Last week, salesforce.com announced the launch of its Communities product. Salesforce Communities™ marks a shift in the way organizations approach interactions with their customer and partner bases—moving away from a transactional, portal-focused paradigm towards a more collaborative, social model. Organizations utilizing Communities are taking another step towards becoming a customer-obsessed enterprise, and leaders in the emerging Customer Engagement Economy. 

Salesforce Communities offers a great opportunity for customers, partners, suppliers and distributors to connect and collaborate within their own external support network. This community platform is key because it combines a customer interaction platform with internal business processes, making it easier to show customers the right information and connect them with the right experts. Forward-thinking enterprises can expect to boost engagement, productivity, and efficiency in this new flattened landscape. However, when looking to fully leverage Salesforce Communities always keep these three elements in mind: 

1. Customers are people, not transactions
   The two-way flow of information in a traditional portal—between a business and its individual customers (or partners)—is inherently transactional. This request-response flow of data is bidirectional, but limited to only the two parties involved. Salesforce Communities, in contrast, introduces a third node in this network—other customers. While the direct connection of a portal transaction may still provide a positive customer experience, the social, collaborative nature of a community can drive deeper customer engagement as customers converse not just with your company, but with each other around your brand. 
2. Nobody owns the customer, but someone always owns the moment
   A customer-obsessed enterprise empowers its employees to own any customer interaction. Communities enables this in two ways: first, by driving conversation about your brand and products to your own backyard; and second, by allowing you to break the traditional model of customer communication. When a customer has questions about your product or services, a community allows those best-suited to answer. For example, when a question is posed on the (traditionally) Marketing or Customer Support-owned social channels today, there is often a lag as the appropriate answer is found via internal communications. With Communities, you enable product experts in R&D to respond directly to the customer. By flattening the route between customer and knowledge, you allow the entire organization to seize each customer interaction moment.
3. Know what your customers want before they do—and act on it
   One byproduct of all this conversation happening in your backyard is that you gain greater visibility into it. This allows you to see not only the questions and issues raised by your customer base, but also community-sourced solutions and ways your product is being used ‘in the wild.’ This visibility allows you to proactively engage around new features, services or products, and even help determine where to direct resources in the future.

As customer engagement becomes the key driver of profitable companies, those organizations that can make the shift to an agile, customer-obsessed enterprise are poised to become leaders in their space. Learn more about companies are getting value out of Salesforce Communities by watching our webcast recording  "The Portal Is Dead, The Rise Of Salesforce Communities."