The Enterprise Community Platform
March 09, 2020
The Enterprise Community Platform
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
I have used Khoros Communities at two organizations to build vibrant communities of customers, partners, and employees to drive to increase engagement, satisfaction, retention, and a host of other imperatives across the business. The primary use case in both instances was scalable support via case deflection and cost reduction. We then leveraged it across a number of other use cases including learning, innovation, ideation, internal collaboration, and corporate communications.
- Robust - The feature/functionality set is best-in-class.
- Scalable - The platform can handle any volume/size community you can throw at it.
- Extensible - APIs and customization frameworks enable great flexibility.
- Workflow capabilities for things like Knowledge Base and Blogs are lacking (updates have been promised for 2020).
- Minor features that are present in other solutions are missing (although the roadmap pace of releases is picking up).
- Reduced overall support costs.
- Accelerated and expanded purchasing decisions.
- Increased efficiency of knowledge sharing and learning delivery.
- Expanded ability to gather customer feedback and turn into actionable insights.
Khoros' Professional Services team is likely the best in the industry in terms of the quantity and quality of insights and success they can deliver. A team of their experts walk you through the entire launch process and stick around to ensure that you are meeting your success criteria for some time after. They also have a technical team that can help you build customizations, integrations, and do design work if you need it.
From an administration and moderation standpoint, the platform is robust and flexible, making it fairly easy to manage and maintain the community on a day-to-day basis. The permissions system in particular is extremely granular and allows for quite a bit of flexibility in managing access and member capabilities.
The built-in analytics work well for general understanding of what is happening in your community. They also have a Bulk Data API that will allow an organization to build an automated solution to extract the data, load it into their own database systems, and build insights reporting/dashboards. This is a truly enterprise capability that works well.
The built-in analytics work well for general understanding of what is happening in your community. They also have a Bulk Data API that will allow an organization to build an automated solution to extract the data, load it into their own database systems, and build insights reporting/dashboards. This is a truly enterprise capability that works well.
- Product feedback
- New feature ideas
- Access to learning and training resources (e.g. product coaching)
The ability to turn community engagement into actionable insights inside of the business has been critical to success. Collecting feedback from customers via ideation and other methods allows us to understand the pulse of what our users need and in-turn deliver a better experience back to them. When customers feel heard and see enhancements being delivered because of their direct feedback, they become advocates and help drive affinity, expansion, and retention for our products inside of their companies.
Ranking, recognition, and rewards are a core piece of a good community strategy. Khoros enabled us to design systems to promote specific behaviors and drive users to engage more than they likely would have otherwise. This helped us surface our most passionate customers that we could then invite to formal super user programs.