Experience Cloud sites for customer self-service
Key Takeaway
The Customer Service template is the main self-service choice: customers can search articles, ask the community, and create cases to reach a support agent.
An Experience Cloud site is a website built on Salesforce where customers can help themselves. They can search knowledge articles, ask questions of the community, and create cases when they need a support agent. Self-service sites reduce the load on your support team because customers find their own answers, but customers still have a path to a human.
Choosing a site template
When you create a site, a creation wizard opens with several templates, so choosing the template is your first big decision. These three templates give customers ways to help themselves:
- The Customer Service template is the main self-service choice. It supports Salesforce Knowledge, Chatter Questions, and cases. It also has multiple prebuilt theme options. With this template, customers can:
- Post questions to the community.
- Search for and view articles.
- Collaborate.
- Contact support agents by creating cases.
- The Help Center template builds a public-access, self-service site that exposes the articles you make available from your knowledge base. Unlike the Customer Service template, its focus is letting customers find their own solutions in articles.
- The Customer Account Portal template builds a private and secure place where customers access and update their account information. Customers can see and pay invoices, update account details, and search your knowledge base for answers to common questions.
Other templates fit other needs:
| Template | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Partner Central | Channel sales (lead distribution, deal registration, marketing campaigns) |
| Build Your Own (Aura) | The basic pages every Experience Builder site needs |
| Build Your Own (LWR) and Microsites (LWR) | Developers who build custom Lightning web components |
| Aloha | An App Launcher template with single sign-on, including social logins |
The Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce template isn't Lightning-based, so it doesn't work with Experience Builder. It needs developer experience and advanced setup skills, but it offers full platform access and supports most standard objects, custom objects, and the Salesforce mobile app.