Salesforce.com Unveils Lightning Customer Community

Salesforce.com has released Lightning Customer Community for Web and mobile customer community experiences. Lightning Customer Community helps companies create personalized and intelligent customer experiences that seamlessly extend data, files, and processes from the Salesforce Customer Success Platform.

Salesforce Community Cloud, which combines social engagement with CRM data, enables companies to extend their brand experiences through online customer communities.

The new Lightning Customer Community, which is powered by the Salesforce Lightning Platform, includes the following new features:

• Lightning Themes: Companies can now create customized and highly personalized user experiences on any device.
• Rich Media Feed: Users can now embed videos, images, file link previews, and even code snippets into any community feed. The new Rich Media Feed also provides a Q&A-like environment to help users find answers to their questions.
• Recommended Articles and Answers: Companies can curate personalized experiences for every customer with intelligent scoring to deliver the most relevant articles and answers based on each search query.
• Search Optimization: Companies can surface community content in Web search results and direct queries to relevant community discussions.
• Smart Moderation: Community managers can proactively identify and eliminate spam and unwanted posts. Additionally, Smart Moderation uses intelligent routing to create cases in Lightning Customer Community and direct them to Service Cloud Lightning, enabling agents to respond to customers immediately.
• Lightning Reports and Dashboards: With more than 250 new Lightning Reports and Dashboards, community managers receive real-time insights into customer trends, such as purchasing patterns, top content, escalations, and community traffic.

Along with the release of Lightning Customer Community, Salesforce introduced three partner-built Lightning components that enable users to drag and drop new e-commerce functionality into community pages. They include the following:

• CloudCraze CartPlus: Enables B2B companies to drag and drop native shopping carts anywhere in their community.
• OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Demandware: Integrates Demandware's B2C e-commerce services into any community, allowing companies to provide single sign-on capability and a persistent shopping cart, sync customer data, and embed the Demandware Customer Service Suite, enabling customer service agents to place orders on behalf of customers.
• OSF UnifyCOMMERCE Magento: Connects Magento's e-commerce services into any community, enabling companies to synchronize customer records, orders, and reviews from Magento directly into 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.

"In today's connected world, customers expect every experience to be fast, personal, and seamless," said Mike Micucci, senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce Community Cloud, in a statement. "The new Lightning Customer Community is connected directly into the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, providing companies with the intelligence needed to exceed expectations and build deeper relationships with their customers."

"We are responsible for piecing together billions of historical records every day and delivering a fast and personal experience for each of our customers," said Andrew Watt, vice president of member services at Ancestry, in a statement. "With Customer Lightning Community, we will be able to leverage a whole new platform that will allow our customers to form deeper connections with one another, unearth even more insights and discoveries with relatives, and share their stories."

Lightning Customer Community is available with the purchase of any Community Cloud license.

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