Next Generation of Khoros Communities: Revolutionizing Customer Experience

Online communities serve as a platform where customers can connect not only with each other but also develop a loyal and strong bond with the brand itself.

This fosters engagement, self-service support, and the sharing of knowledge and ideas about the brand’s offerings. Leading companies see brand communities as crucial to their customer experience strategy.

However, creating a successful, sustainable community can be challenging for some businesses. Without the right guidance; building, integrating, and customizing a robust community is tough. Measuring its business impact and ensuring user-friendly navigation are also common hurdles.

The next generation of Khoros communities streamlines this process. It enables quicker launches, easy customization for optimal member experiences, and innovative impact measurement methods. With a feature-rich Khoros community, brands realize their community goals faster and more efficiently.

Let’s explore the trends fueling the evolution of next-generation online communities and the demand for improved community software.

Evolving Needs and Characteristics of Next-Gen Communities

In today’s highly competitive business realm, several overarching dynamics are driving the demand for brand-owned community solutions. Having a clear understanding of these dynamic trends is imperative to get a competitive-edge.

Let’s take a look at the mission-critical trends of next-gen communities:

1. Cost Reduction Imperative: Executives are under pressure to trim expenses, and one significant opportunity lies in the contact center. Transitioning customer support to self-service communities can effectively deflect costly phone calls and reduce the burden on agents, resulting in substantial savings.

2. Elevated Customer Expectations: Rising customer expectations pose a challenge on brand loyalty. Modern consumers and businesses now expect self-service options, rapid responses, personalized experiences, peer-to-peer interactions, and a preference for digital engagement. Brands that fail to adapt, risk higher customer attrition rates, necessitating a transformation of their customer journeys.

3. Monetization of Social Networks: Social platforms are increasingly transitioning from offering free services to monetizing their capabilities. This shift prompts major brands to reassess their social channel strategies, ensuring that the outcomes align with their investments. While brands will continue to engage customers on established platforms, there’s a growing interest in developing brand-owned channels.

4. Ownership of Customer Data: With the impending cookieless future and growing privacy concerns, more brands seek to possess first-party customer data and establish direct customer relationships. These steps are vital for protecting both their business interests and customer privacy, ensuring long-term sustainability.

5. Integration with Emerging Technologies: To remain competitive in the intricate tech landscape, brands must embrace emerging technologies such as ChatGPT, the metaverse, blockchain, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Integrating these innovations is essential for staying relevant and meeting evolving consumer demands.

A Closer Look at What’s New: Highlighting Key Features

The all new Khoros platform redefines the possibilities of customer engagement. It empowers leading enterprises to create dynamic, brand-owned spaces where customers can seamlessly engage, self-serve, collaborate, and educate one another about products, services, and experiences.

Khoros places a significant emphasis on efficiency. With this revolutionary version, online communities can be launched faster, customized with ease, and optimized for exceptional member experiences. The end result? Brands can achieve their customer engagement goals more rapidly, all while investing fewer resources.

This next-generation solution comes packed with game-changing features:

Streamlined Setup, Boundless Possibilities: Communities can now be deployed and evolved swiftly, requiring minimal setup services, thanks to an array of meticulously designed and preconfigured templates.

Effortless Customization With Drag-and-Drop Design: Empower your community management team to easily tailor page layouts, navigation, and design elements with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, eliminating the need for custom coding.

Elevated Insights at Your Fingertips: Uncover valuable insights effortlessly through a revamped analytics app within ‘administrator settings’. This enhanced feature offers access to new analytics APIs, health and engagement metrics, reports, and more, facilitating data-driven decision-making.

AI-Enhanced Moderation for Efficient Community Management: Propel your community management efforts with workflow automation, organizational tools, and AI-driven content filters. This allows your team to allocate more time to strategic planning and less on routine tasks.

Unleash Creativity With an Open, Flexible Platform: Create unique community experiences and custom integrations without constraints. Thanks to an evolved API-first architecture complemented by a robust new GraphQL layer.

Enhanced Member Engagement: Boost member engagement with visually appealing, responsive, and accessible end-user experiences powered by an updated web application framework. Deliver a seamless and enjoyable community experience, all while boosting ROI.

Key Advantages of Next-Gen Khoros Communities

The forthcoming iteration of Khoros communities promises robust capabilities that will reshape the landscape for members, business leaders, and community managers. It brings substantial value, revolutionizing the deployment, management, and scalability of communities.

1. Enhanced Productivity for Community Managers

The platform’s intuitive drag-and-drop design empowers community managers to implement changes swiftly, eliminating the need for IT involvement. Preconfigured templates facilitate a rapid start, while AI-powered moderation and workflow automation streamline back-end tasks, enhancing efficiency.

2. Reducing Total Cost of Ownership

Khoros Communities’ user-friendly interface and pre-packaged setup significantly diminish the TCO of communities. It reduces or eliminates expensive implementation services, minimizes the demand for paid development resources for system integration and maintenance, and eases customization. AI-driven moderation also lightens the workload for community managers, enabling cost-effective community support.

3. Validating ROI and Enabling Data-Driven Decisions

Advanced insights, including new analytics dashboards, widgets, and APIs, empower community teams to make informed decisions and share real-time insights across the organization. Additionally, the solution facilitates quicker, more focused innovation through bulk-data APIs and a community firehose, feeding data to analytics engines such as Microsoft Power BI.

4. Expanding the Reach and Impact

The revamped architecture adopts an API-first approach and streamlined developer workflows, facilitating the rapid creation of custom integrations. This enables users to seamlessly connect with their entire tech stack and harness valuable community data throughout their journey.

5. Delivering Impactful Member Experiences and Achieving Organic Growth

Above all, this version accelerates organic growth by attracting and engaging new community members. Improved, user-friendly experiences drive active participation, fueling community success. As members engage with the brand and each other, their user-generated content, enriched with high SEO value, also contributes to reducing customer acquisition costs.

Khoros’ Vision Behind the Update

Khoros’ CEO, Chris Tranquill, emphasizes the industry-redefining nature of this launch. He highlights how online communities play an invaluable role in building loyalty and trust, and how this release empowers brands to deliver superlative customer experiences.

In setting a new standard for customer-brand connections, Khoros reaffirms its 20-year commitment to providing enterprise brands with top-notch technology to engage with their customers wherever they are.

What Does the Future Hold for Khoros Communities?

In today’s digital landscape, online communities are indispensable for fostering customer loyalty and trust. With Khoros’ innovative next-generation solution, brands can overcome the challenges of community management and create powerful, efficient, and customer-centric online spaces.