My experience with 3 years of working with Khoros Communities
May 10, 2022

My experience with 3 years of working with Khoros Communities

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Our Community was designed to be a Support style community. We put emphasis on Accepted Solutions and having our members find and get access to information as fast as possible.

Support in our Business is an additional fee, so having the community to support Trial/Lite users or even more advanced paying users is great for us to have where customers can support other customers with 1 to many.

We also use the Idea Exchange which quickly became one of the most popular areas in the community. The ideas started flowing as soon as it went live and has come with it's own set of problems.

Pros

  • Their own Community, Atlas, is a good way to learn and interact with other customers and professionals in the industry.
  • Their release cadence is pretty consistent with no updates coming out every few months. The release notes are decently filled out with links to more specific documentation.
  • The Khoros Communities platform is also very solid. It's their main product offering and has a lot of out-of-the-box features that would allow anyone to easily start up a community quite easily.

Cons

  • I feel that the professional services engagements need to be better. There is a lot of miscommunication, and a lack of clear outcomes, goals, and timelines. It can take weeks to get meetings on the books and a team assembled to start getting work done.
  • Documentation on their website, at times, is outdated or incorrect. Sometimes the product doesn't even work as described in some of their documentation
  • The admin console could use a nice fresh UI overhaul. While it's functional, it would be nice to see a more modern UI for the area where most community managers are spending a decent amount of time
  • We are able to see what our different cohorts of customers are doing within the community, and we are able to create content and programs based on the engagement we get from these different groups.
  • We have been able to start an Idea Exchange space where our customers can share, vote, and comment on features they would like to see in our products. It quickly became a very popular place within the Community.
  • With the discussion forums, we are able to use the Accepted Solutions functions to help deflect tickets and Support interactions working on a 1-to-many scale.
In my experience so far, we have not had any issues with scaling the platform to fit our needs at all.
We have worked with professional services to improve our home page to make content more discoverable and add some CTAs across the site to make certain actions we believe would benefit the community more visible and actionable.

We've also engaged with Strategic services to understand our current ranking system and it turns out, it was created pretty poorly and they offered some very easy solutions to implement so improve on those.
The recent addition of the Bulk Content Archive has been huge! In our specific community, a content cleanup has been long overdue, so having this feature which allows us to narrow down the content that isn't getting views and easily archive them was a HUGE feature for them to roll out.

I just recently archived nearly 700 pieces of content making room for more discussions and easily discoverability of existing content.
  • Product feedback
  • New feature ideas
Launching the Idea Exchange was a big task and it quickly became a very busy and popular place within the community! These things are not easy to launch or manage.
It's been awesome to get feedback from customers in their own words and it allows other customers to comment and vote on other customers' ideas allowing the popular ones to rise to the top.
The company was already using this platform when I was hired, so it's what I had to work with. In a previous role, I did explore Khoros Communities as a platform and it was one I really wanted to use, but it's a very expensive platform so I wasn't able to move forward with it.

Back to my current role, again, this is who we already had a contract with.

Do you think Khoros Communities delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Khoros Communities's feature set?

Yes

Did Khoros Communities live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Khoros Communities go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Khoros Communities again?

Yes

Overall, Khoros offers a killer suite of products for any organization to create and run an awesome community that fits their needs. The flipside to this, how feature-packed their products are. While their products can work right out of the box, it's always nice to have your site designed to fit the branding of the overall company or a look and feel that the owner of the community wants.

Engaging with their professional services area can be tough and projects take much longer than I would normally expect. So you may want to think about 3rd part companies that are good at working with the Khoros Communities platform.

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