ViON's Custom Salesforce Community

00:04hi everyone and thanks for joining us today for a great webinar session featuring our customers I on who will talk about their custom Salesforce community which we cannot wait to show you my name is Laura Ginsburg and I will be moderating today's session before I introduce our agenda and our presenters I wanted to let you know that as always we are recording today's webinar as well as taking your questions feel free to enter them anytime and then go to webinar questions panel and we'll get to as many as we can at the end of the presentation as always we'll be happy to connect with you offline you have more specific or in-depth questions as well so on today's agenda we will start off with some introductions and framework around Salesforce community and how they're used and we'll then move right into getting to know vion you have two presenters from the vion team who will share more about why a community is right for them and how they went about building a custom portal for their customers

00:59well then take a live look at vion's customer community before wrapping up with how you can get started on your own community project it's like to briefly introduce you to Luxent if you don't know us already we're based in California with a team of experts nationwide I'd with silver Salesforce partner and you specialize in helping manufacturers and distributors make the most of their Salesforce platform investments including integration ERP advanced quoting and extensions of the salesforce cloud such as the Salesforce community cloud that you're going to hear more about today on the next slide you can see we are knowledgeable on all aspects of the salesforce platform and we'd be happy to talk to you more about how we can help you fully leverage salesforce to meet any objectives of your organization so

01:47I'll have some contact information at the end of this event if you'd like to reach out to us directly or you can email our Salesforce experts anytime very conveniently they have an email INBOX salesforce experts at luxent.com so with that I'd like to segue into the good stuff introduce you to our presenters today I am joined by three presenters luck from Salesforce consultant Chad Smith Kim McCabe and Gina Bhusal from vion chad was hands-on throughout the vion community project and he'll be on later to take you through a tour of this community so let's get a quick introduction to the Salesforce community cloud and Kate the topic is is new renewer to you a community is similar to an online portal and can be built for a variety of audiences while community users are usually external to your company such as customers or partners distributors manufacturers reps a community is also something that can be used for internal employees

02:45they're a great place to store and share resources and knowledge and as we've covered on previous webinars which you can conveniently view at your leisure on our website a community is incredibly versatile and Salesforce provides templates and a lot of training information if you would like to attempt to build your own so on today's webinar will be at the other end of the spectrum which is just how custom can you make a Salesforce community and that brings us to introducing our customers vion so to get started with with our with the meat of our presentation today it's my pleasure to introduce Kim and Gina from vion and Kim I'd like to have you kind of start us off and just orient the group here and give us a little bit of background on vion as a company okay

03:42well vion's been in business for 35 years we are a boutique IT reseller those breaking into the solution clouds and Big Data markets even though we are growing as a company we also like to keep that mom-and-pop environment and an intimate customer experience with that said it's what drives our business decisions especially around the customer support our customers are mainly federal state and local entities that expect a professional speedy resolution our goal was within vion's customer scores to ride the customer with a seamless experience from the time their case is created until the case is resolved my first experience with Salesforce was about two years ago this august and sale sort Salesforce fit right into our business you're able to dispatch field engineers via sale source as the system knows exactly who's on call

04:39I've also been able to create modify and you utilize a lot of reporting functions for quarterly and monthly support meetings with little to no training perfect thank you and I'm glad that you mentioned just how core that vision is of having that really seamless and and and fantastic user experience because I think that really informs a lot about you know your approach to a community and and why that was right for you so let's dig into that a little bit now that we know a little bit about vion and some of some of how they address that that customer experience and can you talk a little bit why why a community was the right approach for vion I'm naturally the community with the next step in both the volumes Salesforce experience and keeping our customers intimate model so it was the next step for our customers getting them involved in the data the support center views on the daily basis the community was not created to prevent the verbal communication with our customers

05:49but enable them to interact with lower priority items on their own time and kind of in their own way they can see their inventory create cases will get open and closed cases and it also enables to customer to track their business in their own customer portal so we were able to add more value from our customer support department and we also deliver knowledge base in question form to our customers so it was definitely the right time we are growing here at vion and we now have the ability to let our customers grow with us great yeah i know i think that that I'm that component of self-service is very important to to a lot of us we're bringing our consumer behaviors and mindsets into the workplace so it's definitely a very smart move on your part so the customer experience is and the customer support the exemplary customer support is something that that you guys have repeatedly touched on and I know that

06:48that's a real real key part of the vion vision and so Gina you know once once you were talking about a Salesforce community and it seems like that was the right approach I know that you guys spent a lot of time really designing that whole experience with the portal and you know when we're talking to customers who you know a lot of them are you know they're starting out and they're thinking about okay well how would I even begin thinking about a community or planning what my community would be like this is something that's that's really important is that is that customer experience designing for the customer experience that you want them to have can you talk us through a little bit about you know what you guys really put into that thought process and what that was like for you yeah sure um we spent around two months gathering information from other from other portals really in the b2c space

07:42and not the b2b space we really wanted it to feel like just the person that was going to Microsoft for support or even even your telecom service for a support we wanted to make it so really clean a natural feel so keeping the color scheme really simple you know white making it so that you don't have to guess when you login there's big buttons you know you know you can make a decision really quickly because when things are broken people are upset and keeping that all in mind that you know you go to some place for information you don't want to spend a lot of time there messing around trying to figure out just how to get some help so that was really our thought process when we we started looking at what other companies were doing taking some idea and saying oh no I don't like this

08:32and so that was really how we restarted to brainstorm around the experience that we wanted our customers to have and part of that was that seamless brand experience right can you touch a little bit on on that and how you want to make sure that the vion brand they came true yeah so after we decided really how we wanted our customers to interact you know it was just about throwing all of our branding on top of it we do have brand standards so that makes it really simple and we knew that we wanted customers to be able to access the portal without memorizing the link so we linked it to our our website and then so that is the catapult for for how we wanted that brand to go just using the website as using the portals and extension from the website and in the website as a template so you can actually get all of our our blog stuff there are Twitter stuff so you're still connected with a larger company even though

09:29you're really getting support great great and well and we'll see that live and just just a few minutes here it set up kind of your teaser and so you know like any you know technical projects of course there's going to be specific requirement and no different in this case and so Kim can you talk to us a little bit about some of the priorities that you had and why these were why these were items that were top of mind rely on well we do so to govern agencies where their support teams are divided by location so we needed the community the agile enough where a context could access multiple locations with their logins so this is ensure that we vion are doing what we need to do to protect our customer data we've made the portal more user friendly environment so the customers able to easily create cases without confusion or frustration gaining knowledge and insights to their vion data should be simple so delivering the vion experience shouldn't change based on the tool whether

10:35it's the website portal or marketing material the experience should always be the same by using our website templates the customer portal just feels like an extension of vion family excellent so you know again as we as you mentioned sort of in the intro buck communities there are these really great out of the box templates that Salesforce provides and in fact Chad presented on this on a previous webinar that you can get on our website and it shows you a little bit more about those templates and how to use them but as we've mentioned several times now you know vion really wanted the fully custom approach and Kim you know if there's anything else you want to add to that about you know how you just wanted to make sure that you know that it really had to be constant you know the templates were great but in this case it was really about you know having that that seamless experience right

11:25it's the only way it would work for vion so giving them a custom customer portal user friendly for the customer to create their cases and view their inventory that was our goal perfect and so Gina you know we worked together to build the community can you tell us more about the the project itself and and how you guys worked with Luxent to realize that vision and make the customer portal what you wanted it to be yeah Luxent was a Salesforce implementation partner and they are continuing developing partner with our little development they've always delivered really intuitive and unique solutions for all of our unique requirements so you guys are just a natural fit into into going forward with the customer community as we think about our growth we always want to make sure that our developers are in line with the gross that we need and so it was a natural choice excellent

12:30well with that we talked so much about how beautiful this this community is and I know that Chad who's on the line has been spent a lot of time helping to to realize the vision for the for the community so I'd like to welcome at chads nuts who's going to come on and take us through a brief tour of violence customer community okay great thanks Laura um yeah so just a spend a few minutes been kind of demoing the community that we built as we built with vion and the first thing that's kind of want to point out or show is that it's you know kind of the color scheme for vion and look and feel and the link for the support portal all that's unified is the difference between the headquarters address as well as the community so when somebody wants to log in they can do it right from the my own home page and all

13:29this is set up with security so username passwords and all that good stuff are completely maintained by Salesforce when you have a community like this so after somebody logs on there going to be presented with our community homepage and so it's kind of Gina was talking about earlier we really wanted this to be you know very simple there's big panels here with nice descriptions on what all these different things to do so if somebody needs to open a new case or view their existing cases if they want to go and download manuals and documentation or review their shipments or orders it's all very quickly and easily accessible right from the home page here and then also on the home page we give the users some information that it's very important right off the bat so from the home page they can see their open cases they can see who is assigned to their accounting as

14:30well as some handy links to back to the vion home page also there upload server and then some news and announcements just information from vion there and so we also wanted to design it so that if we needed to if we wanted to add a new link or put in a new news and announcements that it's not going to require a development effort or a change in the visual force so a Salesforce administrator can just go to this community configuration object that we built in Salesforce click the new button and decide to add a new link or a new message and then it's going to automatically show up right on the homepage for everybody so no programming required and I'll so from the home page the users can also just do their profile and update their their email address or phone number if necessary

15:26and then we were talking about a little bit on the security so these are government in a agencies so they could have pen or make it up multiple locations but one individual like Chad Smith here who are logged in as may only be able to should only see information related to one of the locations and they can set their default here but then security wise we've restricted access to cases and orders and shipments and serial numbers restricted be access to the data so unless somebody is listed as a contact on a particular ship to they're not going to see that information so the end users working with vion's Salesforce administrator I can decide what people see on a unit on an individual by individual basis so then from there we go in and the end user is allowed to see they're allowed to see their cases and these are all hyperlinks they can drill into the case if they want to see the detail they can also see cases for a different location so I only have one ship to so

16:34I'm only going to see open cases or closed cases for one but if I had access to multiple this drop-down would let me switch between those and then on to orders to see my all the orders that I've placed and we can filter that down also by a date range here and again there's the hyperlink so the users can drill into a particular order to see the details and you can see this is kind of from the when we drill into these individual records just from a cost and time perspective to get this launch quickly we're just blood we're leveraging the standard Salesforce record detail page here so we didn't have to do custom development efforts all the way through mostly just found these main pages so very similar to orders I can go in and I can see all of my shipments and my tracking numbers as well as my serial numbers so these would be the individual assets that I have that my location

17:37and then we leveraged Salesforce knowledge in QA kind of standard out of the box so somebody can go in and research the knowledgebase do lookups on the do searches on the knowledge base to get more information about whatever is going on and then chatter question-and-answer leverage that is part of the sales for service cloud as well and finally we have manuals and documents which is something that we just have added recently this gives the end users the ability to forgive vion the ability to go into a Salesforce library which is standard functionality with inside the sales force and contribute different PDFs and links to external websites that their internal people can use via the library but then we also replicate that information over the community so the community users can also have access to it all right Thank You Chad looks great I think what I like so much about that community on top of the beautiful branding

18:53that's very important to me is I just love how robust it is there's so much great information here obvious that it's really been thought through and added you know a lot of robust resources and information and you know links to where you need to go so I think that's a great example of how to really fully utilize a Salesforce community so thank you very much for the demo and I'd like to take it back to our tour vion team so you know Kim now that now that the community is live and customers are using it can you tell us a little bit about you know how it's going and what kind of feedback you're getting and where you might remember where you might take it from here yep the results have been definitely have been a faster approach to dispatching the FES on cases created by the customer through sales force in the portal one quick click on a button and the Epis notified of the case within minutes mhm great it saves the customers time which we consider very valuable not having to sit on the phone trying to figure out what menu options to

20:02now they create a case on their own and on their own time so again the customer report is very easy for the customer should navigate through a way to put the customer ease them knowing they can create a case submit it and know that by own will be notified and work in case through the portal we also encourage customer feedback we've had a few suggestions already and hope them at them here in the near future great I'm just so glad to hear that they've really been embracing it and you know I think that you guys have a definitely have the right approach to thinking about how how customers and all of us really have expectations about how easy it should be to get in touch and get help and be able to do it whether it's through a phone or through a site so it's great to see such a beautiful Salesforce community so with that since we are on a very tight schedule here we're going to start wrapping things up a little bit so

20:58i'll just remind everyone that you can go ahead and put questions into that panel whenever you'd like Chad I want to kick it back to you for just a second you know you you've worked with a lot of customers who've been implementing communities and talking about communities and growing their communities and now that our attendees today have had an opportunity to really see what custom community can be like and where it can take them can you talk to us a little bit about some pointers that you might have for thinking about how you might get started with a community project sure I think the first thing to think about is your audience so who you're who are you going to be launching a community for and a lot of times that might be at a very distinct subset of people just customers or trust partners or just distributors or just internal employees who don't need full Salesforce functionality just need to see some of the information so determine what that audience or audiences is and a single portal can be aimed at different convenient at multiple audiences so

22:08that's I think step one step two after the audience's you know one of the things that they're going to need to do or want to do with it community so for a customer community or customer focus commuter like vion it's very you know it's all about self service in creating cases and accessing information if you are thinking of opening if you're thinking about community for partners or distributors manufacturing that's a lot of times it sits around lead distribution lead assignment lead follow up so you can determine that and then brandy and kind of look and feel is also important so kind of a you know a rule of thumb that I've just seen in general is when these are going to be aimed at out and debt customers usually we want that you know seamless branding it's aimed at partners are and it's kind of lead related maybe

22:59that's less important and we can use sales standard sales were stabs or the Salesforce the Salesforce templates to do that commute to do that to base that community on and then just some resources to get started there's a lot fun salesforce com about different communities and if you're on if you have Salesforce you always have access to trailhead which has a couple of different modules talking about communities and in particular things you can do to get started to use the community so that trailhead module will actually be one of the first places I would start I would think okay fantastic and we've wrangled some resources for you and we'll be happy to send those out to everybody after today's session as well but if chad mentioned a lot of great stuff

23:51that's out there free easy to find easy to use so you can definitely you know to go take a look at those resources and i would be love nest i did not mention our own resources on the luxent.com website we have a lot of salesforce expert resources including quite a bit on communities ranging from case studies to how to recordings and a lot of good things to get you started on our blog as well so that's another place that you can that you can take a look and with that we'll just flip it to the next slide as we go ahead and get things wrapped up here so we will take your questions and just a just a moment here and while you're entering any questions that you may have I'll just mention that a reminder that we will be following up with today's event reporting as well as some of those resources i mentioned to help you get started you can of course reach out to us any time either to the website the Salesforce experts at luxent.com

24:50now address or through any of our social platforms as well so with that I've got a couple of questions rolling in here that I'd like to throw out there and I think they'll both actually going to end up being for the vion Team these first two anyway so for the vion presenters can you talk about Gina I think you have a good view of how long it took to kind of in your planning phase and how long it took to think about it how long was the actual build out in getting you know to the community that you're using um okay so i think the build-out it did take us a while some of it was because we we were doing some iterative development um but from the time it took us started um for each phase no more than I want to say six weeks and then like we took a phased approach and we and so that's kind of how we handled that overall I did it was pretty lengthy so

26:02you're looking at six to eight months of development time but we took that in in chunks because we knew from from our workload that there was only so much time we could dedicate to it so if you can move faster than it probably be done sooner okay Chad doesn't feel like a pretty typical timeline for you kind of given what you've worked on with other customers yeah um yeah and especially with a with a custom community like that you know that's probably pretty typical if you doing more of a standard standard community it can be a lot quicker but so I thought of course I'll dependent on them on how much how much customization you want to do sure okay and I know that Chad showed this in the demo but Gina Kim it might be interesting to hear from you on the on the self-administration piece Chad I know that you showed how easy it is to add a new message or item Gina and Kim can you go talk about how the question is how often you do you add new content and how fast and easy is it for you two to get that done yes so from a security perspective from the admin side I can change stuff pretty quickly

27:27it's not difficult to add things even if we want to hide data like if you want to hide sales order lines or anything like that I can do that pretty quickly because we we're still using a lot of the sales force basic security structure so none of those difficult even adding links or stuff like that I mean you're looking at like two minutes because it's all through a configuration instead of like you don't like go into an object and change anything so that makes it really simple don't know if Kim wants to talk to adding adding contacts but we adding contacts is actually fairly easy and even even adding the links we've added a couple it literally takes 2 minutes add a link if that so in its immediate so the customer can see it right away right perfect I think that's exactly the information this person was probably looking for so yes fasten easy to keep it updated

28:28well fantastic thank you both for all your thoughts and input Chad thanks so much for the tour and for sharing from your communities expertise we are right at the half hour mark so we're going to go ahead and wrap up Chad if you want to throw it back up to the PowerPoint slides we'll just close out on that and cape and we want to get in touch with us so thank you again for being here it was it was great to have you on today's webinar big thanks to our friends at vion for being with us today and sharing their story and we'll hope to see you on a future event thank you so much and have a great day