What is Salesforce Customer Portal?

What is Salesforce Customer Portal?

Before we start with the Salesforce customer portal, let’s explore all the types of Salesforce portals, their differences, and their use case.

Types of Salesforce Portals

Salesforce offers three types of portals that have different use cases:

– Partner Portal

– Self-service Portal

– Customer Portal

It is crucial that you pick one based on your requirement and which entities you want to manage. If it’s partners, then the partner portal should be your choice. Similarly, to manage customers you can either go with self-service portal or customer portal.

Let’s look at the difference between them.

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Difference between Customer and Partner Portal

The key difference here is that a partner portal is useful for when you want to share business-level insights with your partners. Each partner can get only the required data without being able to access all of your organization’s private data.

Compared to this, a customer portal works as a platform for your customers to approach your business, and get support on their own from the portal.

In this blog, we are going to explore multiple aspects of the Salesforce customer portal.

What is Salesforce Customer Portal?

Customer Portal is a unified platform that provides self-service support, a user interface and online support channels for customers.

How to Create a Salesforce Customer Portal?

1. Enable Digital Experiences in Salesforce.
a). Go to Setup > Feature Settings > Digital Experiences > Settings
b). Check “Enable Digital Experiences” and click save.


2. Create an Experience Cloud Site (Ref)
a). To create a site, from Setup, enter Digital Experiences in the Quick Find box, select All Sites, and then click New.


b). The creation wizard opens with several templates for you to choose from. To see more information about a template, select it.
c). Read the template description and key features. To use the selected template click on Get Started button.


d). Enter a site name
e). For URL, enter the name of your site. This name is appended to the domain that you created when you enabled digital experiences for this org. For example, if your domain name is crmjetty.my.site.com and you’re creating a customer community, you can enter CustomerPortal to create the unique URL crmjetty.my.site.com/CustomerPortal.


f). Click Create.
The site is created in Preview status. Now you’re ready to build and customize or manage and moderate your site.
g). When you create a site, Salesforce supplies default pages for login, self-registration, change password, forgot password, and your home page. These pages are based on which template you use to create your site. You can customize these default pages at any time in the Login & Registration page of the Administration workspace.
h). Add logo to your portal site


i). Update site information


j). Create/Update pages


k). Add components to your pages. Like object records list, detail, related records list.


3. Add Profiles for access to your site
a). Go to site Administration area.


b). Go to Members tab.
c). In Select Profiles settings, add profiles to Selected Profiles area.


d). Click Save.
4. Activate Site
a). Once you complete building portal site and assign all required user profiles to site, Go to site Administration area.
b). Go to Settings tab.
c). Click Activate in status.


d). After Activation your customer portal site is ready for use.

How to Enable Customer Portal for Contacts

5. How to Enable Customer Portal for Contacts
a). From the contact detail page, Quick Actions, Select Enable Customer User.


b). Verify the general information and locale settings, and enter any missing information. The customer’s Username defaults to the customer’s email.
c). Select a portal user license. The user license that you choose determines the permission sets, user profile type, and role hierarchy options which you can select for the user. See Customer Portal User Licenses.


d). Click on save to save the settings it.
e). From the contact detail page, Quick Actions, Select Log in to Experience as User.


After performing all the steps, this is how the Salesforce Customer Portal will look like.

Salesforce Customer Portal Features

– User interface

– Salesforce CRM content

– Custom objects and Tabs

– Multiple User profile and Record types

– Account Role hierarchy and sharing

– Branding and style configuration

1) User interface

In the salesforce customer portal, there are user interface features like search, quick solution identification, creating cases, reports, etc.

2) Salesforce CRM content

Through this Salesforce CRM content feature, your customers can access any product document and you can share relevant content with customers as well. It also has features like sharing, subscription and commenting.

3) Custom objects and tabs

You can create custom objects and tabs in the customer portal and share the same with your customers. These objects and tabs help you implement your business logic throughout the portal.

4) Multiple user profiles & record types

A feature to create multiple user-profiles and record types to help you provide some customized experience to your customers.

5) Account role hierarchy and sharing

You can use three-level role hierarchy and sharing with your customers.

6) Branding and style configuration

Customizations in the home page, header, footer, colors, and fonts enables you to match the portal with your brand, therefore creating a synergy.

Limitations of Salesforce Customer Portal:

The Salesforce customer portal is expensive if you put it at $1 per user, per month. It increases your customer retention cost.

Apart from cost, there is also a certain limitation when it comes to the number of accounts. You cannot have over a certain number of accounts, depending on the Salesforce edition you use.

But there are third-party solutions that you can use that to allow you to scale your customer base at a much more reasonable price point.

About CRMJetty:

CRMJetty is a hub of innovative customer relationship solutions. You can connect, collaborate, and engage with your customers smartly using our ready to integrate portal solutions for SuiteCRM, Sugar CRM, Salesforce, and Dynamics CRM.

Gear up your business with our portals to drive new customer relationship intelligence!

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