Customers and partners that interact with your business, as well as the employees who engage them, all expect a modern, digital experience. According to the Salesforce Report, nearly 90% Of buyers say the experience a company provides matters as much as products or services. Whether using Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, or Service Cloud, your Salesforce user experience should be seamless, personalized and hyper-relevant, reflecting all the right context behind every interaction.

At the same time, Salesforce is a big investment, and you need to show return on that investment as quickly as possible. Ensuring maximum user adoption and proficiency is key. The more useful and relevant the experience is, the more effective users will be on the platform—and the more frequently they will return to it.

Here are six ways you can elevate your Salesforce experience for customers, partners and employees.

1. Continuously inform and engage your users.

Keep users abreast of everything they need to know about your business, and share valuable, engaging content related to their needs and interests. Deliver timely information and critical alerts through tailored announcements. Keep your audience informed and engaged with virtual and in-person events and targeted news, blogs or other articles. Manage and surface all of this within Salesforce to minimize context switching and to keep users coming back to the platform.

2. Personalize the user experience for hyper-relevance.

Infuse context and personalized content to enrich the entire experience and make it more relevant to individual customers. Don’t make employees struggle with out-of-the-box search and list views; dynamically present what they need in the flow of work, so they don’t have to leave the current task to find it. Whether it is location mapping, embedded video, targeted news and events, assigned learning, or recommended products and knowledge articles, strive to give users the information they need when they need it.

3. Escape the confines of the typical Salesforce look and feel.

Break away from limiting, out-of-the-box layouts, view, and UI components to give users the beautiful, modern experience they expect. Follow current UX design principles and ensure that every touchpoint represents your unique branding look and feel, rather than just looking like any other Salesforce implementation.

4. Accelerate platform adoption and mastery.

Develop a plan to thoroughly onboard users and get them proficient with the platform as quickly as possible to start realizing value. Streamline and automate the onboarding process. Gathe data to drive users to the site or platform, personalize the experience, and equip them with the knowledge and resources they need for success. Then, go deeper and give your employees, partners and customers an immersive digital learning experience tailored to their specific needs. A highly skilled ecosystem is a loyal and effective one, and educated customers are advocates for the brand.

5. Enable users to serve themselves and each other.

Give your customers, partners and employees the ability to serve themselves 24/7, whether researching products, making purchases, managing accounts or troubleshooting and solving issues. This means making your product information, knowledge articles and other content easily accessible, searchable and filterable. Deflect cases by giving customers access to the same content your service employees use via the knowledge base or a chatbot.

6. Empower your users to be your advocates.

An effective way to get your brand and messaging in front of as many potential customers as possible is to give your users ways to advocate for you. Organically expand the reach and influence of your brand by enabling users to share, contribute to and interact with your content. Enable partners and employees to contribute blogs and articles, empower customers to share your content in their social networks, and enable users to rate and review products, services and other records. Use this active user base to crowdsource the best ideas for improving your business and your Salesforce implementation.

Achieve an elevated experience with IBM® Accelerators for Salesforce

You can achieve this elevated experience with IBM® Accelerators for Salesforce. Its library of pre-built components can be used to quickly implement dozens of common use cases in Salesforce with clicks, not code. You can drag, drop, configure and customize components to create engaging, hyper-relevant experiences for your employees, partners and customers on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Experience Cloud. Accelerators like Announcements, Experience Components, News, Ideas, Learning Adventure, Onboarding, and many more enable you to create a highly relevant and personalized experience.

IBM developed these accelerators with the expertise we gained through thousands of successful IBM Salesforce Services engagements. Now, these same products are available to purchase and use in your projects! Unleash the power of our pre-built components to reduce customization efforts, empower administrators and speed the ROI of your Salesforce implementation.