Khoros Communities vs. WalkMe

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.

Incentivized

• New system implementation - if you're switching or upgrading systems, you can ease users through the transition by providing in-system contextual guidance, extra tips, and automating clicks they don't need to worry about.
• Data integrity - if you have users making mistakes in the system, you can add validation with WalkMe without the need for developer time and reduce those errors and upstream problems, and related costs
• Reducing support tickets - if you have support tickets coming through about how to do tasks in a system, you can reduce the time and cost of your support staff answering these tickets by addressing the queries with WalkMe content
• Change management - ease users through change with guidance and provide in-system surveys
• Onboarding - bring new users quickly up to speed with onboarding tasks
• Automation - automate your regular processes and cut system time, freeing users up for more important tasks
• Process/system analysis - use the analytics to track where users are dropping off in processes and making errors and address these with WalkMe content
• User experience - make your system more user friendly

Incentivized

• Collaboration with other Khoros customers to understand what works and doesn't work within other communities.
• Support documentation makes it easy to find information when looking for technical resources.
• Our account team is always in communication with us to ensure we are aware of roadmap updates.

Incentivized

• Ease of use and getting up-to-speed in a few days only. WalkMe can be used by new users easily and quickly, yet provides a many advance features for power users to keep exploring and creating innovative solutions--there are always some things that you have not used earlier
• Great analytics on our platform, usage and adoption by users, and surveys
• Very friendly community of users who help each other all the time and structured upskilling programs, weekly tips keep the learning going

• 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

Incentivized

• Firefox plugin: The only time I use Firefox is when building a walk-thru. I would like to be able to use Chrome to build the walk-thrus.
• Logic: Walk-thrus, Launchers, Shoutouts and walk-thru steps use different logic. I can't always fire something based on a click or URL when sometimes I would like to.
• Design: You can use CSS to customize the look of your walk-thrus, but there isn't a way to remove the sidebar color of the walk-thrus.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

WalkMe has done a great job of making their tool easy to use. However because it is a Firefox plugin it causes me to need another browser and sacrifice the left 2 - 3 inches of my display, when working on a laptop this makes it a bit painful. Also when publishing you can organize your list of walk-thrus, the window size is small and limited to the constraints of the WalkMe tool.

Incentivized

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.

The WalkMe Support Team was phenomenal. My support rep made a genuine effort to ensure my success with using the WalkMe Software. She was kind, patient, and very knowledgeable on the software. If there was a question she did not know the answer too, she would find the answer and get back to me as soon as possible

Incentivized

I think it is engaging and has good instructors.

Incentivized

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?

Incentivized

My understanding is that WalkMe was selected based on its capability to support our requirements for our enterprise software. We wanted a product that allows us to provide help at the point of need, provide as little or as much help to guide the user to successfully use the product, and a product that is scalable and can support our growing capabilities.

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.

Incentivized

• When we switched from Yammer to here, it really increased visibility of the community to the general public, the media, and in search results.
• It's created dynamic relationships and shortened the gap between Microsoft employees, MVPs, and other users.
• It's been a great place for software products to gather feedback from users, and for users to feel they have the inside track.

Incentivized

• With a promise to help onboard, we found that as people interacted with the walk throughs they didn't get any significant value. Self-service wasn't improved, in fact, we got more complaints from the walk throughs than help from them.
• NPS surveys were a nightmare to try and integrate with our CRM so we could action the results. Lost time and energy without much support from the WalkMe team
• No improvement to our Product Adoption, so all cost and time and energy spent on implementation was a loss.