Top 5 Search Pet Peeves on Your Salesforce Community

From Fortune 500 companies to startups, many corporates are hopping on the Salesforce train to connect with their customers.

But will your customers be able to find what they need? Truth be told, not always. With all the power and potential this CRM brings to the table, it may be hard to digest that limitations exist. But alas, they do. And if you’re familiar with Salesforce, you’d agree with me.

If you want to empower your customers with better discoverability, they’ll likely need more advanced features than what vanilla Salesforce offers. To understand why, keep reading as I lay out 5 key limitations of Salesforce Community’s out-of-the-box search.

1. No Facets and Subfacets

Ever wondered what drives these mega e-commerce platforms? It’s the search that takes the lead in converting casual visitors into paying customers. They employ a simple yet effective technique to achieve this feat: ensuring customers only see items they are interested in.

Users prefer relevance over sheer volume of search results. That’s why it’s no secret that sometimes, they aren’t all that impressed with the search results. In such situations, they need something like facets with subfacets to further refine the results – a tree-like categorization that helps users to continuously focus search action on a particular category. But here lies the problem. Salesforce doesn’t offer facets and subfacets to the end-user.

It does allow you to segment your content under ‘topics’ so that it’s easier for users to navigate to the help content they want. However, Salesforce’s standard search doesn’t allow users to choose which topic they want to search from in order for relevant results to surface.

This makes the going difficult especially for organizations that have content related to multiple brands, products, or services residing in the same Salesforce instance.

2. Not-So-Intelligent Deflection

The case deflection component can curtail inflow of basic cases by providing relevant information on the case creation page. As a user logs the case, Salesforce runs a quick search according to the available data and populates apt results in the form of recommended articles.

As useful as it sounds, it is again let down by search. The component always searches the subject across the Community without leveraging filters for refinement.

This means that it searches the complete Community Cloud instead of a particular topic or category. Neither can a user select a topic to filter search results, nor is the standard search so smart that it can auto-detect the category or topic and filter results automatically. This mars the quality of recommendations and the attempted deflection fails.

3. Siloed Search

This is one of the biggest gripes that Salesforce users have. The standard search is limited to Salesforce and any information outside is off limits. Organizations use multiple solutions to achieve an array of business objectives. So why not integrate them with Salesforce?

This will help your customers and employees access multiple repositories inside the Community Cloud. That can come in handy, right? CMS, file storage platforms, documentation center, and project management solutions – all connected to your Salesforce instance.

4. Limited Insights

Salesforce provides search analytics, which includes limited reports – search queries that returned results and search queries that did not return any results.

The reporting and dashboard mechanisms in Salesforce enable quick access and enhancement of certain data. However, to have a holistic view, it is often necessary to integrate external data into these reports. This can be done by integrating Salesforce data with a business intelligence system. However, there is no ‘in-built’ provision to do the same.

In the end, this impacts the customer self-service experience. How? Folks who strive for improving the customer self-service experience on the community need insights into the user search behavior in order to keep improving and promoting the self-help content on the community. Unless they know what’s working, what’s not, and where, they cannot improve it, which leads us to our next point.

5. Lack of Control Over Search Results

It goes without saying that organizations would prefer to have some degree of control over the results their customers see. However, that is off the table with Salesforce Community Cloud. One cannot optimize the search results for specific keywords.

Another thing that bogs down the experience is the inability to search for all fields. For instance, if an object has a custom field, and a customer wants to include it in the search parameter, nada! Salesforce only searches the title and summary. But if you have added a custom field like resolution, your users cannot search it.

Want to improve your customers’ self-service experience on your salesforce community?