Chameleon vs Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Seems like a great solution for web-based apps and sites when you want to communicate with your users in a fairly lightweight way. Users can "escape" from your guided tours relatively easily. Not sure how it would work for a combined web and mobile experience. Also, if you have a responsive layout, the layout of the guide sometimes breaks - you have to be careful

We use Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) for content and peer-to-peer discussions,; we like being able to gate some content and use private group hubs for exclusive audiences. We post some instructor content as gated content so that we can capture leads from the registration. Although we don't use community for customer support issues, we hear that it has been very successful for others with this use case.

Data is very reliable, tool is fast and efficient.

Like every backend, it can always be improved upon.The excellent thing is that Khoros have a hugely active customer support community as well as a fantastic case management system to triage support issues and requests. So regardless of your level of knowledge or familiarity, you're well supported out of the box.

I've hardly ever seen downtime in any of their production communities. There's the occasional reboot needed for config reasons or if patches are applied, but these take place after customer approval and typically last only a few minutes.

They are responsive and proactive. They are really on top of things. They send personal emails to check in on you. It feels like they really know you. You only get emails from 3-4 people at Khoros – they must be customer assigned.

I think it is engaging and has good instructors.

It was out of the box training - pre-recorded/ not live. There was nothing for more advanced topics like APIs. They do have a good knowledge base and community that you can access and folks in there are responsive. I would however like more advanced training options.

We were up against a hard stop with Jive’s contract ending and Khoros connected us with a deployment partner to do accelerated deployment using a template approach. It could have happened in 2 weeks. We did not end up going that way since we wanted more customization. Lithium handled technical stuff like migration, but a lot of the process is self-deployment. It’s one of the ways they teach use of the system is having the user self-implement.

Overall, the implementation was super easy to do. Doing single sign-on (SSO) was the only hard part. The implementation ended up taking nine weeks total, but in hindsight, we could have done in it six. Most of the implementation time was spent in course work, which consisted of on-demand training - approximately 7-8 hours that you are required for you to do, before they turn on the system. During this nine week period, about 50% of my time was spent on implementation.

We had a deployment manager who we were able to email 1-1. I leaned on him heavily. He was great at all hours, for example, they would call back at 7pm PST. They were very responsive.

Content migration strategy is important to consider. Moving from an existing community you need to strategically choose how your layout will be. Two different systems will have two different ways to format communities. For example, Jive has communities with sub-communities, whereas Khoros has community, category, and boards.

Contact migration is also an important consideration. You need to think through how you are going to move contacts from your old community to a new one. For example, are you going to create new logins and passwords? We were hoping to use the integration with Salesforce.com to be a portal, but ended up using an in-house solution that works well to maintain same the same logins. The next related question is are you going to be able to keep them connected to all the posts in your old community? We migrated old posts. If you have a tech-savvy team, you can do a self-migration. Khoros has a migration services team that we utilized. It cost us $10k to move content and posts were kept tied to the user.

The next consideration is your launch/promotion plan. Khoros helped us out and gave us a lot of examples. They shared pre-launch email dates, follow-up emails, FAQ pages (e.g. to explain why switching, why better).

Our community has multiplied in size many times over since we first started using Khoros Community. Between our own ongoing education, expanding the application of Community, and development of the product, we are always discovering new ways to utilize the software. We've never once felt like we were outpacing the capability of our software.