Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Zendesk Guide

[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

[Zendesk Guide] is well suited for any telecommunications company, especially in a work from home scenario. Zendesk Guide is basically an incentive for employees to not slack off and continue to provide excellent skills and services they were trained to do. The application is not necessarily appropriate for business's that don't utilize over the phone or web chat interactions.

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

• Easy to organize articles
• Easy to preview and publish
• Easy to edit
• Ability to add other users at different permission levels

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

• Some improvement needed to reviewing articles, as we can't do the reviews in the same place where we write and publish the article.
• Central KBs need to support version history, which some time lacks to give track of multiple review.

Incentivized

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

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

The support is good but can sometime be frustrating to get a quick answer. We end up being sent articles that don't answer the question and then we have to go back and try again

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

Freshservice also provides similar features to Zendesk Guide, however, I believe that it is not as good as Zendesk Guide. For example, in Freshservice, manageable and visibility permission can only be set at the folder level and not at the article level. Also security permission in Freshservice cannot be created from tags. This mean that without API calls or integration, admin has to assign employees to the specific manageable and visiblity permission group which is inconvenience and extremely manual. In our company, when there are more than 10 movements in a day as well as many employees hired and left in a month, doing this manually is not preferable

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

• After the community came to us and we redesigned and made it more SEO-friendly and performance-efficient, its engagement increased by 30-40% in 1 Year based on different factors.
• It has returned the Invested money in best way possible and given the product a global name by distributing the queries and solutions to lakhs of community users.
• Increase in Page views by 32% in 1 year
• Increase in Community visits by 29% in 1 year
• Increase in Average Member online time by 54% in 1 year

Incentivized