Channelscaler vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

Very well-suited for a rising startup like ours that is rapidly growing its customer and partner base. Very well-suited for needing to make rapid changes to your marketing mix and being able to quickly see it reflected in the portal.

Incentivized

[Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud)] seems to be very well suited for what we want to use it for, which is to allow customers to have access to their ongoing and already-resolved cases, which will save our customer success team time and allow for transparency. It also seems well-suited for fine-tuning knowledge libraries, as it allows you to track the knowledge articles that are most impactful (and conversely, those that are less impactful) as you are able to track the path that customers use to self-serve ahead of submitting a ticket. I haven't run into any scenarios yet where we wanted to use Experience Cloud as a solution but discovered that it wasn't a fit.

Incentivized

• Lead registrations. One reason we chose Allbound was for its easy to use deal registration form.
• Events. We promote every event that our company will be attending to all of our partners via Allbound.
• Prospecting. Our team also creates unique prospecting pages for customers, prospects, and partners to help drive specific information that these companies should have access to across the organization.

Incentivized

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

Incentivized

• I worked on Cloud based Channel Mechanics product, not sure it could be a server setup model product
• It's good for mid and big firms. But not sure this product can be economical for startup and micro business
• Service level integration is difficult require easy way of doing it

Incentivized

• None that come to mind - integrations, experience, and use is great! However, if you're trying to learn it yourself, you may benefit from consulting an expert. Or, if you're wondering if it's good for you, a business analysis will suit you well before you implement to save yourselves, time, money, efforts, and even people.

Incentivized

Allbound is so easy to use as an administrator and provides human support and a resource for its customers to learn about the features and tools available. Our partners consistently provide feedback to us about how much they absolutely love our partner portal, which Allbound provides the structure and functionality to allow us to over amazing things to thousands of partner globally. Almost every person who provides feedback says some iteration of "this is the best partner portal i've ever used."

It is by far the easiest system to administrator that I have either had experience doing or demoed from other vendors. No coding skills needed. Simple interfaces for everything. And the Allbound University and live support are great!

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

Through ease of use and expandability, I think that Community Cloud is a best in class at exposing Salesforce integrations, as well as expandability in working through building custom add-ons for Salesforce for collaborations and self-service. Additionally, the speed to market on these changes are lightning-quick and allow for experimentation.

Incentivized

Allbound has a support team that is easy to contact right through the PRM interface. Additionally, we have a dedicated account manager and development team who are super responsive and helpful. Allbound has a ticketing system for support as well, which keeps you up to date on status of your support requests.

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

Incentivized

Regular meetings, lots of UAT, quick responses, and adherence to our timeline made implementation a breeze -- even though we had some really complex processes we needed to support.

For our partner portal, we have chosen Allbound. We wanted one place where all of our partners could go to find the information they required, and where some of that information could be made available automatically. Allbound provides us all the necessary tools for facilitating content exchange with our partners, including legally binding contracts, transaction registrations, and everything else we may need. It also helps us empower our partners by providing them with instructional courses and turnkey marketing strategies.

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

Incentivized

• Helped us recruit way more partners and scale the program
• Helped us be way more organized with our partner collateral which was all over the place before
• Has helped us drive more opportunities to the business thanks to the ability to scale and not have everything manual

Incentivized

• Its given us much better issue and customer satisfaction tracking, since before Community Cloud much of our communications were extremely siloed within Outlook. We had no visibility because communications happened on an individual basis rather than a holistic level (the company).
• We've increased user interaction and given our customers a reason to come to the website repeatedly.
• Our costs have gone up, naturally, as the system proves to be a strong solution. We have pulled in other resources and teams which requires more licenses. I guess that's a sign of success but also a cost.

Incentivized