Dealer portals and customer service sites that share product documentation, warranty processes and order visibility from records your teams already maintain.
Experience Cloud lets manufacturers open selected Salesforce data and processes to dealers, distributors, installers and end customers through secure, branded sites. Dealers can submit warranty claims, request marketing funds, find sales tools and check order status. Customers can register products, download manuals and open service requests tied to a serial number. Because each site runs on the same platform as sales and service, a warranty claim or parts question from the field immediately becomes a record the internal team can act on, instead of an email waiting in a shared inbox.
Manufacturers rarely own the end customer relationship outright. Products move through dealers, distributors and installers, and the people who use them may never deal with the manufacturer until something breaks. Experience Cloud adapts by supporting several audiences on one platform, each with its own site, permissions and branding. Dealers need operational tools and data about their own territory. End customers need documentation and a clear path to support. Installers and service partners may need training content and certification status. The product itself, identified by model and serial number, becomes the thread connecting all of them, so portal design starts from the installed asset rather than from a generic contact form.
Dealers and service partners submit claims with serial numbers, failure codes, photos and labor details through a guided form. Rules check coverage and required fields before submission, and claims route to the warranty team with the asset history attached. Dealers follow status and payment decisions in the portal, which reduces calls and speeds the feedback loop to quality engineering. Recurring failure codes become visible by model and region.
End customers or installers register products by serial number, creating an asset record tied to the customer and the dealer who sold it. That record later supports warranty validation, recall outreach and service history, and it gives the manufacturer a direct connection to users who were previously visible only through the channel. Registration incentives, such as extended coverage offers, can encourage owners to complete the step at installation.
Manuals, installation guides, spec sheets and service bulletins are published through Salesforce Knowledge or a content library, filtered by product line and audience. Dealers see service bulletins that customers do not, and search draws on the same content support agents use internally, so answers stay consistent whether they come from a person or a page. Feedback buttons let dealers flag unclear or wrong instructions to the content owner.
Dealers request co-op or market development funds, upload proof of performance and track approvals through the portal. Channel managers review requests against each dealer's allocation and see which activities actually produce leads. The process replaces spreadsheets and emailed receipts that make auditing, budget tracking and year-end reconciliation difficult for everyone involved. Approved claims can also pass to finance for payment without rekeying.
The central decision is the asset: which product and serial data exists in Salesforce, who maintains it and how it links to the customer, the dealer and the installation site. The second is audience design, since dealer users, customer users and service partners typically need separate profiles, sharing sets and often separate sites. The third is ownership of transactional data. Orders, invoices and parts availability usually stay in the ERP and appear through integration, while claims, registrations and requests are created natively in Salesforce, where routing and approvals are easiest to manage.
Order status, shipment tracking, invoices and parts availability display in the dealer portal, while approved warranty credits post back to finance for payment processing.
Specifications, images and product hierarchies feed the portal catalog and documentation filters, keeping model information consistent with what engineering and marketing publish.
Training completions and certifications for dealer technicians appear on partner records, and access to certain service content can depend on current certification status.
Dealer, customer and service partner users need different license types, and cost grows with the number of members or logins. Map each audience's actual tasks before choosing, so occasional users are not given more expensive licenses than their access requires.
Asset-based portals depend on accurate serial, model and ownership data. Legacy registration records are often duplicated or incomplete, so budget time to cleanse and match them before launch, or warranty validation will reject legitimate claims and frustrate dealers. Plan ongoing data stewardship too.
Documentation portals fail when outdated manuals remain searchable. Assign owners for each product line's content, set review dates and retire superseded bulletins automatically, so dealers and customers never act on instructions that engineering has already replaced. Show revision dates on every document page.
Client names are anonymized.
Usually not. Dealers need pricing, claims, funds and territory data that customers must never see, and each group expects a different experience. Experience Cloud lets you run separate sites on the same platform, sharing content and records where appropriate. Some manufacturers start with a dealer site and add a customer site later, once asset and registration data is reliable enough to support it.
They can, either through an integration with the ERP's ordering functions or with Salesforce's business-to-business commerce capabilities layered onto the portal. The right approach depends on how complex your pricing, availability and fulfillment rules are. Many manufacturers begin with order status and parts lookup, then add ordering once pricing data and integration patterns have proven themselves.
When products are registered as assets linked to customers and dealers, the manufacturer can identify affected owners by model and serial range, notify them through the portal and email, and track acknowledgments. Dealers see which of their customers are affected and can schedule repairs. Without registration data, recall outreach depends on channel partners' records, which are often incomplete.
Agentforce can answer product questions from the knowledge base, help a dealer find the right service bulletin or pre-check a warranty claim for missing information before submission. It should cite the documentation it draws from, and warranty decisions stay with people. We scope AI to content that is well maintained, since poorly kept documentation produces poor answers.
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