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.
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Medallia
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Medallia is an enterprise customer feedback solution that allows companies to collect customer feedback across multiple channels and touchpoints, and analyze, understand and react to it in real time.
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Pricing
Khoros Communities
Medallia
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros Communities
Medallia
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
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.
Medallia is best for customer experience feedback. This will allow you to analyze and understand their current experience with the service you are providing. You will not [only] understand what specific point you are lacking, but you will also know which point they are happy with. Using the data provided, you can take necessary actions on how to improve and elevate your customer's experience.
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Documentation on their website, at times, is outdated or incorrect.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
Our service model does not provide any ownership over the platform. We have to engage our Medallia Project Team to build surveys, troubleshoot issues, make changes to surveys, reports, and dashboards, resulting in long turnaround times and inefficiency.
Medallia charges for both "units" and users. "Units" are defined as named individuals in surveys, but don't have log-in privileges. In our case, they are customer service agents or business consultants that engaged with the client but are not part of our closed-loop case management process or access to the platform.
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
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.
Medallia's user interface is simple and intuitive for the end-user. Everyone in our organization from the CEO to store level team members use Medallia to see how we are delivering experiences for our customers. From an administrative side, I would rate Medallia closer to a 7.5, but this part of Medallia is not used as often post-implementation. That being said, you will need a technical/IT resource on staff or will need to pay a premium to a 3rd party to manage it for 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.
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.
Medallia is always there to answer questions and/or support our needs. In some cases it does require a PO if the request does not fall under normal support, but that does not change the fact that they are very responses and available to support your needs
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).
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?
Medallia does not only gives us convenience. It also gives us an opportunity to solve real-time feedback and create real-time solutions. The platform is easy to use, with a dashboard that could help our agents check their progress on a daily basis. I am particularly impressed with the platforms' ability to provide high attention to detail without compromising the sleek design that gives a professional vibe.
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.
It does play a big role when we are running a referral campaign. Referral greatly affects sales and retention since customers are bringing in new clients/customers.
It helps our organization keep track of the accounts that are most likely to churn by checking their feedback and knowing how we can improve our service.
