AdvocateHub helps B2B marketers capture customer enthusiasm and use it to drive marketing and sales efforts. With AdvocateHub, B2B marketers build an advocate community and invite customers into it to complete “challenges” like referrals, reference calls or product reviews. As they complete challenges, advocates gain points, badges and levels which can be used for a variety of perks and privileges.
N/A
Khoros Communities
Score 7.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Lithium Community is a fully-featured community platform and is focused on the needs of marketers. Lithium most often competes with Jive Team Collaboration and Get Satisfaction.
N/A
Pricing
Influitive
Khoros Communities
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Influitive
Khoros Communities
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
To learn more about Influitive's pricing, please reach out to a member of our sales team.
Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
Khoros Communities, in my opinion, isn't set up to host a customer advocacy program, as it's lacking key aspects that Influitive offers (e.g. ability to easily share information with advocates, advanced gamification, etc.) It's much better, however, for a discussion-based …
We use Influitive for our closed customer advocacy program and Khoros for our open discussion-based community. Two different communities...two different software solutions. Each one best fits the ultimate goals of the community.
We haven't used any other similar programs (are there any?), but we were previously managing our advocate program manually. That was a huge effort and pulling metrics was difficult if even possible. Every outreach was a significant effort and it was getting more and more …
Influitive works well for rewarding and nurturing your star customers and advocates, as well as newly acquired customers, who are highly interested in professional development opportunities, networking and exclusive resources. In turn, marketing and product can benefit from these advocates to help bolster more content to draw in new members. For us, this community isn't best suited for prospects at the evaluate/try phase who are more interested in highly-specific product information and purchasing information.
I describe Khoros as the salesforce of community software in that it's customizable and enterprise, however it can be a beast to use. There isn't any standout in the community field (in my opinion) so if you're looking for an enterprise community software, it'll serve you well. I do think it's important to realize you can't manage this without the proper buy in from your company when it comes to development of the site. You shouldn't be using Khoros if you only have a front end community manager. If you're going all in on community and need a solution that will scale as you grow, consider Khoros amongst your vendors and see how you like it. It's worth checking out.
It gives us the opportunity to share valuable content with our users. (e.g. first looks at e-books, white papers, announcements of webinars, etc.)
It allows us to easily collect feedback and insights from our community members through a variety of activity types.
It makes it simple for us to reward our customers for helping each other, and our org, through a rewards store that easily connects to an outside vendor.
Challenge Digest- I would really like to have the digest have a little more functionality. Such as being able to move around the challenges, maybe move them to the top rather than the bottom.
The challenge image/the channel image- This is a feature I would really like to have more user-friendly, especially the crop feature. This feature is not very easy to use, so I have to go to another platform to re-size it. It would be so much easier if I could do this all within Influitive.
Sign In Page Profile Fields- I would like to be able to easily rearrange the fields rather than needing to reach out to support so that they can update on their end. While I appreciate that they can do this, it would be easier and faster if I could have the ability to do it myself.
Support-is AMAZING! But it would be great if they were more ways that an admin could be able to tweak certain pages rather than waiting till the engineering has time to update. I work on a tight timeline and it's hard to go back to the stakeholders and inform them that what they want can't be handled right away. Again I completely understand that other companies also have urgent requests, but if the admin had more capabilities then we wouldn't have to go to support as much.
I feel that the professional services engagements need to be better. There is a lot of miscommunication, and a lack of clear outcomes, goals, and timelines. It can take weeks to get meetings on the books and a team assembled to start getting work done.
Documentation on their website, at times, is outdated or incorrect. Sometimes the product doesn't even work as described in some of their documentation
The admin console could use a nice fresh UI overhaul. While it's functional, it would be nice to see a more modern UI for the area where most community managers are spending a decent amount of time
Depending on the cost and new features to be added, our company might be motivated to renew the use of Influitive. However, a lot depends on the year to come and the enhancements that can better our experience and add more gamification to the platform. Adding elements that can woo our target audience.
Community has worked well for over the year. However, there have been a lot more technical and feature issues we have been seeing in last year or so. Also customer support has not been very quick to address issues. SO there are things that can definitely be improved on Khoros end
Overall, Influitive is very easy to use for customers. There's a bit of a learning curve for new admins, but that's only because Influitive isn't always intuitive. The UI is confusing in certain places. I expect something to be in one place, and I find it somewhere else entirely. This is the only reason my usability rank isn't higher
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.
Yes, always available and extremely quick. The availability is 10 on 10 for sure. We also have situations where their team might not be working or on a holiday, but if we have an event, they are available and ensure smooth running. That is the beauty of having Influitive take care of you.
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.
Influitive AdvocateHub interacts with Blackbaud Champions and is an on-time response system. What I mean by that is once data is entered in Influitive AdvocateHub, it is updated in real time and I can access a computer and the data is there immediately. Sometimes the rewards do not show up right away and I am under the assumption that the delay is caused by an influx of traffic.
I have never had an issue, small or large, that the Influitive support team hasn't taken seriously and given their attention to. Engagement with support is generally quick and painless. There is also a great user community that is monitored to some degree, and general questions are often already available there or answered in short order.
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 was taught and made to show all features that could help me learn more about the platform and this was great hands-on training for me. I picked up things faster than others and did have time to create challenges and make changes while someone was around to supervise and help.
The training was extensive and gave me the knowledge/ skills that I needed in order to implement my advocacy program using Influitive's Advocate Hub. I also meet on a regular basis with my Customer Success Manager. My Success Manager helps give me ideas for my program and helps me ensure that it's successful. Influitive is really invested in my success. They act more like a partner than a vendor
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.
I think some of the key insights I can put forward are all aligned to simply being organized. Make sure you have a well thoughts out plan where you have taken all factors into account. Prioritize the list of deliverables, and make sure you have all the right people alighed to assist internally & externally. If you have a well organized plan you will be set up for success.
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).
Vanilla is great for forums, but they don't have the gamification/challenges piece that is so important toward building advocacy. I've found a similar circumstance with Salesforce communities--good if you're looking primarily for crowdsourced tech support and QA, but nothing "sticky" for really building a thriving community, or the advocacy piece
WordPress, Guild, tribe - all have pros and cons vs Khoros. The primary concern of Khoros vs other platforms is cost. For the price difference, Khoros *should* be a no-brainer choice. No one should ever consider using any platform other than Khoros... so why do people consider other platforms?
The platform is incredibly scalable and provides the flexibility to use it out-of-the-box or customize it to whatever extent is needed. It has very powerful APIs and is built in modular way that allows pages, components and other elements to be constructed easily.
Influitive has helped us generate hundreds of reviews on sites like G2, TrustRadius, and Capterra, which has resulted in various awards and positive placement on grid reports.
Influitive has helped us generate dozens of case studies and hundreds of quotes that can be used in sales and marketing campaigns.
Influitive has generated thousands of survey responses to help our product team better understand what our customers want, which has had a direct impact on our product roadmap.
