Khoros is awesome. Training the only weak spot.
November 21, 2012

Khoros is awesome. Training the only weak spot.

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

Overall Satisfaction with Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

Pros

  • Khoros supports our complex and asymmetrical social media deployment effortlessly. We can configure user permissions, workflow, and analytics in whatever ways are necessary to support the many accounts and users we have in play at any time. We can easily modify our approach as our business needs change.
  • Khoros is responding actively to customer feedback, adding features based on the needs of customers as well as looking forward to how the social media space will be changing in the coming 12-24 months.
  • The Khoros team is a true partner to our team, always looking for ways to make us more successful.
  • The primary use cases for us are:
  • Publishing / scheduling of posts
  • Engagement
  • Analytics
  • Khoros does every one of these very well. In addition, we needed a hyper-configurable tool that would enable us to set up complex permission rules for different types of users. Khoros does this very well.
  • We also required very flexible analytics that would allows us to pull analytics for a hierarchy of entities: Store; City; State; Region; Country. Khoros does all of this out of the box. The analytics package has been completely re-designed and is highly effective for distributed customers like us (companies like Target, Starbucks, and Aramark have the same needs).
  • The company is extremely responsive to customer needs. Their innovation is very largely based on customer needs. We feel like we have a voice.
  • The UI used to be very obviously “designed by engineers”, but has now been completely re-designed based on customer feedback and is highly flexible and easy to use.

Cons

  • Training has been a bit problematic. Part of the issue is that they have designed a product that is so configurable, that it’s difficult to design training that suits every use case. Khoros has definitely not cracked the code on training, however.
  • Detailed analytics we are able to pull from the system are immediately impacting our decision making as we look to scale our business to 1,000 stores. This will save us money in the end, paying easily for the cost of the system. We’re also able to optimize content development and better integrate social into our marketing mix.
• Yes, we evaluated other systems. I immediately eliminated any vendors that did not have enterprise clients listed on their websites. Also, a couple of vendors never called me back (Sprinklr and Buddy Media).
• Our eventual shortlist comprised:
• Khoros • Vitrue
• Context Optional (Adobe Social)
One of the reasons Khoros won our business is because they were highly consultative and took the time to understand our business. For needs as complex as ours, this was very important.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

100 - • Main users are store marketers. Only about 100 are using the product today, but the goal is to roll the product out to over 2,500 users.
  • Publishing – sharing relevant, customer-centric content focused on our brand as well as store-level information such as sales, events, and community engagement.
  • Engagement – responding to customer questions and conversations in Twitter and Facebook.
  • Analytics – optimizing our publication and engagement opportunities as well as understanding how social fits into our larger integrated marketing mix.

Evaluating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) and Competitors

We were previously using CoTweet.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Implementation

  • Implemented in-house
• • Implementation has been difficult and slow but due almost entirely to internal issues and the “housekeeping” that comes with implementation social media management. Part of the problem has been lack of proper internal resources to fully focus on the deployment – an issue we’ve recently solved for so our deployment is moving along very quickly. The most difficult part of the deployment is auditing the organization to understand all the Twitter and Facebook accounts that exist across the organization. We then need to find the credentials for all of these accounts and shut some of them down. This is a bit of a logistical nightmare. Because we have now hired someone to manage this process and have recognized the need for a social media operations team, accounts for 9 o four 12 regions are fully loaded into the system and we expect all to be completed by the end of 2013. Having social media marketers try to manage this enterprise rollout was not a good idea.
• We have also encountered some technical issues in the stores. Some staff members have old computers with unsupported browsers, and this has been an unexpected issue to deal with.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
We did several different types of training. We went there for initial training, and we had them send a trainer to our facilities. We also used online webinars extensively. In general, I thought that the training needed to be a little more formal. It tends to be more of a software tour, rather than actual hands-on training. This is an opportunity for improvement that they are aware of and working on.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Support

• The Khoros team always responds quickly to questions of all levels from around our business; they do an excellent job of supporting both novice and advanced users.

Using Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

As they have completely re-designed the UI, it is great now. Much better than it used to be. One of the things I really like is the concept of a “workspace” I can define the UI experience for different classes of users. One of the problems with the UI before was that it was very cluttered and confusing. I can now remove functionality from the UI that is not required by a certain role so that the user experience is much more intuitive.

Integrating Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)

  • The only integration we are planning is that between our listening tool Brandwatch and Khoros.
We are not building this integration internally. The vendors are working on this together.

Khoros Marketing (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) Reliability

• We still experience a bit of downtime and slowness here but things have drastically improved in the last year with their feature updates and reconfigured hosting.

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