Recently I’ve mentioned the opportunity I had to join the Product Roadmap Tour’s London Event, an initiative where Salesforce brings customers together to discuss the vision and direction of their products.
Well this gets better, as I’ve been asked to be part of the Salesforce Communities Customer Advisory Board. Late last week we had a session in London taking the opportunity of Adi Kuruganti, SVP Product Management, and his team being in town.
Overall the session gave us good insight into the Community Cloud roadmap for Customer, Partner & Employee Communities and it was a place to gather directly from customers their feedback on the product to help shape the strategic product direction.
Now, there were a few bits of the product I wasn’t the most familiar with, and this session opened my eyes by seeing it more of that side of things (oh yes, live demos style!). Here’s just a few of the cool new things we now have at our fingertips.
Flows
Very similarly how you can add a Flow component into a Lightning page, with the builder you can drop your flow into communities. Just think how can you extend flows for your members, from submission of applications and making flow-based decisions leveraging the data you already have in Salesforce, to providing a guidance journey flow for users to troubleshoot your products. This opens a world of possibilities!
And see that ‘Assign Audiences‘ option? Since the last release, you can now assign specific audiences to components.
CMS Connect
You can read more here, but in a nutshell this allows you to connect your CMS applications (that you may already have in place for your website etc) into communities, so that you can easily utilise your assets without having to recreate them, and then you can dynamically render your components, CSS, and JavaScript on community pages for consistent branding, authentication, and ease of maintenance.
Case Deflection
Finally, the Case Deflection component is great! Basically it allows your community to suggest relevant articles or discussions to community members while they are creating cases in order to deflect more support cases, and even better, off the back of this you can run reports on deflection.
Overall, this was a very good session, which reminded me that there is so much to keep up with in terms of the constant product innovation that Salesforce delivers, and it gave me tons of ideas to implement. (As well as a sneak peek on what’s coming in Summer’18, #exciting!) The Treasure Hunt is soon to start for the Summer ’18 features, so let’s see which ones you find on Communities!