Salesforce Lightning Community: What makes it popular?
- Product Reviews
Recent trends have shown that large corporations and government organizations are moving towards Lightning Communities, largely because of:
Faster Launch Time
As per a recent Forrester report, Lightning transition establishes a framework, so the organization can build things more quickly which helps them by providing a 50% reduction in time-to-launch for Salesforce application development projects. However, in our past projects, we have seen that if the design and implementation follow the best practices, the time to launch for Salesforce can vary between 30–60% reduction.
Faster Onboarding Processes, Resulting in Saving Time
Organizations have felt that their Lightning deployment gave them access to a wider range of developers as well as faster implementations, due to the increased productivity of these users in the Salesforce environment. It narrows the onboarding window from a month to about a week’s time.
Consistent UI design
With its consistent UI design, Lightning Community meets users’ needs more effectively and enhances the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of work productivity.
Native Salesforce Integration
With its native Salesforce Integration, you can integrate with other Salesforce Ecosystems and act as a driving factor in achieving your company’s long-term goals.
Factors driving this change
From our past implementations, we have seen tremendous benefits and have a few key takeaways about why Lightning Community is special.
Community Builder
It’s pretty easy to setup. With just a few clicks, drag-and-drop components, and a WYSIWYG editor, Lightning reduces the development time and helps your organization to quickly setup a community.
Mobile First
The other big driving factor is its responsive UI, which serves as a major advantage of using Lightning Community. By providing mobile-first design, Lightning community puts handheld devices at the forefront of both strategy and implementation.
Lightning Templates
With a variety of pre-configured templates, like the Customer Service template, Partner Central template, Lightning Bolt template, etc., it’s easier to find an existing community design which fits your business. It provides the community with more options and widgets that make community design appealing in a whole new way.
CMS Connect
You can use this tool to easily reuse the content for any CMS in the Salesforce Community.
Native SEO
By setting up SEO for your community, your company can become easily searchable which can significantly improve discovery for the public community.
CDN Support
To improve the page load-time performance, the Lightning Community provides free CDN support.
App Exchange Marketplace
App exchange marketplace is like a Playstore for Android. There are lots of apps and packages available to choose from.
Upgrade at No Extra Cost
Additionally, if you are already an existing Salesforce customer and have a community license, you already have access to Lightning without paying additional licensing fees.
Should I use Visualforce or Lightning Component in Community?
Using the Visualforce page is pretty common. It has lots of organizational components to provide organizations with, and it works without any issue in Lightning Experience. However, Lightning provides an excellent user experience with an eye-catching visual display, and below are some factors where Lightning proves to be more promising than Visualforce.
Lightning Community: Long-Term Benefits
Customers look for flexibility in design when they opt for a platform to help bring their solution to life, and Salesforce Platform gives them exactly what they need.
The benefits of Salesforce platform include:
Increased End-user productivity: As organizations increase the number of users working on Lightning, they can expect an increase in each individual user’s productivity due to its simplified and user-friendly solution design. Examples of such organizations include call center agents, help desk personnel, system administrators, and others.
Revenue from faster time-to-market for business applications: With the ease of deployment of customer-facing applications, organizations see a faster implementation of ideas to get new customers and to retain existing ones, thus focusing on additional revenue and incremental profit generated from these apps.
With Salesforce’s three-release schedule each year, organizations get a chance to revamp their existing implementations to better suit their users’ needs. New capabilities, such as Einstein and Marketing Cloud, benefits organizations by predicting their customers’ needs and pitching them the required solutions.
Key Recommendation
To sum up, with the change in the organizational approaches of being more customer-centric and the desire to invest in the new technologies or platforms, Salesforce Lightning community is one of the best and more matured platform options available in the market. It provides the flexibility and freedom to explore and design platforms in a way to get the Maximum ROI while also being an experience-driven business.
References
1. Source — Forrester’s Q4 2015 Global Low-code Platforms Vendor Landscape Online Survey
2. Source — A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study Commissioned by Salesforce June 2018
3. Source — Stats Counter Global Stats Internet Usage Worldwide
4. Source — SixTvertical
5. Source — Infotechlead https://www.infotechlead.com/software/financial-benefits-from-salesforcelightning-revealed-55020
6. Source — www.computerworld.com
7. Source — Salesforce