Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud E-Book

Lillie Beiting

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 447

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Empowering your target audience to interact effortlessly with you and your product offerings is a critical aspect of business in the modern era. Users expect easy, professional digital experiences when engaging with organizations. However, creating engagement applications from scratch is challenging, and connecting user behavior with your organization’s data is even more complex.
Enter Salesforce Experience Cloud sites, website portals built on the Salesforce data model that seamlessly connects your user data to your user experience. Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud focuses on the human-centric nature of this product, beginning with a comprehensive guide on designing for your organization’s desired users and ensuring success for both internal teams and end users. After exploring the real-world applications of Experience Cloud and reviewing license models, this book provides a beginning-to-end guide to mastering the technical backend of this product, covering both out-of-the-box settings and customization techniques.
By the end of this book, you’ll have gained a deep understanding of the Experience Cloud data model and customization options to create engaging, user-centric digital experiences that deliver value to your organization and stakeholders.

Leseprobe

Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud

Strategies for creating powerful customer interactions

Lillie Beiting

Rachel Rogers

Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud

Copyright © 2024 Packt Publishing

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First published: October 2024

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ISBN 978-1-83546-634-6

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Breaking glass ceilings requires grit and determination. We do this not for ourselves, but for the generations of women to come, like Kinley Rogers and Paloma Rocke-Berrocal. We celebrate the women who made it in the male-dominated technology industry, and we thank the women before us who paved bright futures for us and for STEM badasses such as Dr. Magdalen Beiting-Parrish, Meridith Paluck (RN), Nell Watson, and Anna Benbrook (MS, CHES).

Keep fighting.

~ Lillie and Rachel

Contributors

About the authors

Lillie Beiting began her Salesforce experience in Fortune 500 companies such as General Motors, Stanley Black and Decker, and Anthem. For her expertise in Salesforce products, Beiting was recognized as a Salesforce Trailblazer and one of the 30 Marketers to Watch. She has spoken at multiple conferences and Salesforce events, notably at Dreamforce 2018.

Beiting has contributed to the field of Data Ethics as a United Nations Delegate in Data Ethics in Sustainable Development Goals. She was also a contributing author for the first artificial intelligence ethics certification program, The Ethics Certification Program for Autonomous and Intelligent Systems (ECPAIS), from the Ethical Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

I’d like to acknowledge the Salesforce Ohana for their assistance in the creation of this book, as well as my friends and loved ones who supported me while I worked nights and weekends to write this.

Rachel Rogers stumbled into a technology-first career when she was introduced to Salesforce. In a world driven by hyper-connectivity, she pushes to understand: what do we lose when we remove people from the equation? She has led multiple companies in the quest to curate technology with the people at its heart.

Rachel spoke at Dreamforce from 2012 to 2018. In 2013, she was honored as a Salesforce MVP and was inducted into the Salesforce MVP Hall of Fame in 2019, recognizing her expertise and commitment to the Salesforce Community. She won the Lighting Bright Ideas Award, Data Driven Business Leader Award, and was the original Lightning Champion. In 2024, she was awarded the Honored Listed as Who’s Who in America 2024.

This book has been a blessing and has pushed me to hone my technical skills. I want to thank Jamie and Kinley Rogers for their support through the late nights and early mornings that made this book a reality, and my inner circle for the courage to tackle something new. Together, we will keep moving onward and upward!

About the reviewer

Since 1995, Ryan Headley spent nearly 30 years working in different areas of IT. Having started his career in desktop support, he moved to Chicago, US, to work in the LAN group at a large data center in the late 90s and ultimately relocated to Madison, US, where he taught himself Java and worked as a contractor and consultant. In 2013, in the course of helping a former colleague build his practice, Ryan logged into Salesforce.org for the first time. Within a couple of years he became a Salesforce MVP and wound up working for Salesforce directly in 2018 where he became an Engineering Manager. In 2023, he joined a Fortune 100 company as a Senior Director of Engineering to oversee the governance and delivery of Salesforce solutions.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Curating a Digital Experience Strategy

1

Defining Your Digital Experience Strategy

Introducing Experience Cloud products

Determining your Target Audience

Identifying internal stakeholders

Curating external advisory committees

Understanding key interactions

Determining success metrics

Summary

2

Translating Your Audience and Interactions into Meaningful Technology Features

Organizing and prioritizing feedback

Identifying themes

Connecting feedback to product features

Identifying differences between Experience Cloud offerings

Identifying the “why not”

Summary

3

Technology Component Identification – Which Parts of Experience Cloud Do I Need?

Aligning features to technology stacks

Experience Cloud – Self-Service

Experience Cloud – PRM

Experience Cloud – content management system (CMS)

Experience Cloud – business-to-business (B2B) commerce

Experience Cloud – External Apps

Narrowing down the optimal combination

Service functions

Sales functions

Custom objects

Tracking your digital experience strategy

Summary

Part 2: Infrastructure Setup to Support and Customize Design Strategy

4

Curating Data Models

Connecting the data dots

Standard objects

Custom objects

Designing for requested KPIs

Identifying data sensitivity

Deep dive into Target Audience data practices

Curating an enterprise architecture map

Marketing technologies

Finance technologies

IT systems

Mapping it out

Curating an ERD

Licensure considerations

Guide to reading the ERD tables

Franchisee Experience Cloud ERD

End Consumer Experience Cloud ERD

Summary

5

Understanding Experience Cloud Templates

Preliminary setup

Enabling Digital Experiences

Templates overview

Customer templates

Partner Central template

Custom templates

Understanding theming – declarative versus custom CSS

Retired templates and template migrations

Retired templates

Template migrations

Summary

6

When to Use Aura Components, Lightning Web Components, and Lightning Runtime Components

Why are there three component types?

Aura Components

Features in Aura not yet available in LWC or LWRs

Lightning Web Components

LWC considerations

Lightning Web Runtime Components

Considerations

When to switch from LWCs to LWRs

Transitioning from Aura to Lightning

When to make the move

Transition considerations and preparation

How to make a page with declarative components

Summary

Part 3: Human-Centric Development

7

Leveraging Screen Flows versus Apex

Process use cases for a guided UX

Salesforce Flow and Screen Flows

Screen Flows

Record-Triggered Flows

Schedule-Trigger Flows

Platform Event-Triggered Flows

Autolaunched Flows

Subflows

Custom code – LWC, Apex, and CSS

LWC

Apex

CSS

When to use custom code and Salesforce Screen Flows

When to use custom code instead of Salesforce Flow

When to use a combination of custom code and Salesforce Flow

Summary

8

Understanding Inputs – Emails, Chats, and Text Messages

Communication leveraging Experience Cloud

Implementing Salesforce Chat or third-party chat

Implementing and managing Experience Cloud emails

Implementing and managing text messaging

Summary

9

Marketing Automation Setup

Marketing Automation capabilities 101

Salesforce CMS and dynamic content

Setting up Salesforce CMS

Salesforce CMS best practices

Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud integration

Data Cloud

Setting up Data Cloud

Setting up SEO

Robots.txt files, sitemaps, and indexing

Exposing Salesforce objects

SEO page properties

AppExchange and third-party marketing tools

Summary

10

Leveraging Case Management and Knowledge Bases

Service Cloud – Case management

Enabling service assets in Experience Cloud

Partner Central template – native service option

Customer Service template – native service option

Help Center template – native service option

Service Cloud – Knowledge setup

Enabling Knowledge in Experience Cloud

Summary

Part 4: Site Launch

11

Security – Authentication, Data Sharing, and Encryption

Defining your Experience Cloud data sharing model

Experience Cloud guest user setup

Authenticating users on your Experience Cloud site

Setting up authenticated users

Connected apps and SSO

Unauthenticated user considerations

CSP and Lightning Locker to combat XSS and clickjacking

How to set a CSP

Setting up Lightning Locker

Enabling clickjack protection

Encrypting your data and protecting your users

HTTPS/TLS and classic encryption in Salesforce

Protecting your users

Setting up a cookie policy

Summary

12

Monitoring Your Site – Salesforce Native Reporting

Experience Cloud out-of-the-box reporting

Dashboards inside My Workspaces

Dashboards in Sales or Service Cloud

Einstein Analytics (CRMA) Configurations

Google Analytics and third-party web analytics

Setting up reporting for your Experience Cloud users

Native Salesforce reporting

CRMA

Summary

13

Site Launch, Maintenance, and Moderation

Pre-launch activities

Technical readiness

Exploring site moderation and users

User self-registration

Specialty users

User audits

Understanding analytics and adopting best practices

Adoption best practices

Ongoing maintenance

Summary

Part 5: Certifications

14

Best Practices and Certification Test Preparation

Understanding the test structure

Answer key

Sharing, visibility, and licensing

Answer key

Administration, setup, and configuration

Answer key

Adoption and analytics

Answer key

Customization considerations and limitations

Answer key

Branding, personalization, and content

Answer key

Final thoughts

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

Empowering your target audience to easily interact with you and your product offerings is a critical aspect of business in the modern era – your users now expect easy, professional digital experiences when they engage with organizations. However, setting up engagement applications from scratch is challenging, and getting user behavior to connect with your organization’s data is even harder.

Enter Salesforce Experience Cloud sites – website portals built off the Salesforce data model that cleanly connect your user data to your user experience. Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud focuses on the human-centric nature of this product, beginning with a comprehensive guide on designing for your organization’s desired users and ensuring that you’re setting your internal teams and end users up for success. After contextualizing the real-world use of Experience Cloud and reviewing license models, it coaches its users through a beginning-to-end guide to mastering the technical backend of this product, both out-of-the-box settings and customization techniques.

You’ll learn the Experience Cloud data model and options for customization, standard template and component structures, Visualforce, Aura, LWC and LWR UI used in Experience Cloud, Salesforce screen flow and custom trigger options, marketing automation, Knowledge Base, reporting, and more!

Who this book is for

If you are looking to understand the intricacies of Salesforce Experience Cloud, transform your client experience, enhance your enterprise architecture, and create a scalable, world class-customer web experience that seamlessly integrates with an existing Salesforce instance, then this book is for you. Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud is for Business leaders, IT leaders, Salesforce Developers, Salesforce Admins, and web teams tasked with delivering and maintaining an excellent, integrated Experience Cloud portal experience.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Defining Your Digital Experience Strategy, helps you determine your target audience, identify your stakeholders, and determine if Salesforce Experience Cloud is right for your organization.

Chapter 2, Translating Your Audience and Interactions into Meaningful Technology Features, teaches you how to organize your stakeholder feedback and connect it to Experience Cloud features.

Chapter 3, Technology Component Identification – Which Parts of Experience Cloud Do I need? aids you in aligning your features to technology stacks and determine your optimal technical stack.

Chapter 4, Curating Data Models, explains how to determine the data you need to create an Enterprise Relationship Diagram.

Chapter 5, Understanding Experience Cloud Templates, covers your options for basic and custom site templates in Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Chapter 6, When to Use Aura Components, Lightning Web Components, and Lightning Runtime Components, teaches the difference between the custom UI development components and when to use them.

Chapter 7, Leveraging Screen Flows versus Apex explains when to use the declarative tool, Flow instead of Apex to accomplish complex UX.

Chapter 8, Understanding Inputs – Emails, Chats, and Text Messages, talks about the digital communication offerings within Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Chapter 9, Marketing Automation Setup, explains how marketing automation works and what tools are available in Salesforce and third-party tech stacks.

Chapter 10, Leveraging Case Management and Knowledge Bases, covers how to implement scalable Salesforce Service Cloud solutions in Experience Cloud.

Chapter 11, Security – Authentication, Data Sharing, and Encryption, teaches you to define a security model and leverage common web security techniques to keep your Experience Cloud site safe.

Chapter 12, Monitoring Your Site – Salesforce Native Reporting, explains how to leverage native and third-party reports to monitor your Experience Cloud site.

Chapter 13, Site Launch, Maintenance and Moderation, helps you plan for your site launch, and create maintenance and moderation strategies to keep your site fresh.

Chapter 14, Best Practices and Certification Test Preparation, helps you put your knowledge to the test and prepare for the Salesforce Experience Cloud Certification.

To get the most out of this book

To get the most out of Salesforce Experience Cloud, it’s helpful to have knowledge of the core Salesforce Clouds, specifically Sales and Service Clouds. For business users, understanding the basic functions of these core clouds will make Experience Cloud concepts clearer. For admins or developers, familiarity with the declarative order of operations and the Lightning Framework will be beneficial. Additionally, a web development background can help demystify some of the concepts in Experience Cloud.

Software/hardware covered in the book

Operating system requirements

Salesforce Experience Cloud

Windows, macOS, or Linux

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Windows, macOS, or Linux

Salesforce Service Cloud

Windows, macOS, or Linux

Salesforce Sales Cloud

Windows, macOS, or Linux

Salesforce CMS

Windows, macOS, or Linux

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the

A great way to test your knowledge of Salesforce Experience Cloud is to use Salesforce Trailhead and download a demo org. A demo org will be a developer sandbox of a net new Salesforce instance, allowing you to configure and test your designs.

Conventions used

The following text conventions have been used throughout this book.

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “ Find All Sites and locate the Builder link for the site you wish to create a page on.”

Tips or important notes

Appear like this.

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Part 1:Curating a Digital Experience Strategy

When building a digital experience strategy, there are several key components. First, you need to identify who you need to engage internally, and what type(s) of customers you are trying to attract. Then, you need to turn that information into what parts of the Salesforce technology stack you will need to leverage.

Keeping that in mind, we have curated this part to have the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Defining Your Digital Experience StrategyChapter 2, Translating Your Audience and Interactions into Meaningful Technology FeaturesChapter 3, Technology Component Identification: Which Parts of Experience Cloud Do I need?

1

Defining Your Digital Experience Strategy

Hi there! We are excited that you have selected Mastering Salesforce Experience Cloud as your guide to all things Experience Cloud. In this book, we will walk you through your journey from creating your Experience Cloud strategy to monitoring your digital site after the release. Along the way, we will introduce you to real-world examples and leverage a fictional company to teach you how you can curate the next generation of digital experiences.

Experience Cloud is a product that helps you curate a digital storefront for your end consumers/customers. You can leverage it to have interactions with third parties. It can be your central repository, with the addition of Service Cloud, for your end consumer interactions. This will empower you to understand where your end consumers are in terms of their relationship with your company. Thus, in turn, you can respond with the appropriate tone to their concerns. The possibilities are as big as you can dream, but we must start at the beginning.

This chapter focuses on setting expectations from the beginning of your Experience Cloud project, in addition to providing tips on creating successful strategy workshops, determining how to communicate with external advisory committee members, level-setting expectations of the committee, and setting up the best first engagement. The goal is to set the foundation for the project you will undertake setting up an Experience Cloud site.

Once you are done with this chapter, you can easily navigate the initial stages of setting up your Experience Cloud strategy, which will put you in the captain’s chair of your Experience Cloud project! If you have already started a project, there are still a few tips you will pick up. The chapter will help you identify any gaps in the information you received and give you a jump start on product education. By understanding how the information you receive from the business translates into technology, you can produce a top-notch implementation.

Let’s look at the key topics covered in this chapter:

Introducing to Experience Cloud productsDetermining your Target AudienceIdentifying internal stakeholdersCurating external advisory committeesDetermining success metrics

Introducing Experience Cloud products

Where to start? Well, isn’t that a loaded question? But it is the most important question in any technology implementation. There are so many offerings and combinations in a technical application deployment that can lead to world-class experiences or first-class disasters, and Salesforce Experience Cloud is no different. Experience Cloud follows a very similar model to Salesforce’s other product offerings. Salesforce focuses on this collection of products in its Digital Experience Platform (DXP) solutions. Within that platform, there are two different categories: profit and non-profit offerings.

For this book’s purposes, we will concentrate on the profit offering. In Chapter 14, Best Practices and Certification Test Preparation, you will find some test pre-questions for the non-profit offerings. The profit offerings can be broken into four main categories: Self-Service, Partner Relationship Management (PRM), Salesforce Content Management, B2B Commerce, and External Apps. Each element contains edition options and license options. To give context to the offerings, here are brief descriptions of the main elements:

Self-Service: This solution is a combination of assets that allows you to quickly deploy customer service in a digital fashion. It enables your customers to submit issues or leverage the curated FAQ center. Additionally, your internal users are empowered to create knowledge centers/FAQs. Ultimately, this offering facilitates collaboration between end users and the company.Partner Relationship Management: This solution is tailored to help you work with external partners; that is, people who share a part of your business process and need access to sales objects in Salesforce. For example, it could be external sales representatives, branding agencies, franchisees, customer support, and so on.Salesforce Content Management: This solution is tailored to allow you to build content once and deploy it across multiple channels. There are plenty of tools and templates to get you started that we will dive into in Chapter 5, Understanding the Experience Site Templates and Theme Setup.B2B Commerce: This solution provides a configurable online storefront, allowing you to quickly get your products online for sale. It also includes the ability to provide Self-Service as a feature.External Apps: This solution leverages the Salesforce platform backend but is completely configurable to your needs. Note that this module does not offer a template base like the other solutions do.

You can refer to Salesforce’s website to review the features of those areas in detail. Before you reach out to your handy-dandy Salesforce account executive, you first need to figure out what your business is trying to achieve.

To identify this, we need to gather information, so let’s break this information gathering into three sections:

Determining your Target AudienceIdentifying internal stakeholdersCurating external advisory committee

Once we have the key elements from these exercises, we will then be able to translate those findings into what technology components are necessary to execute the product vision.

Determining your Target Audience

For illustrative purposes, assume that we all work at a company named Delivery International. We specialize in providing a top-notch food delivery service across a variety of franchises. Our product team has decided to launch a net new consumer and franchisee digital experience. We need to empower our franchisees with the ability to open new pizza delivery locations and allow consumers to directly engage with ordering from independently owned franchises and locations.

As the head of technology delivery for this new digital experience, how do we understand what they mean when they mention those two market segments? What technology can we purchase and what stories to support these business goals do our teams need to develop? Talking through what we are trying to drive, as well as actions we expect our Target Audience to complete and where, will set the tone for your Experience Cloud design. To answer these questions, we will start at the beginning of any good strategy: with a collaborative internal workshop. In this workshop, we need to identify the needs of the different groups in our own organization and interview prospective users to uncover what will drive value for both sides.

The first step in actually setting up the session is engaging the product team to articulate the Target Audience for this new digital engagement strategy. We need to understand who they envision as the end consumer of the digital experience. For our company, they have said that there are two groups: franchisees and end consumers. We need to ask clarifying questions to determine whether these groups represent two distinct digital experiences or whether they should have a shared experience. Here are some example questions that help curate the direction:

What are the intended functions of each population of people?Is there any information shared between the populations?Can you assume that the populations are related in any way?How do you plan to capture information on these two populations?Do you need to use their data in the future?In a perfect world, what would their experience look like? How would you improve it as time goes on?

Once you have those questions answered, create ideal profiles for your Target Audience These are typically one-pagers that call out key information. There are many different techniques to accomplish this. Here are some options to put together profiles:

Demographic-based profiles: These profiles focus heavily on the demographic data associated with the Target Audience. Some items featured in this type are age range, gender, location of residence, education level, and socio-economic status.Channel-based profiles: In some cases, there are different target audiences based on the medium you are trying to attract them with. Some items featured in this type are preferred channels, preferred content types, and key psychographics. Purchase intention: Target Audiences based on the type of product(s) that they would potentially purchase from the vendor. These types may be heavily related to different sales cycles within your company as well. Some items featured in this type are socio-economic status, preferred channels, key psychographics, and product alignment.

For most projects, a combination profile works best. Combine the key features that you need from each type into a single profile. This will be an asset that you will distribute to your internal stakeholders for feedback in your strategy session. It will be a great pre-read to get everyone aligned on the vision. We have created our profiles on a combination of data based on our conversations with the delivery team. Here is a sample profile for our end consumer.

Figure 1.1: Target Audience profile example

Delivery International’s target audience profile for the end consumer covers what they have deemed to be important topics to design around. Knowing that this group wants to be able to quickly access information on the go will be key to how we develop the UI/UX. Starting with a mobile-first mindset will help limit the information we add to the digital experience. Why limit information? That sounds counter-intuitive, right? Well, consider that you have limited digital real estate, so you will want to use it for information that provides the most value.

Identifying internal stakeholders

Starting with the product team is probably the easiest method by which to identify internal stakeholders. They are the ones who created the need in the first place, but where do you go next? Let’s think through who else in the company is necessary to achieve this vision. Sure, we can look at anyone who directly interacts with our End Consumer; for example, our customer service department or sales associates. Or, we can look at the executive sponsor, the voice of the customer representative, or even your head of quality.

However, the people you really need at the table are your internal operations team, that is, the people who get things done behind the scenes. They are the unsung heroes of how your company can go from good to great in terms of fulfilling your customers’ products and support needs.

Be bold and invite the unconventional. Why? Well, remember that your consumers don’t all look and think like you. They also don’t look exactly like your executive team. So, by excluding voices/ideas at the table, you are limiting the creativity and the possibility that what you create resonates with your end users. To get the best results, we want to check our own and/or the company’s bias. Let’s look at a few different questions to locate your unconventional attendees:

Question

Why?

Who is a good example of someone who executes the internal process as intended today?

The purpose of a good example is to have someone at the table that adheres to how the company prefers to do business in an ideal state. They will be able to articulate any challenges with the existing process based on the proposed changes.

Who is an example of someone who does the process internally in the “wrong” or the most inefficient way?

On the flip side, having someone who does things “wrong” provides a challenging viewpoint. There are reasons why they go around the process. Bringing them to the table provides you with the opportunity to incorporate their feedback into the new process, and hopefully helps them adhere to the new process since they were involved in its creation.

Who are seen as the challengers to conventional processes in the company?

Challengers are not a bad thing. Challengers help people think differently. Think beyond what is currently available/doable and what needs to happen next. They will provide process creativity.

Who would be the blocker to a process change?

Understanding where your blockers are and inviting them to the conversation will ultimately help reduce conflict during change.

Who represents the company culture the best?

Culture is a key component of any successful company. If the people working there believe in the mission, then it makes it easier to delight your consumers. Having culture champions engage will ensure that the culture extends to the new venture.

Table 1.1: Unconventional audience identification questions

Do you have some people in mind? Or maybe you still have a few questions? Let’s check in on who we’ve identified at Delivery International who we believe are critical to our success. While we may not reference every single one of these parties as we work through our future technical examples, it is an important exercise to identify stakeholders early in the design process.

Person

Role

Why?

Kinley

Head of Product

Her team is responsible for delivering the new product to market. She has set the initial two-line project in the team’s backlog. She will be the person in charge of the project vision and ultimately agreeing to the success metrics. Kinley is responsible for reporting the success or failure of the project to the board of directors.

Anna

Head of Quality

She is responsible for ensuring that there is quality across the products and supporting experiences we curate for our consumers. Anna’s team is the front line of defense for any issues reported by our franchisees or consumers.

Jack

Service Representative

He is the person who has challenges with any process. He understands the way in which we would like for items to flow; however, his adherence to making it happen is less than desirable.

Jamie

Sales Representative

Not only does he follow the process to the letter, but he is also our top producer. His input has previously guided sales processes that have produced high-grossing revenue.

Maggie

Director of Finance

She challenges today’s company vision and operating standards. She is always looking for efficiency gains and how those gains translate to the next generation of consumers through our digital strategy.

Dalbert

Head of Marketing

Communication is a key factor in success, and he knows more than anyone why words matter. Dalbert is always challenging us to be tone sensitive in our journey with consumers and communicate with them in the right way, at the right time.

Table 1.2: Delivery International’s Unconventional Committee Members

What information do we need to structure the initial internal conversation? You will want to work with your product team to help frame the conversation. Let’s break the meeting into key information topics you would need to move the conversation forward:

Target audience: Who do we want to join us in this new or modified digital experience solution? For example: all customers, prospects, partners, franchisees, and so on.Value proposition: Why do we want them to join us in a digital experience?Benefit statements: What benefit will the consumer get by participating online? What benefit will the company get from the online consumer experience?

By focusing on these elements, you can lead structured exercises. You can do this via a remote option or in-person exercise. For optimal results, we do not recommend a hybrid approach. Why? Typically, with a hybrid approach, those in the room can end up excluding those on the phone, or it is hard for the remote folks to truly speak up. We understand that in today’s environment, many companies, due to travel constraints or other items, are really pushing hybrid environments. So, make sure that you have good online collaboration tools that allow you to gather feedback from people in their own words. If you are in-person, break out the sticky notes and markers. Give everyone their own stack, give objectives, and let creativity flow!

Now, let’s focus on what information you need to get out of the meeting, based on the information you have received from the product team. First and foremost, you are looking to gather the high-level requirements. We have the asset we created for the target audience profiles previously, which you can use as a starting point. Next, we will focus on identifying the key processes/actions that people should be able to engage with on the portal(s). You should have something to go off based on the initial charter of the project. Let’s look at Delivery International. Kinley’s original request to us was “We need to empower our franchisees with the ability to open our new pizza delivery locations AND allow for consumers to directly engage in ordering from our solely owned franchise locations.” This would lead us down the path of reviewing the following:

How do our partners/franchisees engage with us via a new or existing portal?Are we signing up new partners/franchisees, targeting our existing base, or a mix?Can our consumers order directly from us online today?Is there anything outside of ordering that our consumers need to be able to do online?

Any materials you can send out as pre-reads so people know what processes to start thinking about will help. In addition to your target audience profile(s), you can send out a project charter, any existing processes (if applicable), or slides regarding the financial and cultural mission of the project. Make sure that you give people ample time to read the materials and understand that, for some, no matter how much time you give, they will simply not come prepared. It is a good idea to make your first agenda item asking whether everyone had an opportunity to read the material or whether they need a quick recap. Here is a sample meeting agenda to consider framing the conversation:

Introduction: Who is in attendance? Why are we here?Level setting: Are there any questions about the pre-read documentation? Specifically, are there initial thoughts about the Target Audience and high-level project scope documentation?Product vision: The product team expands upon the vision of the new business venture.Process review: Identification of what process(es) need to change to support the new venture. Are there new processes that need to be created?Moments that matter: Brainstorming on what needs to be present in a digital experience to achieve the product vision and support the processes.Recap: Understanding what we accomplished and the next steps.

Make sure to clearly outline the role you will play in the meeting. You can either facilitate the meeting yourself or partner with someone else. Depending on your style, it could be very helpful to either be a participant focused on curating the new process or a facilitator who guides conversation. If you try to split your focus and do both, remember to capture everyone’s ideas, not just summarize your own contributions. Whoever facilitates the meeting needs to remember that their role is to stay neutral.

Leverage tools such as having a meeting “parking lot,” a place where you capture items that were brought up, but the exact way in which those items will be addressed will be saved for a later day/audience. Before the meeting adjourns, ensure that everyone is on the same page about the next steps and who owns those steps.

“Next steps” are what you should walk away from the meeting with. Identifying what artifacts you want out of the meeting will help you continuously guide your agenda toward the optimal outcomes you need. For each of the questions you are posing, here are some ideas on feedback to walk out with:

Target audience: Remember that before the meeting, we sent this list out as a pre-read. We want to leave the meeting with a confirmed list of the types of people/parties who need to interact digitally.Digital interaction list: Actions/processes that the end user should be able to perform digitally. Each action should align with the target audience identified.Gap list: A place where you have put processes that have been identified as needing modification to become digital first, tagged with whoever is responsible for modifying those processes.Project management cadence: An agreed-upon way in which the team will communicate decisions and who has the authority to make the decisions. You can break authority out into categories such as process, digital experience, and target audience. If you have multiple parties, consider a RACI matrix. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. Then you can break out each group and the roles people play within them into focused conversations.

Once the session is over, take time to gather all the items into a consumable format. You want to ensure all participants have access to the decisions made and outstanding items. Pick a central place to store the information so that everyone can access it in real time, as centralizing information will increase project collaboration. Your organization may have a standard such as Confluence, a wiki space, or maybe a Microsoft team site. Take a look at your standards and make sure you consistently leverage them throughout your project.

Readout from Delivery International meeting

Delivery International first confirmed the Target Audiences identified in the previous section. Next, we moved into the ideal state of digital interactions that each group wanted to cover. As they were going through that list, they identified gaps in their existing offering/process that would need to be solved to further enable the desired state.

In the following table, you will see the list of gaps they identified for the new process. They started with the digital interaction they were trying to outline. As they continued conversations, they identified the gaps in executing the requested interaction based on the existing business processes.

Digital Interactions

Gap List

Report issues

What can we offer to encourage people to do this?

Sign up for new franchise opportunities

How do we communicate the value of new franchise opportunities?

Order pizza online

How can we display the franchise locations for the new delivery-only option?

Loyalty program for repeat customers

How are the new offers priced?

Franchise marketing materials

Training for service team on offerings and programs

See order status

How do the internal service teams know the status of orders?

Table 1.3: Internal target audience digital interactions gap list

You can see from the list they created that it is OK to have large unknowns coming out of the meeting. One meeting isn’t meant to solve every process in the company as it relates to the new product. The goal is to call out the gaps so that they can be broken into small teams to solve those questions. These aren’t necessarily technology items that they need; the gaps could be simple items in how they handle their process. It could be simple items in how they handle their process. It will be important to keep an eye on these items to see how/when they get added as requirements.

As for project governance, the team has agreed that the product roadmap is ultimately prioritized by the head of products. Process decisions go to the person responsible for the process. Now that we have process squared away, let’s talk about how we engage our Target Audience through external advisory committees.

Curating external advisory committees

There is no voice better than the end consumer when it comes to building a platform you expect them to engage with. They will provide continuous feedback on features and designs for your digital experience. Keeping consistent engagement with your top critics will help ensure that you continue to hit the top marks that are impacting your audience(s) as you evolve from initial launch to established product. Engaging external actors is typically more of a business activity versus a technology-driven activity. However, the outputs of this activity are invaluable to the curators of the digital experience.

In partnership with business/technology, we need to start by identifying how many committees we may need. Reference the target audience(s) that we identified in the previous section. Then, we need to look at those audiences and see whether they are unique or whether there is a possibility to combine them. A good rule to follow is that for each unique digital experience, you should have a unique advisory committee. However, that does not have to be a “per-channel” rule. This means that if your target audience has channel preferences of email versus SMS versus portal usage, you don’t necessarily have to have a committee for each one of those. You would host one more channel-agnostic meeting and focus on the outcomes/drivers similar for that group. This will help ensure that your meeting content is targeted and you can get the most value from the committee.

So, where do we find these people? If you use Salesforce CRM, you could start by running analytics to find which people even meet the criteria for your target audience. If you don’t have any system data for the audience you are attempting to attract, then reach out to your sales team for references. If your organization hasn’t yet set up a sales team yet, then social media research will be invaluable. You can set up searches to reach certain demographics. You could even sponsor surveys to that search and ask whether they would be willing to participate in a new offering research panel.

However you get potential Target Audience candidates, it is best to produce a list for people to react to versus asking for recommendations. If you only ask for recommendations, your committee will contain some level of bias. Whether it is a group that is shaped on the historical view of a customer segment or only high-level spenders, you may miss different levels of customers. In either case, you are repeating the historical viewpoints and practices. By presenting a list for people to react to, you are naturally introducing the demographic cross-set that your Target Audience viewpoint confirmed in the first place.

Equally as important is identifying who from within the company will be participating on this advisory committee. You will need visionary supporters to help you articulate the vision, showcase forward-looking product demos, help challenge the thought process of the group, and listen to the challenges. These people need to be open-minded and come neutral to the conversation. What you want to avoid is having internal parties that are very protective of their vision of the future. If they come with an “I know best” mentality, then they will not be open to listening. They will miss key feedback moments and create a product that may not be aligned with the feedback from the customer.

So, how do you entice people to show up and participate? Well, there is a tried-and-true method of identifying the What’s In It For Me? (WIIFM) proposition statement. If people don’t understand what they will get out of participating, they are less likely to participate – especially when you are curating an external advisory committee. They have no reason to take time out of their busy schedules to help you. This is where your product team comes in. They guide what incentives they can offer to encourage participation.

When it comes to the actual meeting sections, typically technology will be engaged to showcase prototypes or experiences that are in the User Acceptance Stage, UAT. Keep the demos focused on the new features and allow the committee to tell you what they believe the value or lack thereof is in what you are showcasing. To help with a smooth presentation, consider having one person speak about the features while another person controls the screen. This allows each person to have a focus on their role in the demo. Typically, your product team will be capturing feedback to summarize for technology after the session.

Let’s assume that Delivery International has decided on a target audience list, but their session won’t contain any demos. We are building new experience sites, so what we want is an audience of dreamers: people who can articulate their ideal purchasing experience.

For our WIIFM, we decided to give the consumers vouchers for free delivery for their first 10 delivery orders. For our franchisee audience, we gave them 10% off their franchise fee if they signed contracts to open stores in target markets within the next 30 days. The incentives returned a 75% participation rate of the target audience and gave us some great feedback. Here are some items that they wish to incorporate based on the vision:

End Consumer

Franchisee

Know who I am when I log in

Easily access branding materials

Set favorite orders

Easy access to location specifications

Save my payment information

Ability to order customized store package

Easily access coupons

Easily see YTD sales

Save my delivery locations

Ability to take care of subsidized offerings

Order from my phone

Easy access to support

See my order status

Ability to register a new location

Table 1.4: External Advisory Committee Feedback

At the end of the session, the committee sponsor set up a timeline of when the group should expect to be engaged again. They were informed that, next time, there will be an email readout and a future session scheduled for a demo. Now, let’s jump into how we turn feedback into themes and tangible processes that need to be created or changed.

Understanding key interactions

You have been collecting a lot of feedback, but what feedback is the most important? It is best practice to make sure that you are identifying what your Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is. What takes priority on the MVP build and what may future phase activity be? Having people prioritize as a group can be very challenging but it is necessary to get the highest-value items reviewed by technology first. Look at each feedback item and answer these questions based on the information you have:

What are the key factors from the external advisory committee? What are their priorities to build into a site that would be meaningful for them to leverage?What are the key company factors? What does the company want to achieve in the portal as its entryway into a digital experience site?Where is the intersection between the external advisory committee and company factors? This intersection will help you identify what the key elements of the MVP are as they are important to both groups.For those items that do not align, how do we sort them into a product roadmap?

If you aren’t sure about any of the questions, reach out to the decision-maker responsible for each area for clarity. Once we have gone through the scenarios, we will then summarize the product roadmap vision to the internal and external committees to ensure that everyone has one more view before we kick off the detailed assessment of the request. In Chapter 2, Translating Your Audience and Interactions into Meaningful Technology Features, we will parse this information into themes and a true prioritized roadmap connected to the Experience Cloud features you will need to activate.

Determining success metrics

The last step before we move into a business translation of which components of Experience Cloud you will need is ensuring that everyone is on the same page for the vision of success. This goes beyond just what the executive sponsor or product team may set. It isn’t as simple as saying, “Well, we want x logins.” Logins may be a part of the process, but it shouldn’t define the entire vision of success.

Understanding what the business says success looks like is a key factor for your project. You must account for enabling features in your data module, UI/UX, and general processes that are built. You will have to enable the ability to track the metrics. It is the final “checkpoint” of the experience build.

When looking at business objectives, you need to break the requested objective into the technology/process output. This will help you connect the dots to the data module. Let’s look at a few examples.

Business Objective

Technology/Process Output

Increase sales by x%

Ability to track sales.

Ability to either leverage existing data within the system or set a variable baseline of prior sales to measure against.

Decrease customer service time by x%

Ability to track the time it takes for a service representative to resolve an item.

Ability to measure the time of resolution.

Ability to either leverage existing data within the system or set a variable baseline of prior sales to measure against.

Achieve x% ROI within ytime frame

Ability to store the ROI metrics and create a report to demonstrate the reality of achieving them. Typically, this is a dashboard as several factors determine ROI, not a single metric.

Delivery SLA met x% of the time

Ability to track the time it takes for a service representative to resolve an item.

Ability to measure the time of resolution.

Ability to set a predetermined SLA variable.

Ability to report on the resolution time of an item versus the predetermined SLA.

Drive digital engagement

Ability to see community growth via a baseline versus current enrollment.

Ability to measure the frequency of logins via a grouped report of how many members engage within certain time intervals.

Ability to see how many Self-Service items are submitted and the correlation between the submission and current call volumes.

Reduce phone minutes by x%

Ability to track original inbound call times.

Ability to measure current call time against historical call time.

Increase attachment rate of products to customers by x%

Ability to track the original ratio of how many products a customer has versus the average number of customers.

Ability to measure the new product attachment ratio against the historical attachment ratio to show up-lift or downturn in attachment.

Table 1.5: Delivery International’s KPI request list

These elements have started the outline for the key data fields. In Chapter 4, Curating Data Models, we will show how to translate this into the data structure.

Summary

Yes, this chapter had a business-heavy focus, but as we move forward, each chapter will become more and more technical. No highly successful implementation ever just started with, “Well, let’s wing it!” That’s what makes aligning across stakeholders from the beginning so critical. Even if these aren’t elements you personally lead as a technical leader/developer/admin, they are questions that you should be asking before you start building anything.

To guide business conversations, remember that there are three key areas you need to focus on:

Target audience: Who is the confirmed audience for the build?Product vision: What are you expecting to ultimately achieve with this experience?Product roadmap: What are the expectations of the releases?

Those areas of understanding will enhance your skill set and set you on the right track for the project! At this point, you should have honed the following skills:

Learning the key inputs needed to set a strategyUnderstanding who needs to be involved in decision-making for the siteUnderstanding who needs the ability to log in to the portalUnderstanding what actions users are expected to carry out via digital interactionsCreating key success metrics for the portal’s success/failure measurements

In the next chapter, we will turn our findings into features, diving further into technological design.

2

Translating Your Audience and Interactions into Meaningful Technology Features

Now that you have clearly identified who needs to engage and have a mountain of feedback, what do you do with it? In this chapter, you will learn how to translate that feedback into what features need to be enabled in your new Experience Cloud site. We will break them into sections related to which technology (Service Cloud, Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, and so on) that you will need to partner the feature with.

Here is what you will learn as part of this chapter:

Organizing and prioritizing feedbackIdentifying themesConnecting feedback to product features

Organizing and prioritizing feedback

In Chapter 1, Defining Your Digital Experience Strategy, you collected feedback from your internal stakeholders and external advisory committee. Here, we will organize that