Khoros Communities

Formerly Spredfast + Lithium

Forum.

I've been working on Khoros Communities platform since 2012... so I can judge the scalability. The community structure has known very poor evolution. If I judge functionality: poor evolution so poor scalability. If I judge the capacity of the platform to grow with more traffic and more members: it is ok! I can give 9/10.

Hard to predict the future due to financial constraints

no idea. No possibility to skip this question

Hard to say more, the product didn't change deeply

Khoros Communities is very well suited for someone looking to provide a curated look and feel, and experience to their customer rather than just Vanilla. You can develop and match it with your brand needs and create custom components, pages as needed. It is also very robust in terms of integration. Even for someone new it is very easy to use and provide a lot of value with OOTB components and features.

Platform is highly scalable. With its robust SaaS framework and Horizontal Scaling we can scale and create new areas without sacrificing user experience.

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

Overall its been good experience however support has been slow and there has been other technical issues that we have faced

I would still recommend Khoros as it is currently the best in the industry. However, I have seen competitors coming with better features that include AI and a lot of automation. Notifications, gamification is great for Khoros. Lot of features are outdated, like private messaging, Analytics Survey, Community Analytics. Support is also average and takes a lot of time to resolve issues. It is very difficult to raise an enhancement request in Khoros and barely gets noticed. Enhancements should be individually handled and looked into.

Poor SEO features and no dedicated support team available to perform analysis on dropping SEO numbers.

Slow and mostly try to put it back as customer's issue.

Apart from what Khoros does best (managing and surfacing UGC), it is very well suited for support or sales support communities when an existing CRM is involved. During the selection process, it's important to fully understand what prospects want and why. E.g., if they want to encourage people to post, Q&A might be the module you want to put front and center, whereas if you want people to engage with existing content first, you might want to deemphasize content creation a bit. It's important to understand the prospect's philosophy to help them guide to the best approach.

Knowledgable, does custom code analysis to point out issues that might make the code not work (well), have a great developer community that can help, even if their support does not.

It's a great value.

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.

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).

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.

It is easy as could be to use. Clients can also use it easily. The analytics are easy to use.