A note from Khoros CEO Jack Blaha to celebrate the community managers and moderators that make every online community successful. Community Manager Advancement Day 2022 is Monday, January 24. This professional holiday takes place in January every year to recognize and thank community leaders for their hard work and dedication. Today is Community Manager Advancement Day, and we’re so excited to celebrate the people who make communities in every industry so vibrant and productive. Businesses use their communities to interact with customers along every facet of the customer journey — from top-of-funnel marketing all the way to product support. This has a huge impact on any brand, and it wouldn’t be possible without the people working hard behind the scenes to keep things running smoothly. Community managers step up for their brand to keep customers happy, help share new ideas, and make sure questions are getting answered. So I couldn’t be happier to take some time to celebrate their contribution to one of the best forms of customer engagement out there. Khoros customers have created some of the top performing communities in the world, so I’d like to give them some special recognition today. Hundreds of Khoros powered communities have been crushing it in the past year, generating incredible growth and retention for their companies. Powerschool, for example, added over 70,000 members to their community in 2021, and achieved a 97% CSAT. Esri, who built their community in 2021, saw a 150% YoY increase in new member registrations. And Sky used their Khoros community to achieve a 13 minute average time to resolution. I could go on and on about the incredible things our customers are doing with their communities, but today, I want to recognize the managers who make that magic happen. Thanks to them and many more like them, digital communities are vibrant spaces that encourage all types of interactions and help brands create customers for life. Of course, making a community come to life is a team effort, so I’d also like to recognize the hard work of the community experts on our Strategic Services team here at Khoros. Over 50 of these specialists are dedicated to helping our customers get the most out of this market-leading solution. As every community manager knows, the job is part science and part art, and I’m so grateful to the people who do it every day here at Khoros. Of course, we recognize the contributions of community managers all year long, both on Atlas, our internal community, and elsewhere. But today is an important day to acknowledge their year-long (often round-the-clock!) contributions. I hope you are able to spend some time today and throughout the year furthering your skills as a community manager. Our own community manager of Atlas, @BlakeH, has compiled resources to advance your skills along with ways to share appreciation.  All the best in 2022, Jack ... View more

Community Manager Advancement Day, formerly Community Manager Appreciation Day, is an important day at Khoros. We take today to acknowledge and celebrate both types of community managers: brand-owned communities and social network communities. We’ve always believed that online communities can change the way brands can achieve their purpose and connect customers, partners and employees. This past year turned into a shining moment for digital communities to prove just that. Amid the challenges of 2020, online communities stepped up and showed how valuable they can be. Digital communities allowed brands to address customer service needs at scale, perpetuate brand love, and foster genuine human connection online. None of that is possible without community managers. The people who, day in and day out, engage with customers and prospects, facilitate connections, solve problems, spark conversation, and maintain a constructive and collegial tone. This past year tested all of us, but put special pressure on community managers, so many of whom found themselves on the front lines of escalating tensions, increased volumes, and shorter tempers. Resilience is the theme for this year’s Community Manager Advancement Day and it’s a fitting word to describe the many quiet leaders who held their communities together through uncharted territory. One story that comes to mind is our award-winning customer, Intuit. There’s no pre-written manual for managing a brand-owned community during a global pandemic, but Intuit kept calm and carried on. Intuit’s brand purpose is to “power prosperity around the world,” so they advocate for and educate millions of small businesses and individual taxpayers. Intuit’s global team quickly responded to the crisis at hand by offering agent-staffed forums to foster discussions and peer-to-peer support, hosting Ask An Expert events, and quickly publishing a compilation of best practices and tips. Resilience isn’t just about getting back up again. It’s also about preparing for difficulty and being resilient from the beginning, and that’s exactly how Intuit and its community thrived and will continue to, on a go-forward basis. I want to send personal thanks to the community managers around the world who shepherd the many hundreds of brand-owned communities running on the Khoros Communities platform. At the beginning of April, traffic across Khoros Communities spiked nearly 50%, and in conjunction, so did community engagement and posts. People were going anywhere possible to get answers to undiscovered questions, as we all tried to figure out how to handle something so unexpected. Our own Khoros community, Atlas, was no different. I applaud our Digital Customer Experience, Professional Services, and Strategic Services teams who went above and beyond to support our customers with insightful content, relevant advice, and most importantly, a positive space for everyone to collaborate and simply connect. While Community Manager Advancement Day only happens once a year, community management can — and should — be celebrated everyday. If you haven’t already, join our Atlas Community where you can continue to connect, learn, and share ideas among fellow community experts. Here’s to resilient communities and their fearless community managers leading the way in 2021 — representing the best of human and digital connection. Thank you. ... View more

With the world focused on the growing COVID-19 pandemic, I wanted to share an update from Khoros about what we are doing to protect our teams and communities, as well as some ways we want to be of service to you in these uncertain times. Let me say before I begin that service and support for your Khoros solutions remains and will continue to be unaffected. WIth that said, the health and well-being of our employees and our communities is our foremost concern, and my staff and I are closely monitoring developments and implementing policies to ensure everyone’s mutual safety. Effective today, we have moved from an optional work-from-home model to a mandatory one until further notice.  The Khoros team has best-in-class video conference, chat, and collaboration tools in place to ensure that we can operate our business as usual, whether we’re in the office or working remotely. Our global team is experienced working across our various offices, time zones, and geographies. We  will continue to support you and your efforts, and you should not experience any change in how you work with our teams on a day-to-day basis.  In sum, we have implemented the following precautions: Khoros employees will be working from home until further notice. We will evaluate this policy as we learn new information.   All Khoros staff will have limited travel. My leadership team will have to approve any travel. You can expect traditionally on-site visits to be handled over a video or voice call.  We are prohibiting visitors to our offices. All visitors are prohibited at Khoros Offices until further notice. Any workshops or large group meetings will take place over video conference.  Most importantly, let us help YOU. Khoros represents more than 20 years of combined expertise in digital customer engagement - we can help you to optimize your investment with us to make your digital channels work harder for you. Whether it’s revitalizing digital community engagement, leveraging video capabilities within Community to supplement a virtual event strategy, or tips on fostering brand love in times of crisis, we have expertise that might help. We’ll be sharing content in Atlas on all of that and more in the days and weeks ahead.   For our Khoros Care customers in particular, we recognize the unique impact that COVID-19 is having on your traditional support channels. We’ve put together a webinar for Thursday, March 18th to discuss best practices to help you lean into your digital customer service solution. Invitations for that session will be sent later this week - I encourage you to join us. We continue to monitor the situation closely and look forward to being of continued service. Please rest assured that while we may be virtual, it’s business as usual at Khoros and we are at the ready to support your business in these challenging times.  Thank you and stay healthy, Jack  PS: We are actively monitoring the situation as it relates to our in-person events, and we have decided to postpone our London Engage event (April 2020) to September. We will continue to update you on the status of events as they evolve. We are proceeding with plans for Engage Austin in October and hope you plan to join us!    ... View more

This is a note from Khoros CEO, Jack Blaha, to celebrate Community Manager Appreciation Day on Monday, January 27. This professional holiday takes place the fourth Monday in January as a way to recognize and thank the efforts of Community Managers around the world using social media and other tools to improve customer experiences. ———————— Today is a special day here at Khoros where we take the opportunity to celebrate key team members around the world on Community Manager Appreciation Day. Over the years, communities have made a growing impact on the way businesses interact with their customers and their employees. Behind the scenes of these powerful communities are people who make them work, and drive these interactions: the Community Managers. I’m honored to take a minute to personally celebrate the unique contributions these team members make to help make communities a unique way for companies to engage.   Here at Khoros, we view Community Management as an important part of our objective to help companies create to create customers for life. Every day over 50 Khoros staff help our customers build and grow their communities as part of our Professional and Strategic Services teams. Each online community is unique, but behind every effort is a dedicated team of professionals committed to serving and empowering customers and employees.    Thanks to the dedicated Community Managers around the world, communities are places for users to find and share common interests, contribute ideas for business innovation, and be a part of building the brands they love.   Appreciating and advancing community management is about more than one day a year. Our Atlas Community is a place for Community Managers, by Community managers, where they can connect, learn, and share ways to build better communities in the future.    For more community content, check out: Brian Oblinger and Ashley Smith’s blog post to learn what online and social community managers have in common The Customer Connection area to expand your network and learn from peers The Community Ideas area to share your ideas with Khoros about how we can improve   And if you haven’t already, join the Atlas Community today!   Special thanks to our Atlas team: @DanCr, @LisaI, @JamilaR, @AndyK, and everyone else who makes it run.    Sincerely,   Jack ... View more

Hi everyone, my name is Jack Blaha and I’m honored to share that I’ve joined Khoros as CEO.  I’m thrilled to be here and join this dynamic space. As more and more brands are realizing their growth depends on their reputation in the market, there’s never been a more critical time to get customer engagement right across the entire journey. We are here to help you do just that. Our work is now truly mission critical for your business. More than 80% of consumers agree or strongly agree that they are more loyal to brands who respond to and resolve their complaints. 1  Brands may think they are doing well, but customers see a lot of room for improvement. For example, 91% of customers have received robotic or unhelpful answers from customer care — but only 37% of brands think this happens. 2  And this disconnect can directly affect your bottom line, as 62% of customers say they are likely to switch to a different brand after a negative experience. 3  There’s more work now than ever before for brands to truly connect with their customers throughout their digital journeys — and even more to gain. Customer experience is today’s battleground for differentiation. Our sole purpose at Khoros is to help you create customers for life. I look forward to capitalizing on the combined strengths of our legacy Spredfast and Lithium solutions to accelerate our growth as the leading platform for digital customer engagement. My core focus is to support our world-class team so that we can deliver even more value for you. Together, I know we can define a new standard for exceptional customer experience that will help you to better win, serve, and retain customers. Khoros’ former CEO Pete Hess has been incredibly supportive throughout this transition, and I want to thank him for the leadership that brought Spredfast and Lithium together to create Khoros over the last year. Pete has shared with me many great stories about the amazing brands we serve, and I could not be more excited to continue and build on his great work. With 2,000+ customers, the community of Khoros customers extends worldwide. I am primarily based out of our Austin, Texas office, but I plan to hit the road soon to meet customers around the world. And, of course, I’ll be at Khoros Engage, so make sure to say hi when you see me.  We can all look forward to the tremendous growth that lies ahead. From our whole team, thank you for being part of the Khoros family.  1,2,3: Data from a 2019 Forrester study commissioned by Khoros ... View more