brian Hartley

 Phase 1 of our community is purely support and help desk - but are looking to future iterations.  We are currently leveraging SFDC.  I realize each portal may have different bells and whistles but what have you found successful to your customers while they engaged with your portal?  For context we are a B2B software application with 350+ customers.

Jeff Breunsbach

@Alex Farmer Any advice you can offer Brian here - I think you mentioned that you've had to stand up communities in your career. 

Alex Farmer

How long is a piece of string!? I've rolled out two communities across the last two companies both using Salesforce Community Cloud.  

For me, the key things are:

1. Ensuring its more than a warehouse for documentation.  A knowledge library is important, but shouldn't lead with it as that turns off any exec sponsor or non-admin.
2. Put CS outcomes on the home page.  I've seen portals that have each product module on their homepage.  If the CS team's job is to connect modules to outcomes, them put the common outcomes on the homepage - ie: a more strategic layer. I've also seen that generate more inbound leads for expansion from customers - "hey you also hep companies do x?  Tell me more!"
3. Start with the community from day one.  Running onboarding through the community is key to drive adoption and uptake.  If they start their engagement with you from the community, they'll stay engaged.
4. Get SSO setup if possible so the credentials for your product log them in to the community - one hurdle for adoption less to deal with.
5. Publicly reward MVPs at user events to drive adoption further.
6. Explore different layouts based on customer health data or modules purchased - Salesforce lets you show different things to different audiences, so you can have a different landing page for red accounts or growth accounts.
7. Infuse community and comments into everything to get customers to connect with customers

And I should say - not all of these are must haves, but wanted to give full breadth of context.  Happy to discuss further!

  

Brian Hartley

@Alex Farmer this is great, thanks a ton for the intel.  I will holler at you if additional questions come up.

Scott Hopper

Yeah this one is an ocean.  But FAQs and alerts are nice things to surface early.  Ideally, a customer can get an insight at some point to there open tickets.   Possibly highlight content on new functionality.