Experience Cloud 101 with Jarrod Kingston of IBM

Serious Insights for Admins

Episode Description

On today’s episode of Serious Insights for Salesforce Admins, we’re talking about a tool so universal that we believe all intentional admins should learn how to use it: Experience Cloud.

“Experience Cloud is something that any admin should frankly learn. A great way to do it is [to] build your own site and share what you're doing,” says Jarrod Kingston, Solution Engineering Leader at IBM and a master at using Experience Cloud to its full potential.

Experience Cloud does a lot more than cultivate relationships and improve experiences for your customers — it’s a platform that can foster community.

Jarrod joins Host Kristi Campbell, Senior Salesforce Admin & Salesforce MVP, on this episode of Serious Insights to talk about how Experience Cloud can help companies grow, and what to expect in the future as Salesforce continues to add features.

Listen to this episode to learn:

• The many use cases of Experience Cloud
• How Experience Cloud makes licensing simple
• Why all admins should know how to use Experience Cloud

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Episode Summary

It’s no secret that Salesforce has developed a lot over the years. There are now specialized products or platforms for just about any sector that may find it useful, from automotive to finance.

But on today’s episode of Serious Insights for Salesforce Admins, we’re talking about a tool so adaptable and universal that we believe all intentional admins should learn how to use it: Experience Cloud.

Experience Cloud does a lot more than cultivate relationships and improve experiences for your customers. With available features like help centers, account and partner portals, and flexibility for creating your own personalized features or layering other products, it’s a platform that can foster community among your team as well as your customers.

“Experience Cloud is something that any admin should frankly learn. A great way to do it is [to] build your own site and share what you're doing,” says Jarrod Kingston, Solution Engineering Leader at IBM and a master at using Experience Cloud to its full potential.

Jarrod joins Host Kristi Campbell, Senior Salesforce Admin & Salesforce MVP, on this episode of Serious Insights to talk about how Experience Cloud can help companies grow, and what to expect in the future as Salesforce continues to add features.

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Key Takeaways

Experience Cloud can meet your needs.

One of the best things about Experience Cloud is its flexibility. There are plenty of options for both a web developer who wants to add custom features on the backend and an admin in control of the design. It features tons of ready-made templates and layout options to correspond with your company’s needs and branding.

Experience Cloud also easily integrates with other programs your company may be using, like Lightning Experience and Lightning Web Runtime (LWR).

Experience Cloud goes beyond experiences — it helps create community.

When we think about “community” in the Salesforce space, the first thing that comes to mind is something like Trailblazer. But what if we could share that community experience with our customers?

That’s exactly what Experience Cloud does. It’s a platform that’s easy for both admins and customers to use, allowing your organization to grow into it over time. With everything from account portals to help centers that will enable your team to smoothly communicate with customers, it’s made for building community.

Learning Experience Cloud is the perfect starting point for intentional admins.

Experience Cloud is flexible and has a wide range of use cases, which is why it’s such a useful tool for intentional admins to learn. Mastering a universal tool Experience Cloud will make you a standout candidate for just about any company that uses Salesforce.

Jarrod recommends a number of helpful resources for mastery, including Phil Weinmeister’s guide to Experience Cloud and courses available on Pluralsight.

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Featured Guest: Jarrod Kingston of IBM

💥 What he does: Solution Engineering Leader at IBM.

💻 IBM on the web: Twitter | LinkedIn

🔗 Jarrod on the web: Twitter | LinkedIn | Trailblazer

🧠 Jarrod’s big idea: “I think Experience cloud is something that any admin should frankly learn. And yeah, a great way to do it is [to] build your own site and share what you're doing.”

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Episode Highlights

Key excerpts from the episode transcript

💡 What is experience cloud?

[04:11] “When it originally came around, Salesforce saw the need for this portal-type environment, where a customer could log in and interact with their data, in essence, but within this Salesforce framework [...] It was this very basic portal experience, old Salesforce tabs, kind of the old Aloha environment look and feel. And then it really took off with the introduction of Community Cloud, which really blew things out of the water as far as what it used to be. And of course, just like Salesforce likes to do, they renamed it Experience Cloud, which makes sense, because as you interact with the product, it is an experience, right? It's more than just community.”

💡 Lightning Web Runtime (LWR) is a great new tool — but with limits.

[13:56] “The trade-off right now — and Salesforce knows this — is that there aren't as many out-of-the-box components with LWR sites. And so the trade-off is if you use Aura, you get more out-of-the-box components. If you use LWR, you get less. There are still some there, things like flow. Flow can be used within LWR. Most like all of our accelerator components, any [Lightning Web Component] can be used within LWR. So that's the trade-off is, you may have a standard thing that's not there, you may have to recreate, if you need it in LWR […] But I would certainly recommend [to] anybody, LWR should be something they seriously try to use, if at all possible, because it is the path forward.”

💡 Licenses made easy.

[18:01] “A lot of times [when] people hear a portal environment, they immediately think authentication, right? I have to be authenticated, I have to have a user license. The cool thing about Experience Cloud is that that's not always the case, right? You can have an Experience Cloud site that has portions of it from both a page and data perspective available to any public person or what we call a guest user. And then you can have the authenticated side to that.”

💡 Experience Cloud can help you create a community.

[23:09] “I think it's a really interesting product to grow into. Because starting a community — and you mentioned Experience is not just community — but that idea of community, and what we think about what the Trailblazer community, where you've got groups, you've got people that have profiles that are talking to each other — that's a large investment, and it's a lot to moderate and monitor. [...] I think it's interesting to consider trying something on an Experience Cloud site to get familiar.”

💡 Experience Cloud is a great platform for everyone to learn.

[28:48] “I think specifically Experience Cloud is really cool for intentional admins. If people are just deciding to start becoming an admin and getting involved in the Salesforce industry — various use cases and types of companies will use Experience Cloud. And you can build out whatever ideas you have in a dev.org, and share those as a living resume through Experience Cloud. So things that you have built you can make available to people.”

Top Quotes:

[08:06] Jarrod: “You can make it look really nice, honestly, without doing any customization, just through point and click. And then there are a whole host of different sites out there that people probably access today that they don't even know it's an Experience Cloud site, because you can take it that far where you don't even know that it's Salesforce behind the scenes.”

[15:28] Jarrod: “Salesforce is putting the investment in [Lightning Web Runtime]. They're not investing in Aura, per se. But part of that investment is deployability. How do I deploy changes between things? There are still some gotchas and things like that around deploying Experience Cloud sites. […] But Salesforce knows that and they're working on it, which I think is the cool thing. They're not just ignoring that, they're working towards better solutions there to improve those steps.”

[29:33] Jarrod: ““I think Experience cloud is something that any admin should frankly learn. And yeah, a great way to do it is [to] build your own site and share what you're doing.”