Digital Experience
A Digital Experience in Salesforce is a self-service portal or community site built with Experience Cloud that provides external users (customers, partners, employees) secure access to relevant information, support, and transactions.
Definition
A Digital Experience in Salesforce is a self-service portal or community site built with Experience Cloud that provides external users (customers, partners, employees) secure access to relevant information, support, and transactions. It can include knowledge bases, case creation, account portals, and more.
In plain English
“A Digital Experience is what Salesforce calls a customer-facing site you build with Experience Cloud. It's a portal where external users like customers, partners, or employees can access information, create cases, browse Knowledge articles, or do other things tied to your Salesforce org.”
Worked example
BlueRiver Health builds a patient Digital Experience using Experience Cloud - a branded portal where patients book appointments, view lab results, message their care team, and pay bills. The portal looks and feels like a BlueRiver app, not a Salesforce one; underneath, it's an Experience Cloud Site running on the same data model as the internal Salesforce org. Patients never log into Salesforce directly; they interact with the Digital Experience their care team built for them.
Why Digital Experience matters
A Digital Experience in Salesforce is an external-facing site built with Experience Cloud (formerly Communities) that gives external users secure access to relevant Salesforce data and functionality. Digital Experiences can be customer support portals, partner deal registration portals, employee self-service sites, branded customer communities, or any custom external experience built on the Salesforce platform. They use the same data and business logic as the internal Salesforce org but present it through a separate, branded interface tailored to the external audience.
Digital Experiences are the modern replacement for several older Salesforce concepts: Customer Portal, Partner Portal, Self-Service Portal, and Communities. Salesforce rebranded the umbrella as Experience Cloud and the individual sites as Digital Experiences to reflect the broader scope of digital interactions they support. Building one involves choosing a template (or LWR for fully custom), configuring branding, designing pages, mapping data access through profiles and sharing rules, and assigning external user licenses. The result is a self-service experience that reduces inbound support volume and gives external stakeholders direct access to what they need.
How organizations use Digital Experience
Built a customer support Digital Experience for a client where customers log in to view their cases, browse Knowledge, and submit new cases. The site cut inbound support phone volume by 30%.
Runs a partner Digital Experience where channel partners register deals, view co-marketing materials, and access training. The portal is the primary touchpoint between Vertex and 200+ partners.
Built a custom employee Digital Experience consolidating HR documents, time-off requests, and company news into a single branded site, replacing three separate internal tools.
Trust & references
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Digital Experience.
- Experience CloudSalesforce Help
Test your knowledge
Q1. What is a Digital Experience?
Q2. What older Salesforce concepts does Digital Experience replace?
Q3. What's a common Digital Experience use case?
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