Item: Khoros Communities
Rating: 9
Author: Chris Hemedinger

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the Khoros to host our peer-to-peer support forum for our customers. It's visited by SAS users around the world to find answers to their SAS usage questions, best practices, and to connect with other users and with SAS experts. Our community helps customers to find answers to their questions so they do not need to contact technical support as often. This self-service provides a better customer experience, and of course, it also reduces support costs for SAS.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Optimized for internet search (SEO).
Ease of use for visitors.
APIs and data access.

Cons

Advanced skills needed to style/customize.
Need better support for private groups.
Need to improve timely and comprehensive response to support cases.

Return on Investment

Increases overall web traffic by making good content findable.
Deflects thousands of potential support cases each month, saving tremendous costs.
Increases customer satisfaction. Engaged community members show higher NPS compared to general population of customers.

Scalability

Our Khoros community is hosted in AWS in multiple nodes, and we know that as demand increases this can scale. Khoros manages all of this for us and delivers solid uptime. The community platform is extensible and we can customize the experience in many ways. For example, we used bulk data transactions and our own SAS analytics to build a topic recommendation engine, which we plugged into the community visitor experience using our own services and APIs.

Alternatives Considered

We haven't looked at a different community platform since 2015 when we moved from Jive. (Now Jive is part of Khoros.) Other platforms we use in our digital experience include Sprinklr, Influitive, and Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). All of these offer some sort of community module, but nothing that would meet our needs.

We also have a presence on GitHub and YouTube. But we rely on Khoros for our important branded community experience.

Likelihood to Recommend

Our community is a highly searchable knowledge base of Q&A and expert articles. Thanks to good SEO practices, the content draws millions of visits per year, which we know translates to better customer experience. The insights from Khoros community data are helpful in understanding the usage and engagement. And responses to the built-in "impact survey" help us to quantify deflected support cases and ROI.

We also make heavy use of Khoros APIs to gather data and publish content. We are able to automate some bulletins/announcements using the publishing APIs. We use the bulk data API to pull all transactional data (visits, posts, views, likes, and more) and add to our own enterprise data store for reporting and action.

But, Khoros is not optimized as a technical community. Many visitors expect something like Stack Overflow, and this is a different experience. We aim to provide a richer experience by adding curated content and networking opportunities, and the Khoros community platform is good for that.

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A good partner with deep expertise