A very good contender in the Social platform environment for Enterprise customers
Updated December 18, 2014
A very good contender in the Social platform environment for Enterprise customers
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
14.5
Modules Used
- Community
- Mobile
- Q&A
- Tribal Knowledgebase
- Ideas
Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
Khoros is an enterprise-grade social community platform, which is most commonly used to allow for interactions between B2B and B2C customers, prospects, and partnering in either a Support (call deflection), Marketing, or Collaboration environment or context. Communities deployed by its customers are predominantly external-facing. The product is modular, so it can be expanded with additional functionality over time. Khoros offers connectors to popular enterprise backend systems, such as Salesforce. Additional connections or functionality can be programmed via APIs. Most customers use professional service organizations to launch Khoros for them.
Pros
- Community - it has the robust functionality and all the bells and whistles that customers typically look for
- Out-of-the-box widgets - there are a number of out of the box widgets, such as "Most recent threads" or "Unanswered questions" that can be easily deployed throughout the community. Depending on where you deploy them, e.g., homepage vs. a specific board, these widgets "narrow down" their content based on the context you are in.
- Programmability - well-documented APIs that allow you to custom-program functionality
Cons
- Not a knock on the product per se - but each product in this space follows a certain philosophy. If customers don't want to learn that philosophy and thus force-feed Khoros to do something it's not designed, it becomes hard to implement and maintenance heavy. Same is true with Jive and Salesforce Communities
- Design adaptation sometimes requires a lot of custom-programming. This is often caused by designers not fully understanding how communities work. On the other hand, esp. on homepages, in order to draw people in, a mix of content is often the best approach. And that requires at least some custom-programming for Khoros's integrators
- In a support environment, call deflection has been measurable for many customers. In fact, more and more customers utilize Khoros to deflect a vast majority of the L1 inquiries to the community.
- In a Sales/Marketing area, conversions and upselling are key. Here, Khoros's community can be very instrumental, since experts in the community often can answer questions that the company cannot or is not trusted enough by its customers, e.g., how good are LTE speeds in a certain neighborhood in San Francisco, or, when comparing Phone1 against Phone2 and battery life matters in real-life environments, which phone is better.
- While mileage might vary, we've heard from our customers that a number of them achieved a 20+% call deflection, or a 30+% conversion increase
Khoros is much more established and feature-rich than Salesforce's Community offering. E.g., gamification is implemented well in Khoros (except for Missions and Journeys) whereas Salesforce's offering is rudimentary.
Jive is mainly used for internal communities, whereas Khoros mainly for external communities. Both can do both internal and external, but their roots are different.
Jive is mainly used for internal communities, whereas Khoros mainly for external communities. Both can do both internal and external, but their roots are different.
Using Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
50 - Development, Project Management, Program Management, Support, Sales, Marketing
40 - Technical Architects, Project Managers, Developers, QA, Customer Success Managers, Sales
- Support
- Marketing / Sales
- Collaboration
Khoros Communities (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
As mentioned, they dig into custom code, when certain API calls seem to not work. Are a good stakeholder in resolving my issues. Have helped us in analyses on performance in communities.
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