Definition
Community is a feature or product within the Salesforce platform ecosystem that extends its core capabilities. It provides additional functionality, infrastructure, or services that organizations use to build, connect, or scale their Salesforce implementation.
Real-World Example
When an architect at Skyline Consulting needs to streamline operations, they turn to Community to extend their Salesforce implementation to meet growing business demands. Community provides the additional capability they need without requiring a separate third-party system, keeping everything within the trusted Salesforce ecosystem and reducing integration complexity.
Why Community Matters
Salesforce Communities (now rebranded as Experience Cloud sites) are externally-facing portals built on the Salesforce platform that allow organizations to create branded digital experiences for customers, partners, and other external stakeholders. Communities solve the problem of extending Salesforce data and processes to people outside the organization without giving them direct access to the internal Salesforce org. Customers can log in to check order status, submit and track support cases, browse knowledge articles, and participate in discussions. Partners can access deal registration, shared Opportunities, and co-marketing materials. All of this runs on the same Salesforce data model, meaning changes made in the Community are reflected in real-time inside the org.
As organizations scale their external engagement, Communities become central to reducing support costs, accelerating partner channels, and improving customer satisfaction. A well-built customer community can deflect 30-50% of incoming support cases by providing self-service access to knowledge articles and peer-to-peer forums. Partner communities accelerate deal flow by giving channel partners visibility into shared pipeline and marketing resources. However, Communities introduce significant complexity around licensing (Customer Community vs. Partner Community vs. Customer Community Plus), data visibility (sharing rules, record access), and branding (templates, CSS, Lightning components). Organizations that underinvest in Community planning often discover that their external users can see data they shouldn't, or conversely, that security restrictions make the portal too limited to be useful.
How Organizations Use Community
- TrueNorth Financial Services — TrueNorth builds a customer Community where clients log in to view their investment portfolio, download tax documents, and submit service requests. The Community uses a Customer Community Plus license so clients can see their own Account, Contact, and Case records. Since going live, phone call volume to their service center has dropped by 40% as clients self-serve for routine inquiries.
- Volt Distribution Partners — Volt creates a partner Community for their 150 channel resellers. Partners log in to register deals, access the shared Opportunity pipeline, download marketing collateral, and complete certification training through embedded myTrailhead modules. The partner portal reduced deal registration processing from 5 days to same-day, and partner-sourced revenue grew 25% in the first year.
- Greenleaf Municipal Government — Greenleaf builds a citizen-facing Community where residents can report issues (potholes, streetlight outages), check permit application status, pay utility bills, and browse a knowledge base of city services. The Community integrates with their existing payment processor and GIS mapping system. In the first 6 months, 12,000 residents registered, and 65% of utility payments shifted from in-person to online.