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 Agent Connect
Score 6.9 out of 10
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Medallia Agent Connect (based on the former Stella Connect) is a CX suite of applications, performing customer feedback collection and service quality measurement, customer agent motivation tools, and employee engagement tools such as agent reward tools and performance tracking. Stella Connect was acquired by Medallia September 2020.
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Pricing
Khoros Communities
Medallia Agent Connect
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros Communities
Medallia Agent Connect
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing is variable based on the needs of the customer.
Khoros Communities is my go-to when I'm part of a big company with lots of customers who want to help each other. It's awesome for talking about products, giving ideas to make them better, and getting help when I need it. If my team is spread out or we're working from home, Khoros Communities is handy for sharing updates and working together. It's also a good tool for events, helping with planning and discussing what happened. But if my group is small or not very active, or if I just need a simple place to chat without too many extras, Khoros Communities might be more than I need. Plus, I've got to be ready to keep an eye on things to keep the community positive, and it works best when I have a plan to grow and keep the community lively.
The survey sent is customer-friendly, vibrant, simple, and easy to understand. The survey itself is comprised of simple question(s) with straightforward answer options for customers to make their selections. Creating the survey is a straightforward process for us to prepare and implement. Making updates or changes is just as easy.
The fundamental tool for customer satisfaction is exactly right. The way they allow us as agents to share details about ourselves, and humanize the process, has made a huge impact on the customer experience we provide. Our customers feel more inclined to leave us feedback and it allows us to get a real understanding of each of their individual expectations.
Customer Journey. From the beginning through the Sales process, through procurement, through trial and through now being users for over a year, the Stella Connect team has been incredibly helpful, informative and has provided us with the exact amount of interaction we need. They are very good at respecting your time while making sure they get in touch when necessary. New features that are relevant to our use case are sent my way. It's one of the only product update emails I actually read. They're incredibly responsive and very helpful.
Self Service, Low and No Code. The Community Managers should be able to some UI Tasks by self with doing any code updates.
Salesforce Integration: The basic Integration should also include the basic level of business requirement. (Contacts and Accounts Mapping)
Slack Connector Update: There is no update on this connector till the time its launch. The other team has lot of options to push the notification in multiple slack channels. And unfortunately Khoros does not. This creates a lot work for Community team to bring internal teams to the community to respond or acknowledge an post.
More Integrations: Since now the Khoros communities does not comes up with the integrations with basic support tools like JIRA, Confluence, Github etc.
Search Improvisation: Apart from last search update there is no updates we see in this feature. The team should think of Putting Some AI based Search into the community which helps the Community managers to manage the content accordingly
Some update on AI and Gen AI: Khoros communities did not shared any thoughts about their plans for putting these technology in community
On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Khoros Communities a solid 8. The system is extremely easy to use, enabling our team and community members to navigate and interact with the platform with ease. The wide range of features offered by Khoros Communities has greatly enriched our online interactions and improved the efficiency of our customer service. The technical support team has also been extremely helpful, could be quicker sometimes for answering our questions but they efficiently resolving any problems we have encountered. The platform is perfectly scalable, capable of handling our growing user base without any performance problems. What's more, Khoros Communities offers excellent integration capabilities with our other software tools, making our operations smoother and more 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.
They are the absolute best. My Sales guy Corey D. and my CSM Tim P. are totally a part of the team. They have been incredibly helpful through the process pre and post-sales and have become good friends. I appreciate that I feel like our team's success is always at the forefront of their minds.
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).
Large companies and organizations with complex community needs are well served by Khoros communities. The platform's advanced analytics and reporting features helps organizations seeking deeper insights. The gamification is the best way to boost user engagement, Khoros Communities has a rich feature set. Also with customization options offered by Khoros Communities, companies can develop a unique and customized community experience.
We do not currently use any other products like Stella Connect, by Medallia. We have recently begun evaluating platforms that would allow us to collect feedback at different touchpoints throughout our customers' journeys, as well as through additional channels such as during our application process, quote and purchase experience, website experience, etc. We have looked at companies such as Survey Monkey, Medallia, and Qualtrics to help us better understand CSAT.
I think I would give Khoros an overall 7, while there were things we really liked about it. I also saw things that just did not work well for us. We like using iG but it was not the friendliest in using it on that platform. Sometimes the software would glitch or lag which is not helpful during high critical moments
We are able to see what our different cohorts of customers are doing within the community, and we are able to create content and programs based on the engagement we get from these different groups.
We have been able to start an Idea Exchange space where our customers can share, vote, and comment on features they would like to see in our products. It quickly became a very popular place within the Community.
With the discussion forums, we are able to use the Accepted Solutions functions to help deflect tickets and Support interactions working on a 1-to-many scale.
Implementing Stella Connect was such an easy decision. Before, we were working with "yes, I'm satisfied" or "no, I'm not satisfied" and felt it was an incredibly unclear and polarizing experience, as our users were forced to pick one or the other. Most often, we'd get a negative rating with a comment saying that the experience was fine, but some feature in the product was missing. This left it very difficult for us to really gauge the experience we were providing and how to improve. In addition, agent motivation was incredibly low and impossible to improve because they were left feeling like their scores were not matching their experience. Needless to say, implementing Stella Connect improved all of these issues 10-fold. The ROI has been incredibly substantial. We've been able to improve CSAT scores and properly measure the rate of first attempt resolutions. Team morale is at an all-time high, and our customers even love the experience.
