extensive software to manage communities
April 26, 2022

extensive software to manage communities

Eric Starker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

I use Khoros Communities to run an online community called the Microsoft Tech Community, which aims to be a resource for IT professionals, developers and end-users around Microsoft products. We typically focus on use cases, best practices, and other tips and tricks to help a wide variety of users, but we don't focus on support as there are other communities for that.
  • The forum system is robust and fully featured.
  • Blogging system works well and is constantly being improved.
  • There's a lot of analytics available on the back-end!
  • Some analytics are missing such as internal link clicks.
  • Some of the forum organization can use some work, particularly in huge communities where sub-menus would be helpful.
  • Khoros support sometimes takes awhile to fix issues.
  • When we switched from Yammer to here, it really increased visibility of the community to the general public, the media, and in search results.
  • It's created dynamic relationships and shortened the gap between Microsoft employees, MVPs, and other users.
  • It's been a great place for software products to gather feedback from users, and for users to feel they have the inside track.
I am less involved with this side of the work, but we've scaled up pretty well from when I started at about 70k members to around 500k today.
Khoros Support has definitely listened to our concerns and used them to make improvements in the product. Most of what's listed in this section was handled by other folks on our team, however - I only interacted with support if there was a problem.
Analytics has been helpful to showcase our efforts to the higher-ups and stakeholders at Microsoft, and to get a sense of what content is working and some reasonable guesses as to why.
  • Product feedback
  • New feature ideas
We have some communities that use the ideas spaces for feedback. In some cases, they have replaced UserVoice for specific products and saved teams a lot of money for a similar sort of experience. Of course given we are at a large company, we aren't responsible for the entirety of feedback/ideas and a lot of that is handled elsewhere.
I feel customers are definitely interested in ranking up in the community, as well as attaining certain badges such as Member of the Week. I feel like we are primarily out-of-the-box on our gamification and it could use some improvements to be a bit more specific to our community. I wouldn't say it has affected our superusers too much though as we have an established superuser program called the MVP program.

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

Yes

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

I think if you want a robust community with a lot of different features, it's a great fit. It might be less of a fit if your community is more specialized (i.e. maybe if you just had a single forum, it might be overkill). I don't know how it interacts with other software such as sales or social media.