Khoros Communities vs. Salesforce Experience Cloud

The given FAQs, tutorials, and resources for self-service reduced support tools, Loop for Product Feedback gives insightful consumer feedback to help with products to meet growing needs. Businesses could succeed by utilizing the Khoros community as a strategic tool, which educates consumers and facilitates meaningful discussions.

Incentivized

[Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Salesforce Community Cloud)] seems to be very well suited for what we want to use it for, which is to allow customers to have access to their ongoing and already-resolved cases, which will save our customer success team time and allow for transparency. It also seems well-suited for fine-tuning knowledge libraries, as it allows you to track the knowledge articles that are most impactful (and conversely, those that are less impactful) as you are able to track the path that customers use to self-serve ahead of submitting a ticket. I haven't run into any scenarios yet where we wanted to use Experience Cloud as a solution but discovered that it wasn't a fit.

Incentivized

• Collaboration with other Khoros customers to understand what works and doesn't work within other communities.
• Support documentation makes it easy to find information when looking for technical resources.
• Our account team is always in communication with us to ensure we are aware of roadmap updates.

Incentivized

• Complete integration with the Salesforce ecosystem. Data displayed in your Community portal reflects records from a Sales Cloud organization
• Highly customizable. A Community Cloud portal can be totally customized both visually and with different funcionalities with little to no coding skills required

Incentivized

• Self Service, Low and No Code. The Community Managers should be able to some UI Tasks by self with doing any code updates.
• Salesforce Integration: The basic Integration should also include the basic level of business requirement. (Contacts and Accounts Mapping)
• Slack Connector Update: There is no update on this connector till the time its launch. The other team has lot of options to push the notification in multiple slack channels. And unfortunately Khoros does not. This creates a lot work for Community team to bring internal teams to the community to respond or acknowledge an post.
• More Integrations: Since now the Khoros communities does not comes up with the integrations with basic support tools like JIRA, Confluence, Github etc.
• Search Improvisation: Apart from last search update there is no updates we see in this feature. The team should think of Putting Some AI based Search into the community which helps the Community managers to manage the content accordingly
• Some update on AI and Gen AI: Khoros communities did not shared any thoughts about their plans for putting these technology in community

• None that come to mind - integrations, experience, and use is great! However, if you're trying to learn it yourself, you may benefit from consulting an expert. Or, if you're wondering if it's good for you, a business analysis will suit you well before you implement to save yourselves, time, money, efforts, and even people.

Incentivized

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give Khoros Communities a solid 8. The system is extremely easy to use, enabling our team and community members to navigate and interact with the platform with ease. The wide range of features offered by Khoros Communities has greatly enriched our online interactions and improved the efficiency of our customer service. The technical support team has also been extremely helpful, could be quicker sometimes for answering our questions but they efficiently resolving any problems we have encountered. The platform is perfectly scalable, capable of handling our growing user base without any performance problems. What's more, Khoros Communities offers excellent integration capabilities with our other software tools, making our operations smoother and more efficient

Incentivized

Like every backend, it can always be improved upon. The excellent thing is that Khoros have a hugely active customer support community as well as a fantastic case management system to triage support issues and requests. So regardless of your level of knowledge or familiarity, you're well supported out of the box.

Usability is pretty streamlined, especially if you're familiar with other Salesforce products, but even if not, take it from me, as I just entered the technological space about two years ago, that this product is pretty simple to learn. You don't have to jump in with your head underwater. Small wins and learnings along the way are what foster long-term understandings and enable your evolution alongside the product. I definitely recommend Salesforce Trailhead along with it

Incentivized

I've hardly ever seen downtime in any of their production communities. There's the occasional reboot needed for config reasons or if patches are applied, but these take place after customer approval and typically last only a few minutes.

Through ease of use and expandability, I think that Community Cloud is a best in class at exposing Salesforce integrations, as well as expandability in working through building custom add-ons for Salesforce for collaborations and self-service. Additionally, the speed to market on these changes are lightning-quick and allow for experimentation.

Incentivized

They are responsive and proactive. They are really on top of things. They send personal emails to check in on you. It feels like they really know you. You only get emails from 3-4 people at Khoros – they must be customer assigned.

We have weekly calls with our Salesforce reps. They bring new ideas to the table and help with taxonomy builds. They have also answered many questions and connected us to the right people for us to grow our knowledge and utilization of the platform. They are a good partner overall in comparison.

Incentivized

I think it is engaging and has good instructors.

Incentivized

It was out of the box training - pre-recorded/ not live. There was nothing for more advanced topics like APIs. They do have a good knowledge base and community that you can access and folks in there are responsive. I would however like more advanced training options.

We were up against a hard stop with Jive’s contract ending and Khoros connected us with a deployment partner to do accelerated deployment using a template approach. It could have happened in 2 weeks. We did not end up going that way since we wanted more customization. Lithium handled technical stuff like migration, but a lot of the process is self-deployment. It’s one of the ways they teach use of the system is having the user self-implement.

Overall, the implementation was super easy to do. Doing single sign-on (SSO) was the only hard part. The implementation ended up taking nine weeks total, but in hindsight, we could have done in it six. Most of the implementation time was spent in course work, which consisted of on-demand training - approximately 7-8 hours that you are required for you to do, before they turn on the system. During this nine week period, about 50% of my time was spent on implementation.

We had a deployment manager who we were able to email 1-1. I leaned on him heavily. He was great at all hours, for example, they would call back at 7pm PST. They were very responsive.

Content migration strategy is important to consider. Moving from an existing community you need to strategically choose how your layout will be. Two different systems will have two different ways to format communities. For example, Jive has communities with sub-communities, whereas Khoros has community, category, and boards.

Contact migration is also an important consideration. You need to think through how you are going to move contacts from your old community to a new one. For example, are you going to create new logins and passwords? We were hoping to use the integration with Salesforce.com to be a portal, but ended up using an in-house solution that works well to maintain same the same logins. The next related question is are you going to be able to keep them connected to all the posts in your old community? We migrated old posts. If you have a tech-savvy team, you can do a self-migration. Khoros has a migration services team that we utilized. It cost us $10k to move content and posts were kept tied to the user.

The next consideration is your launch/promotion plan. Khoros helped us out and gave us a lot of examples. They shared pre-launch email dates, follow-up emails, FAQ pages (e.g. to explain why switching, why better).

Khoros Communities is like a tool for companies to create and manage online groups where customers can talk, share, and get help. It's all about building a community. On the other hand, SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is like a big toolbox for businesses. It helps them do many things like building apps, managing data, and connecting different parts of their business. So, Khoros is more about talking and engaging with customers online, while SAP BTP is a toolkit for handling various tech needs in a business. They serve different purposes based on what a company needs.

Incentivized

Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.

Incentivized

I think I would give Khoros an overall 7, while there were things we really liked about it. I also saw things that just did not work well for us. We like using iG but it was not the friendliest in using it on that platform. Sometimes the software would glitch or lag which is not helpful during high critical moments

Incentivized

• Reduce customer service costs due to how easy it is to resolve issues with a service or product directly on the Khoros Communities platform.
• Improve our logistics system and help inform the quality of our services in the best way.
• Khoros Communities was implemented in a very short time and does not require additional administrative expenses.

Incentivized

• Its given us much better issue and customer satisfaction tracking, since before Community Cloud much of our communications were extremely siloed within Outlook. We had no visibility because communications happened on an individual basis rather than a holistic level (the company).
• We've increased user interaction and given our customers a reason to come to the website repeatedly.
• Our costs have gone up, naturally, as the system proves to be a strong solution. We have pulled in other resources and teams which requires more licenses. I guess that's a sign of success but also a cost.

Incentivized