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
Zendesk Support Suite
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
The Zendesk Support suite is a cloud-based customer support software built for better customer relationships. Designed to improve customer satisfaction and to support customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media. The vendor states more than 200,000 companies such as Uber, Groupon, Box, Airbnb, and Slack are using Zendesk to lower their support costs, raise productivity, and increase customer satisfaction. Zendesk offers a full suite of products to meet customer…
$19
per agent/month billed annually
Pricing
Khoros Communities
Zendesk Support Suite
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Support Team (Foundational Support Only)
$19.00
per agent/month billed annually
Suite Team
$49.00
per agent/month billed annually
Suite Growth
$79.00
per agent/month billed annually
Suite Professional
$99.00
per agent/month billed annually
Suite Enterprise
$150.00
per agent/month billed annually
Additional Enterprise-Ready Plans, starting at...
$215.00
per agent/month billed annually
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros Communities
Zendesk Support Suite
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.
Zendesk Support Suite implementation means an industry-class help desk with a dynamic interface that brings together all customer interactions from almost any channel allowing agents to respond faster to customer queries and with the right context. It is more than just a help desk since it also acts as a CRM by allowing us to organize workflows, processes and track customer engagement.
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
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
There has not been a reason to consider anything else as the core functions work perfectly for ticketing. Also Zendesk continues to focus on new functionality, growth of the API and Apps framework and add more partner application to the list. Not only will be renew but it is likely we will add seats as we grow and expand our customer focused teams.
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.
As an agent it's very simple to use. As an admin it's also easy to use, but sometimes lacks some functionality that would be nice to have such as expanded native 2 way sync functionality for many major apps that are commonly used today like HubSpot and Salesforce. The ability to add followers to tickets to they get updates and are in the know without the customer seeing this agent cc'd is a nice touch. This ensures additional visibility and easily following the communication without having to appear as a CC to the customer, who could accidentally remove that person in a response, thus breaking the visibility
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.
Every time I contacted them they were not only very responsive and knowledgable, but always seemed to have a positive upbeat attitude. It probably helps that we did not have significant service outages or sev 1 level issues, but even my lower severity issues were quickly answered. And the positive and upbeat attitude really made things feel comfortable.
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.
Zendesk has tons of available material for training - videos, webinars, articles, etc. The only reason this is not a 10 is because it can be hard to figure out how to navigate to these things and find what you are looking for.
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).
I was very satisfied. They have a free trial for 30 days and I recommend you do that and use it. It is very easy to get started with the basics and the build on over time.
The only thing technically complex was single sign-on and integration to Salesforce.com required some tweaks – otherwise setting up system was very easy
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?
I have not used any other support software, but also evaluated FreshDesk. For our needs at the time, Zendesk was more polished and had the ability to support multiple websites in a single instance, while allowing customization for each brand separately. That was crucial to us, and is why we went with Enterprise.
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.
