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Define Your Site Vision and Purpose
Experience Cloud makes it easy to build sites that deliver customer-first experiences—fast! But, before you dive head-first into building your Experience Cloud site, pause for a moment to envision the larger picture of what you want your site to accomplish. What is your website’s primary purpose?
Required Editions
| Available in: both Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience |
| Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions |
Why Is This Important?
When you’re clear about your site’s purpose, you take a strategic approach to building and managing your site. And then clarity about your target audience, conversion actions, goals, and measurements naturally follow.
Your investment in this site goes beyond the resources used to build it. Your online presence is typically the first impression of your business that your customers have. A clearly defined purpose is the first step to building a meaningful website that adds value for you and your customers and partners.
Having a clearly defined site purpose also helps you:
- Ensure all members of your team are aligned on the overall goals of the site.
- Determine which framework and template best serve your needs.
- Develop the design of your website, including the layout and which pages and features to include.
- Set up your site for success when you plan your rollout and adoption framework.
- Gather the right people to drive your site to fruition.
What Should You Keep in Mind?
Here are some considerations to help you craft your vision and purpose.
Review Your Objectives: Highlight which key elements of the business the site addresses. Does it lower costs, increase brand awareness, or simplify operations? Are you creating a business flow, such as a registration process or an onboarding process? Here are some objective ideas.
- Improve engagement: Give customers an easy way to interact with your organization whenever and wherever they are. They can search for articles, ask questions, and get crowd-sourced answers.
- Provide self-service: Empower your customers to find solutions to customer-service issues on their own with access to your knowledge base, your service agents, and peer-to-peer support. Provide access to their data in a member portal.
- Improve partner relationships: Collaborate on opportunities and deals to increase you and your partners’ revenue stream. Onboard partners quickly by sharing content and training materials.
Consider the Use Cases: Use cases are foundational to your strategy and the user experience. Use cases can help you define, map out, and prioritize how you want your customers to use the site. Define an initial set of use cases and align them with your business objectives. Think of use cases in terms of a prioritization exercise. To get started, think about what’s most important for your site to support the experience you want to create. Then, prioritize the use cases by noting which are accelerated growth drivers, top-priority growth drivers, tough wins, and efficiency drivers.
A self-service site is a place where you can help your customers help themselves. Here are some of the use cases for this type of site.
- Account Management—Users can conveniently update their contact information, update their preferences, and sign up for new services.
- Help Portal—Supply knowledge articles that aid in case deflection, customer satisfaction, and agent productivity. Use chatbots or live agents to supply quick responses to questions.
- Support Portal—Provide easy access to customer support and the ability to create and track cases. Pair with a support knowledge base so users can get answers quickly.
What’s Next?
After you have a clear vision of where your site is headed and how to get there, you can fill in the blank in this question:
“The purpose of my site is to ________”
Write down your vision and use it as your guiding light as you plan and prepare for site building. And now, full speed ahead to bring your vision to life!
