Khoros Communities - a solution if you're looking to scale

Our community platform is used by multiple departments, including marketing and sales. Currently it supports both our support forums as well as our online groups, AMAs, some blogs, and engagement focused content. Currently it's the most adopted solution for creating and serving community within our company. The product is used to create opportunities for, and encourage, peer to peer support, self service support, and connection amongst members.

I've found that the more humans / POCs you work with at Khoros the better off you'll be set up for success. Trying to navigate their software, offerings, and platform without having their staff involved is impossible. We've worked with professional services, we have a technical account manager (TAM), and we'll talk to pretty much any human they let us connect with because that is where you unlock the value of the software. With that said, it comes at a cost, so this isn't a free value add, but in my opinion if you're going to invest in community it's worth it. Their team have helped use with our APIs, reporting, SSO set up, some strategy conversations, and more. If you get the right people on the case, you'll definitely learn from working with these folks.

The moderation manager is the main tool our community managers work through - the built in ability to moderate takes a large and busy community and makes it manageable. We've also found the analytics to be helpful - we primarily use looker (because community analytics links are gated to admins in your community and time out immediately), however when you're looking to quickly pull a number, the analytics tool has you covered 9/10 times. Overall their moderation and operations tools are legit.

Super users love badges, and badges are a key component to gamification. We've now built two gamification systems in Khoros, and they've been received very well. Having the ability to directly integrate our gamification system into our community ensures that people get points and badges for what they're doing, and we don't even have to worry about it. The notifications and badges are granted on the backend without a human needing to micromanage this. It can truly be a set it and forget it (until you need to audit it) experience. We've also used the ranking program to help define super users, which ensures you're giving titles to the folks you want to have titles.