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A good partner with deep expertise
March 11, 2020

A good partner with deep expertise

Chris Hemedinger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

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.
  • Optimized for internet search (SEO).
  • Ease of use for visitors.
  • APIs and data access.
  • Advanced skills needed to style/customize.
  • Need better support for private groups.
  • Need to improve timely and comprehensive response to support cases.
  • 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.
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.
A major reason that we partnered with Khoros was their deep expertise in communities. Khoros also hosts its own community ("Atlas") where community professionals can share ideas and practices.

Since our original launch in 2015, Khoros (formerly Lithium) has undergone lots of changes in leadership and personnel. However, they remain good partners with a deep bench of community experts.
We use the Khoros APIs and bulk data to understand our customers and optimize their experience on the community site. Community data isn't an island to itself --- it's important to pull that data into our larger ecosystem of customer data to help drive campaigns and account-based marketing. Our small community team makes these insights available to other colleagues too. We operated as a hub-and-spoke model, where community managers can facilitate the platform, but others can use the community to enhance the customer relationship.
  • Product feedback
  • New feature ideas
  • Access to learning and training resources (e.g. product coaching)
We use the ideation feature of Khoros to gather product suggestions. We then work with product teams to provide feedback and "close the loop", so community members can see how their suggestions have influenced product development.

We also publish articles from experts on tried-and-true highly search topics, as well as on topics that are emerging and ahead of the demand. We combine our community content with content from other channels, such as YouTube videos, webinars, and blog articles.
Our Super Users are one of the most valuable components of our community program. We recognize these users publicly, and we reward them with swag and privileges in the community. The Khoros platform makes it easy to identify Super Users by their activity and helpfulness. And it's easy to grant them special privileges to do even more, such as reassign topic categories, perform light edits, and mark spam.
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.
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.