Khoros Communities vs. Zoho CRM Plus

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

Starting with campaigns, once we send the campaign out, prospects who open it are moved into the sales funnel; the sales team then calls or emails the prospect. Our VOIP works in conjunction with Zoho CRM Plus, so phone calls are logged into the contact. And generates another call, letter, or appointment with the client on the Zoho calendar. Emails are sent through Gmail since Zoho CRM Plus does not work with Gmail. The client's email must be copied and pasted into Gmail. (responses are tracked in the Zoho CRM Plus). Once the sales team meets with the client and starts the process, it turns into an "opportunity" where all stages in the sale are tracked. We mail merge the contact info to the correct letter template, then download it into "Word," where the letter is proofed and corrected as necessary (Zoho merge does not allow you to work in "Word" 2019). When finalized, it is then uploaded back into Zoho CRM Plus under the Opportunity. The sale then continues through the process, and once signed off on, all the details of the job are logged into the Zoho CRM Plus. When the job is completed and closed out, Zoho CRM Plus automatically sends the client a thank you email. The client will then can biannual automatic emails reminding them to set up their bi-annual inspection.

• 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

• I use Zoho Social the most. There is a feature called "Bulk Scheduler". By uploading a spreadsheet with a number of posts I can schedule out up to 300 social posts to our Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google accounts at once. Then on the specified day and time, the posts go live. I typically only do a couple of weeks at a time so that I can keep the posts relevant to topics we are concerned with.
• Pemco sells surgical instruments to hospitals. The end users are the surgeons. Surgeons may have privileges at multiple hospitals. In order for us to accurately reflect the information about our doctors and hospitals, Zoho CRM Plus has a "many-to-many" feature. This allows doctors to be associated with multiple hospitals, and hospitals to have many doctors associated.
• I use the territory management feature to track sales by representatives. This is also a feature unique to Zoho CRM Plus. This helps us track commissions for the reps.

• 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

• I think that Outlook integration with Zoho CRM is horrible. You have no control over where the emails get attached and IMAP does not always work as it should. One reason we are considering leaving the platform.
• Having all emails show up on an account vs having to go to each contact would be great. It used to do this but no longer with IMAP.

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.

I personally started off as a CRM novice. But in a matter of 2 months, I was writing my own custom workflows, playing with modules and fields, and training my sales and operations teams to manage leads and accounts. Simply put, the system is intuitive after a brief introduction. The level of customization is staggering until you change your mindset. Zoho CRM Plus excels where you're able to attack your goals as problems already solved in the platform — you just need to locate the feature to make what you want to happen... happen! I equate it to the Adobe Creative Suite. You don't pick the fun filter before you lay out what exactly you want to draw. With that mindset intact, you can dial in the system to meet your and your team's needs based on your proposed SOLUTIONS, not just leaning heavily into a single feature to "force" some ROI.

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.

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.

Every account representative I have worked with has been extremely helpful and nice. You can tell the account reps and support staff truly care about the product and want to provide you with the resources that you need. The response time is also fast for support inquiries and that has been a massive help for us.

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

Zoho CRM is very customizable but compared to Salesforce it is a lot more buggy. Support is lacking but you get what you pay for. Overall we are happy but only because we are not paying a fortune!

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

• Cut down our CRM costs by 50% + without losing any functionality that we needed.
• Helped us increase our win percentages by helping us following our unique sales and marketing processes. (doubled sales bookings up until COVID and then still grew 10% in the COVID year)
• Helped us in managing our partnering programs.