Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE:CRM) recently announced the launch of a new update to its Community Cloud to which they added a new Lighting user interface along with a host of newer and better features.
Speaking during the release of the new update, Salesforce’s Senior Vice President in charge of Product Marketing, Mike Stone, revealed that the launch was by far the largest the company has had in recent years since 2013. He further added that the launch comes after two years of rigorous development and is expected to bring and boost proactive intelligence throughout the Salesforce Community space.
The main reason behind the development of the new Lightning Customer Communities update is to make the Salesforce community cloud more friendly and personal to mobile users based on their profiles. It is supposed to combine all areas under the Salesforce community cloud including portals, websites and social platforms all at the same time.
Some of the new features that Salesforce users can expect with the launch of the new release include the following:
- Special themes available across multiple user devices. The special themes will give users a personalized brand experience independent of the type and capabilities of the device that they are using.
- A rich media feed designed along the same lines as Quora with a similar Question and Answer forum. The media feed has capabilities for handling code snippets, images, file previews and videos all from the same point.
- Unique user experiences designed according to the profile information for various member types.
- Special recommendations based on search scoring to help users find useful articles and the right answers.
- Search optimization capabilities for surface community content as well as direct queries within the community
- Special tools to help community managers in moderating the community and fish out unwanted posts or spam messages.
- Simple e-commerce modules from third party vendors such as Magento, CloudCraze and Demandware. The modules come with drag and drop features that make them very easy to use.
- Dashboards through which content/ community engagement and purchasing patterns can be monitored across multiple platforms
