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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ServiceNow Customer Service Management
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Built on the Now Platform, ServiceNow offers their Customer Service Management solution through the Standard and Professional Customer Service Management bundles. Both include agent workspace, knowledge management, survey and assessment module, and the community module, oriented in this edition to support customers rather than internal employees. The Professional bundle also includes performance analytics, predictive intelligence, and related tools to support customer support agents improvement…
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Pricing
Khoros Communities
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros Communities
ServiceNow Customer Service Management
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.
It is well suited for medium to large companies that manage different teams and need to communicate constantly and track progress in a timely manner. It is less suited for small enterprises as it will overwhelm users with the features and functionalities embedded.
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.
Bottom line is that it does what you need it to do. We've been using Service Now as a ticket managing tool for a few years now. There's really not much it can't do when it comes to recording interactions. It has been nice using inventory tracking for software licenses and hardware as well.
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.
Support has been very good. Any time there has been a real issue, the team has responded very quickly and identified the issue without a lot of repetitive questions that I've seen from other services. There is a great external community and internal knowledge base that covers pretty much anything you need.
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.
Connectwise targets small to medium enterprises and kept things simple for cross-organizational communications. On the other hand, ServiceNow with users with more than 500 at least, tends to create lag and tension when all are using the app at the same time, especially getting reports in a timely manner.
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.
