Overview

Formerly known as “Community Cloud”, Salesforce Experience Cloud is a set of functionality built on the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Experience Cloud enables you to build branded digital experience sites that are connected to your CRM with a key focus on engaging customers and empowering partners. You can use Experience Cloud to create multiple sites and experiences within your Salesforce org to address different purposes.
You can create multiple sites and experiences within your Salesforce org to address different purposes.


Customer Service and Account Portals -
Empower your customers to find solutions to their customer-service issues on their own with access to your knowledge base, your service agents, and peer-to-peer support. In addition, give customers access to their data in a member portal.

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) and Channel Sales -
Increase your (and your partners’) revenue stream by collaborating on opportunities and deals. Onboard partners quickly by sharing content and training materials.

Additional Reference:
Trailhead - Experience Cloud Basics

Partner Relationship Management (PRM) (also called Channel Managemnt or Channel Automation Software)

It is software system that helps companies automate activities related to companies working with their distributor, reseller, MSPs, and VAR partners to drive better channel sales by reselling their products and services. With a PRM, channel partners get controlled access to leads, joint opportunities, affiliate links, deals, sales metrics, and up-to-date documents of their partner programs.
Note: PRM System is also known as Channel Management Software or Channel Automation Software.


Source: workspan.com

Additional Reference:
Beginner's guide to Partner Relationship Management (PRM)

Most Significant Features and Capabilities of Experience Cloud

Customer 360 -
Experience Cloud sites are built on the Customer 360 concept; meaning your teams are provided with a single shared customer view. The Customer 360 feature helps you understand your customers and their behaviors, and deliver better experiences according to their personal needs.

Templates -
Use Experience Cloud’s readymade templates to create responsive experiences that you, your customers or your partners need. Preconfigured themes and branding capabilities. Use Experience Builder to brand your site by utilizing prebuilt themes and adjusting colors, fonts, and styles. Add readymade Lightning components or use custom solutions to enhance the functionality of your site.

Salesforce CMS -
Use the power of the Salesforce Content Management System (CMS) to create, organize, and manage your content in one place, then publish it across all your Experience Cloud sites. Salesforce lets you connect your external CMS to post relevant content on your sites.

Knowledge -
Provide your customers with an exceptional support experience by enabling a Knowledge base full of articles, FAQs, notes, documents, etc., in your Experience Cloud site.

Chatter -
Add Chatter Feed to your Experience Cloud site to let members reach out to your company and get expert advice/help faster. Allow Discussion Threads so your users can reply to answers or previous replies.

Question to Case -
Enable the Chatter Questions feature to let moderators create cases from questions posted in Chatter. You can also use the automation capabilities of Salesforce and set up flows in Flow Builder to automatically create cases from questions that meet specified criteria.

Groups -
Enhance self-service and collaboration in your Experience Cloud site by letting your site members and guest users browse and join the groups they like. Customize your group detail page the way you prefer using separate components.

Additional functionality with AppExchange solutions -
Extend functionality of your site by empowering it with third-party solutions.

Analytics, dashboards and reports -
Build reports and expose their data in dashboards to see the performance of your business in various areas, and provide your customers/partners with the insights they need.

Experience Cloud Template

Out-of-the-box, Salesforce gives you ten pre-built, customizable templates to choose from. Let’s look at the most outstanding ones, summarizing their features and benefits.

Customer Account Portal template -
The Customer Account Portal template is ideal for customer service as it allows your site members to log in, access, and manage their accounts, create and manage cases or claims, and other Salesforce records, including custom objects.

Customer Service & Help Center templates -
Use the Customer Service template to set up a community in Salesforce, allowing site members to post questions, access relevant content, view knowledge articles and Q&As, collaborate in groups and discussions, submit support requests, and track their cases.

Partner Central template -
The Partner Central template helps to build an efficient, engaging hub where partners can connect with each other, and your company, to work on driving channel sales.

Additional Reference:
How to Choose the Right Experience Cloud Template

Experience Cloud Site For Partners

Experience Cloud allows to set up a partner portal using the Partner Central template. This template includes lead distribution and deal registration.
Lead distribution capture leads from its marketing campaigns and website, then pass all the leads to qualified channel partners. This is usefule when company's own sales team is not present in the geographical area and Channel partners in such locations, accelerate their selling process with a trusted source of viable leads.
With deal registration, partners can register their deals, both planned and in progress, so Lira is always knowledgeable about a deal’s status.
CPQ enables sales teams to generate branded, customized proposals and contracts with a few clicks, rather than dozens of phone calls and hundreds of clicks. CPQ can be extended to partners to increase productivity.
Distributed Marketing provides prepackaged campaigns to its partners to help them drive demand—while also protecting the brand by keeping everyone on the same message. Some partners request market development funds (MDF) or cooperative (co-op) funds to execute their own campaigns. Partners can request, track, and access approved MDF and co-op marketing funds all within partner portal.

Streamlined onboarding allows up-to-date product information and sales collateral specific to a reseller’s location available in the partner portal. For example, when resellers in Europe login, they see pertinent, localized information about tax laws and pricing, making their onboarding specific to their needs. They also get localized training for certification purposes, and a list of nearby certification testing centers.
Partner portal shows homepage personalized for his partner type and location: value-added resellers in Central and South America. Sales team notices some new content—all in Spanish—on improving sales in his area and sees a list of leads assigned to him in Guatemala and neighboring Belize. Qualified leads in Salesforce automatically creates account and contact records in org.
Opportunity record is created for the lead and sales process is seen and can track where is the opportunity at any moment. He sends an email to the account’s main contact straight from the opportunity, without having to hunt down any email addresses. And the first interaction is automatically logged in to Salesforce.

Securely Share CRM Data With Partners Outside Salesforce -
Share Opportunities with Partner users in the same account, Partner users in a different account, and Salesforce users in the role hierarchy.
Cases other customer users on the same account.

Additional Reference:
Trailhead: Share CRM Data with Your Partners

Experience Cloud Site For Customers

With Experience Cloud, you can create multiple experiences in its Salesforce org, and tailor them to individual and business customers.
Individual and business customers can have their own specific site for their needs and can maintain their account, view knowledge articles, and if need be, open cases with support.

Additional Reference:
Trailhead: ??

Additional References and Resources

Refer to the additional references and respurces below for the exam preparations.

• Trailhead - Share CRM Data with Your Partners