Item: Khoros Communities
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Self-service support for IT professionals that are using our product, getting feedback from them and creation of the brand advocates. Thanks to the forums our users can:

Get the answers for their product-related questions both from other users or from the company employees.
Easily get the answer for their problems just by using a search engine (instead of contacting support).
Post their ideas for the product, that are later evaluated by Product Managers.
Participate in the feedback threads, in which they can comment on product feature.
Talk directly with people that are creating the product.
Share their experiences with others, post tips, tricks and best practices socialize with other professionals, participate in challenges, many gamifications options.
And much more.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Many settings and customization options.
Community is easy to use.
Permission management is pretty vast.
Moderation is easy and there are many options.

Cons

Better and quicker engine.
Support is uneven.
Better communication about upcoming changes.

Return on Investment

Easier targeting key users.
Better UI/UX of the forums.
Scaling self-service support.

It's good to the point - there are some problems with the platform at the moment, that should be addressed with the new "Aurora" project. At the moment, while there are many options, setting, customizations, some of them are strangely limited, which makes developing the community great on the basic level, but with time there will be some hard-to-break walls.

Customer Support

While support of Khoros is uneven, they've helped us many times in creation of a good experience for the users in many different ways. Sometimes it takes a long time, but the community goals were usually achieved. Khoros Communities is also a great place to get help, although their product ideas section is often very disappointing.

Community Management with Khoros

Analytics are ok and are helping us in our day-to-day work, but they could offer more data. Content management is strong side of the Khoros, we are able to get it where we want it and where we want it. Label/tags system could be better, but it is getting reworked in the future.

Insights Gained From Khoros Communities

Product feedback
New feature ideas
Access to learning and training resources (e.g. product coaching)

Yes, this is a great way to do this. We are using Khoros Communities to gather feedback for the new features, roadmaps, or just new releases. We are posting surveys for them or creating Q&A sessions with Product Managers. Users can post their product ideas, tips and tricks or best practices.

Gamification Features

Yes, having a good permissions system, gamification options, customizations, and private forums and groups allowed us to create a strong Super User program.

Alternatives Considered

AnswerHub, Discourse, Vanilla Forums and Stack Overflow Advertising

Khoros was the best use for our needs and other solutions were always missing at least one or more features that were crucial for our use case and the workaround proposed by other platforms weren't simply enough. Most of them have their strong side and it is hard to say, which is the best for all of the users, but for our needs, this was clearly a winner.

Other Software Used

Jira Software, Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), Atlassian Confluence, Miro

Key Insights

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?

Yes

Did implementation of Khoros Communities go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Khoros Communities again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

This is one of the best community platforms on the market, so it should be a good choice for most of the companies on the market. Especially for the ones, that are just starting their community. Out-of-the-box proposition for the newcomers should be more than enough. Problems with Khoros are coming more in the later stage with developing a community, where the product is lacking some features that would allow more integrations with other tools or customizations, for example. They should be addressed in the future though.

Comments

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Very good platform for the forums, especially for the new communities