In this post, we'll do a quick intro to Communications Cloud, our view on how to best get up to speed, and resources to get started.
Communications Cloud is a telecommunications industry specific application built on top of the Salesforce platform, extending the capabilities of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to meet the business needs of the telecommunications industry.
Overview
You get all of the power of the base Salesforce Lightning platform, and the horizontal Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud (depending on your license) plus the following:
Communications Cloud Data Model: building on the horizontal data model provided with Sales and Service Cloud, this brings support for common use cases in the Communications industry such as Service Accounts to model the user of services or service profiles, and Billing Accounts to model billing profiles.
Industries CPQ: a configure-price-quote application native to Salesforce built for the Communications, Media, and Energy verticals, with support for common industry needs such as MACD (move, add, change, disconnect), amendments, product versioning, change of plans, and more. Note that Salesforce CPQ is a separate product from Industries CPQ.
Digital Commerce: an extension of CPQ, meant to be used to build customer-facing, high volume, high performance web and mobile applications.
Industries Order Management (OM): a powerful order decomposition and orchestration engine, to help break down your commercial orders with commercial products to technical products and fulfillment requests to be sent to downstream systems to successfully fulfill, activate, and start billing for the services.
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM): CLM allows us to create and manage the lifecycle of Contracts, and generate pixel perfect documents for those contracts, orders, or any object in Salesforce.
Enterprise Sales Management (ESM): ESM is a pre-built implementation targeted for B2B with large, multi-site quotes and orders.
Multiplay Subscription Management (MSM): Rebranded from Mobile Subscription Management as of the Winter '23 release, MSM is a pre-built implementation targeted for B2C consumers to streamline onboarding and service.
OmniStudio: a rich digital interaction platform for building internal agent and external customer facing digital experiences, far more powerful than Salesforce Flows. These experiences can be exposed internally within Lightning, externally in an Experience Cloud Site (fka Community), or a third-party website or mobile app via OmniOut.
Each of these pieces is roughly the complexity (or more) of Sales or Service Cloud, so there's a lot to learn, but quite a lot of functionality and business value!
Licensing
It's important to understand the licensing so you can recommend solutions that are leveraging the licenses your customer has or recommend they change their licenses to get more value. Please note that the details below are based on the publicly available licensing pricing on this page, as of November 2023. If you are reading this after that, please double-check that the licensing/pricing hasn't changed.
We have two core tiers of licenses:
Communications Cloud Growth, which includes Sales or Service Cloud (your choice to which one), the Communications Cloud Data Model, and OmniStudio, but does not include CPQ, Doc Gen, Enterprise Sales Management (ESM), Multiplay Subscription Management (MSM), CLM, or OM.
Communications Cloud Advanced, which includes everything in Comms Cloud Growth, and CPQ, Doc Gen, ESM, and MSM, but not CLM or OM.
And there are three important Add-Ons:
B2B BSS Suite, which includes OM for B2B orders and EPC
B2C BSS Suite, which includes OM for B2C orders and EPC
Contract Lifecycle Management for Communications, which includes CLM
There are also various additional Add-Ons for licenses for external users (partners and customers), for analytics, and a few other things. Check the full price list here.
The key thing to take note of is whether your customer has Communications Cloud Growth or Advanced, and whether they have the B2B and/or B2C BSS Suites for OM as well as Contract Lifecycle Management for Communications. These will determine if you have CPQ, OM, and CLM (among other things) available for use in your solution.
Disclaimer: always check with your customer and/or your customer's Salesforce Account Executive as your situation may vary from what is described here.
Learning Journey
Becoming certified before starting your first Communications Cloud (or any Industry Cloud) implementation is an absolute must. The typical Communications Cloud digital transformation program isn't just a simple sales automation or CRM tool, but a Business Support System (BSS), or in other words, runs the whole business. The stakes and complexity are higher, so make sure you come properly equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to deliver a functional, performant, scalable system.
Start with OmniStudio Consultant and OmniStudio Developer as there is significant overlap, and OmniStudio is a toolset you will use across the Communications Cloud stack.
Then, move on to Industries CPQ Developer which will test your EPC and CPQ knowledge. If you're employed by Salesforce or a Salesforce Partner, finish your credential journey with the Communications Cloud Accredited Professional. We view this as a "Communications Cloud Solution Architect" credential that tests your ability to connect the dots across OmniStudio, CPQ, OM, DC, CLM, and the whole stack.
We additionally recommend going for Admin, Platform App Builder, Platform Developer 1, and JavaScript Developer I, as Communications Cloud is a native Salesforce application and we will use low code and pro code solutions from the core platform regularly, so the knowledge behind these certifications will help you in your day-to-day.
Resources
Below is a list of resources to help you build your Communications Cloud knowledge and get certified. We recommend going through them in the order below if you're new to Communications Cloud.
Note that some of these resources are on the Partner Community or Partner Learning Camp, and are only available to Partners, not Customers - we've tagged these as *Partners Only*.
Apex Hours Introduction to Industries CPQ: a good introduction to Industry Cloud, Communications Cloud, and CPQ. Recommended as a first starting point.
Apex Hours Introduction to Industries OM: building on the previous video, this continues the customer journey by taking a configured order and fulfilling it via Industries OM
Apex Hours OmniStudio Series: a great series that supplements the materials available on Trailhead ▪ Introduction to OmniStudio ▪ FlexCards Basics ▪ FlexCards Advanced ▪ OmniScripts Basics ▪ OmniScripts Advanced ▪ DataRaptors ▪ Integration Procedures Basics ▪ Integrations Procedures Advanced ▪ Industry DX Workbench and CLI ▪ OmniOut ▪ OmniStudio Best Practices
Partner Community's Partner Learning Camp *Partners Only* - check this link for links to the below items. If you have access, we recommend starting here as these go into way more depth than the publicly available resources ▪ Communications Cloud Learning Journey ▪ Communications Cloud Credential ▪ Communications Cloud Curriculum ▪ Communications Cloud Credential Fact Sheet ▪ Communications Cloud Partner Pocket Guide ▪ Communications Cloud Expert Partner Community Group
Closing Thoughts
Learning Communications Cloud is a challenging, but interesting journey. Take one step at a time and get certified first. The learning journey doesn't end at certification as you'll need to stay up to date with new releases, and learn the complexities of different products, segments, functionalities you will come across on various projects. Good luck!
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