Voting is Open for Khoros Kudos Awards Submissions
Our customers have shared incredible success stories this year for the Khoros Kudos Awards and we need your help determining our finalists and winners for the 11 award categories! Voting starts today and runs for two weeks in Atlas, ending on August 14th. All you have to do to vote is go to the Entries page for the awards and click on the thumbs up — giving a Kudo to all of your favorite submissions. You can vote for as many as you’d like! We’ll announce the winners on Atlas, Khoros social media, and virtually at Khoros Engage on October 14th. We'll also highlight all award submissions as part of the virtual event, Khoros Engage, with peer recognition by 500+ attendees. Thank you for helping us determine this year’s winners! The Khoros Team12KViewsSign in to react to this post1CommentAnnouncing the 2021 Khoros Kudos Awards
Does your brand use Khoros technology to deliver world-class digital customer experiences? Do our tools help you build strategies and results that others can learn from? Share your stories and successes through the second annual Khoros Kudos Awards in one of these 12 categories: Best-in-Class Care Best-in-Class Community Best-in-Class CX Insights Best-in-Class Marketing The Accelerator All-Ways Connected Better Together: Customer Engagement Bottom Line Savings Rock Star Keep Calm and Carry On Rookie of the Year Small But Mighty Top Line Growth All Star We’ll announce the winners on Atlas and Khoros social media channels. Throughout our virtual Khoros Engage conference in September, we will share all award submissions with our 1500+ attendees. We will invite winners to submit a short video describing their success that will be highlighted at the conference! Submissions are open until May 28, and more information about the Khoros Kudos Awards can be found on the contest page on Atlas. Check out our winners and finalists from last year for inspiration for your own submission! We look forward to celebrating your successes with you!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsVote for Khoros-led panels to be a part of SXSW 2022!
The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference & Festivals features a variety of tracks that focus on the most important breakthroughs in technology, film, culture, and music. Today, the public has the opportunity to vote for the panels they’d like to learn and hear about in the 2022 event programming. With a focus on digital customer engagement topics, including AI, purpose-driven marketing, and even a meet-up for digital leaders. Here are the Khoros-hosted Panels and Meet Up that you can vote for ahead of the March conference: URL to IRL: Khoros Meet Up for Digital Leaders: Join Khoros at this meet-up to connect with peers and experts across social media marketing, online communities, digital customer service, and CX. Network with brands from across the globe, share your stories, digital strategy best practices, and more. AI: More Intelligent Humans, Less Artificial Bots: There are many hypotheses surrounding the future of customer service agents -- “blended agent” models (combining voice and email channels, for example) are being piloted to some extent; AI investments are increasing with the promise to offload repetitive processes for agents to take on more meaningful work. This panel aspires to make an informed projection of the Future of the Customer Service Agent Experience, guided by research and a discussion from the people that will shape it -- BPOs who staff and train agents, contact center executives responsible for business outcomes, and agents themselves. Branded Communities: I Want You to Want Me: Branded communities are spaces for customers to connect, ask questions, and share their experiences. They’ve been around for some time, but 2020 brought to light how valuable they can be when there’s an absence of in-person communities, events, and human connection. As the world shifts to a digital-first way of living, communities have become vital to business strategies offering a self-service option for customer support, digital events, a space to connect with peers and fellow brand enthusiasts, and most importantly, a platform to build deeper relationships with customers. This panel will dive into the benefits — as well as challenges — of branded communities, plus, host a lively discussion around why communities are the new future of business. Fight Distraction with the Power of Purpose: Social media continues to evolve, and as a consequence, marketers believe there will be a focus on brands living up to and communicating their mission, values, and purpose-driven actions online. People are looking past the surface-level product and price, basing decisions more on how brands impact the world through their bigger purpose. COVID-19 has further underscored this importance and impacted brand strategy while highlighting the necessity of social responsibility for many brands. This panel explores the challenges of purpose-driven marketing and examines how the pandemic has influenced the resurgence of diversity and inclusion and other pertinent social issues. Along the way, you’ll learn about best practices and get a behind-the-scenes look at how brands navigate crisis moments. Hybrid Commerce: Digital Demand v Human Connection: Experts agree that, in the past 18 months alone, we have witnessed accelerated e-commerce adoption and growth. In 2020, digital sales surged as the pandemic forced global shoppers to rethink how and where they shop. Brands that survived the storm changed the way they marketed with digital-first mentalities and new commerce models. Yet a question arises: Now that we can buy everything from cars to groceries without ever interacting with another soul, is this digital-first model here to stay? Join Khoros, alongside leading global brands, as we present in-depth findings from field research that aims to answer what verticals still require the human touch, what experiences are going touchless, and finally, how hybrid models are changing the way we buy. Listen or Lose: Surfacing Data Diamonds: Data is growing exponentially -- we’re drowning in it. Real-time, behavioral data is superseding “state” data. At the same time, the market and consumer behavior is constantly changing. As these shifts rapidly occur, so does our ability to listen and leverage AI to actually mine data into knowledge and action. Which data sources offer the most value? What are the most practical applications of turning data into action? Explore big data with Khoros as we touch upon the mining opportunities and data ethics in the process. When does voting take place? Community Voting is open from August 10-August 26. How do I vote? Visit https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ and select “Vote on SXSW Session Proposals” in the blue SXSW 2022 box. Sign In (if you already have an account) or Create an Account (if you don’t have one — it’s super easy, fast & free!), so you can vote. In the Search bar, type in “Khoros” to easily find our 6 proposals. Alternatively, you can search each full panel name or click the direct links above, once you’re logged in. Click on each entry, and cast your vote by clicking the “VOTE UP” box on the left-hand side. Click your browser’s back button to go back to the list of our 6 proposals, and repeat for each entry. Thank you for your support and votes!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsEngage 2021 is Live, Join Us!
Khoros Engage 2021 has begun! Our virtual event platform is now live, and we couldn’t be more thrilled for you to join us. On-demand content is available now — go ahead and dive in… we’ve got some of the biggest brands in the world ready to share their stories and expertise with you. It’s all at your fingertips, on your time. Of course, you don’t want to miss our live keynotes and discussions with speakers this Tuesday, September 14. First, make sure you’re registered. Then, log in here, and if you haven’t already, I encourage you to visit our agenda page and start adding sessions to ‘My Interests’ to build your personal agenda for the day. I am personally so excited to hear from our keynote speakers: we’ll get to hear the latest in generational research, the do’s and don’ts for reaching the even toughest audiences effectively, from Jason Dorsey, President of The Center for Generational Kinetics. Also joining us is Yashodhan Gokhale, Adobe’s Senior Director of Product and Operations, Creative Cloud; Zoom’s Jeff Harling, Head of Global Self Service, Zoom Support; and acclaimed documentary maker, producer, and writer, Louis Theroux. You won’t want to miss a moment! On Tuesday, September 14, you’ll also find: Inspirational fireside chats with Khoros executive leaders and other industry titans Live Q+A with the speakers from our on-demand sessions, including leading brands like Dropbox & Square Virtual networking conversations with those in similar industries & roles Already registered? Log in now and watch our on-demand content. Read some helpful tips for logging in. Get registered if you still haven’t. I can’t wait to see you at Engage!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Kudos Deadline Extended to June 4th!
Here’s some good news to start your week: the Khoros Kudos Awards deadline has been extended to Friday, June 4! This gives you an extra week to pull together your story and share your successes in the 12 award categories. Best-in-Class Care Best-in-Class Community Best-in-Class CX Insights Best-in-Class Marketing The Accelerator All-Ways Connected Better Together: Customer Engagement Bottom Line Savings Rock Star Keep Calm and Carry On Rookie of the Year Small But Mighty Top Line Growth All Star We’ll announce the winners on Atlas, Khoros social media, and at our virtual Khoros Engage on September 22-23. All award submissions will be highlighted as part of the virtual event, with peer recognition by 1,500+ attendees. More information about the Khoros Kudos Awards can be found on the contest page on Atlas. Check out our winners and finalists from 2020 for inspiration telling your story! We look forward to celebrating your successes with you!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsJoin Khoros experts at CMSWire's DXS21 Virtual Summit!
Are you ready to realize the full potential of your brand's ROI? Take the next steps on your journey toward a mature digital customer experience practice by joining Khoros experts at CMSWire's upcoming DXS21 Virtual Summit. Dates: Thursday, October 28, 2021, 10:30am-4:30pm EDT Friday, October 29, 2021, 10:30am-2:00pm EDT Activate the data and insights latent in your organization and your customer base to deliver on the performance promises of the modern digital tech stack. Foster the culture and practices of curiosity, creativity, experimentation, and iteration. Learn from industry experts, like Khoros' own Christopher Stark (Director of Business Value Consulting at Khoros), on how to deliver the customer experience consumers want. Stark's session, Stop the Silo: How to measure, improve, and create growth through the CX journey, speaks to how siloed data create siloed teams, which creates siloed experiences. A proliferation of VoC efforts results in a myopic approach to acquiring and acting on CX insights. Gain an understanding of how a holistic approach to gathering customer data through ingestion of omnichannel insights provides one view of the customer journey for growth and efficiency. Christopher Stark, Director of Business Value Consulting at Khoros Christopher Stark is the Director of Business Value Consulting at Khoros. Stark, who was previously a customer experience Director with Nike, leads the company’s BVC group with a clear mandate for growth and customer experience innovation. His unique expertise in building a customer experience program and implementing Khoros CX Insights at one of the world’s largest retail giants is invaluable in understanding configuration and time-to-value for onboarding new clients. Register todayViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAsk the Experts: Khoros CX Insights
Khoros CX experts Brian Timmons and Jacob Borgeson answer your frequently asked questions about the Khoros CX Insights solution. Don’t see your question here? Ask in the chat below or connect with us on Maia (the lower right corner Khoros bot). The below is a transcript from a live CXI FaQ webinar that aired on August 10. Khoros acquired Topbox in January of 2021, bringing an innovative omnichannel CX analytics solution to Khoros’ award-winning digital customer engagement platform to create a powerful new standard for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experience management. [Jacob] What is CX Insights? [Brian] It's the ability to aggregate the Voice of the Customer (VOC) into a unified view: phone calls are transcribed into text and applied to a sentiment algorithm, chats and emails and surveys and third-party review sites like Amazon reviews, Google reviews, web boards like Reddit. Really any way that your customers can talk to you or about you is aggregated together so that you get a 360 degree view of what your customers are feeling and experiencing with your brand. Everybody wants to be able to take action and be confident in those actions, but without having a way to aggregate, normalize, and surface valuable insights from the massive amounts of customer communications you're constantly getting, it's really difficult to rally the troops internally to make those changes. So that's what we do is aggregate, normalize, and present the data in a way that makes it really fast and easy to take action and improve your business. [Jacob] Can you get these insights without buying Khoros CX Insights? [Brian] The traditional way to gather CX insights is to send customers a survey, which is still a valid mechanism. But if you’re solely relying on surveys for customer feedback, you’re only using a very small slice of ALL your customer feedback data to drive improvements, which means you’re probably not making the RIGHT improvements and you’re missing out on greater revenue opportunities by ignoring the majority of your customer base and their feedback. The key is to take that survey data and combine it with what customers are saying on phone, chat, email, and social media... that's how you really create that 360 degree view. In order to get those holistic CX insights, you have to buy the software, which for the value you get and the return on investment, is actually very inexpensive. We expect a minimum of a 5x return on investment, and oftentimes we see 20, 30, 50 times return on investment. [Jacob] Khoros has other solutions, like Khoros Community. How does CXI work with the Khoros Community and what’s the value of applying CXI to Khoros Community data? [Brian] In a community you have one customer asking a question, another customer providing an answer, which is a super cost effective way to support customers. And embedded in those consumer-to-consumer conversations are really valuable insights around customer friction points and new ideas for what they want to see from your brand. So, when we ingest community data, we're ingesting those conversations just like it was a chat between an agent and a customer. The beauty of the marriage between CXI and Khoros is that we can take all of this embedded data that Khoros generates on behalf of our customers and use that in coordination with third-party data to create a unified Voice of the Customer. Community is just another channel that your consumers, your clients, your customers are talking to you and about you. Let's use that data to show you where your friction is and improve your business. [Jacob] So, on that note, how long does it take to get the insights from CX Insights? [Brian] It’s really a three-step process because you have to go through the normal buying process to get a contract in place, and we're dealing with customer data so security review is a big part of that. And then we load the data, which can take 2-4 weeks. The timeframe for how long that takes depends on how many channels you have and the complexity of your data — and we have clients with very organized, well-structured data and we have clients who have data that's really all over the board, it's in different places and it's messy — that's our job to simplify your data. Once those two things are done in your launch, insights are available immediately. We typically bring in two to three months of historical data, so on day one you already have insights telling you trending topics or emerging issues from last quarter. We call that our running start. Within the first two or three weeks after CXI is up and running, our team will create what we call an “Insight Report,” which shows our customers specifically what the data is telling us without any bias from being inside your business. The reaction we usually get to the insights we share is, "Wow, I did not know that was happening," or "I knew this was a thing, but I didn't know it was at this scale. We have to reprioritize and fix these things." So, to answer your question, within the first month of install you're going to start seeing value from the application. [Jacob] Are there limitations to channels or anything you can't ingest in CXI? [Brian] We get asked that a lot because everybody’s data is unique and different. There is only one channel that we've ever not been able to ingest because it's not not really a consumer-based communication method - Microsoft Outlook. We've never found a social platform that we couldn't integrate. We've never found a phone platform where we couldn't ingest phone calls and transcribe and translate into the languages we support. So, the answer is, not so far, and we've been at this for six years. [Jacob] What happens with CXI when the data is just a big mess? [Brian] Many companies haven’t really started to genuinely invest in customer experience until recently. So, we have this range of clients from neophytes to jedis. They're brand new or they've got it nailed down. Those neophytes, the companies that are just beginning to tap into their customer feedback and are mostly focused on improving agent quality, are the most fun for our team because we have such a huge amount of opportunity. And for those companies it's literally millions and millions of dollars that we end up generating in value. And then you have those that have many CX tools. They have Q&A functions that are ingrained into their applications. They may have speech analytics, they may have text analytics, they may even aggregate some of that together. In those cases, we're talking to them about the business problems that are most pressing for them, and often its retention. So, we're looking specifically at joining retention data so that we can help them improve that specific metric. But we've never seen somebody's data where it's such a mess we just can't help, right. That's the beauty of CXI. We can take messy, complex data elements — and when you're talking about Voice of the Customer it's just messy — and clean it up, customize it and make sure that it is presented in a way that makes it fast to find insights. That's what we do, that's our expertise. So, the messier the data the more fun it is for our engineers and for our business value consultants to generate value. [Jacob] Is CXI usable for just community content? [Brian] It is, and we often have customers who start by only ingesting one channel of customer data. All of them end up bringing in the rest of their data. If you're a community manager and you want to be able to quickly see trends, friction points and opportunities within community data, we can absolutely do that. But our client success managers will be bugging you to bring in phone calls, chat, email, and social media on top of that because when you find something in community you need to be able to test that for scale. Because even though a hundred people are chatting about something in your community channel, there could be a hundred thousand others that are calling you on an annual, monthly basis about the same or a related issue. Understanding scale can’t be emphasized enough. For every one of your customers who contacts you about a problem, most don’t bother. In retail, for example, it's around 35 to 1. Every consumer that calls you, chats with you, 35 don't bother. They bail on the purchase or they go to your competition. So, to answer your question, yeah, bring your community on, but more channels will get you more valuable insight. [Jacob] Another technical question, do we have to manually tag all our products and keep a label system, or will the tool do that and use Natural Language Processing to train over time? [Brian] Yeah, so that's the beauty of automation. The application automatically tags and then puts into topics what customers are saying. For example, if it's a defective product, the customer could say it's broken, it popped, it tore, it ripped, it smells, it squeaks... there are a million things that they say that mean there's something wrong with this product. We take all of those words that mean ‘defect’ and put that into one topic. There's no tagging needed across any channel because we do that automatically. ______________________________________________________________ Who are Brian and Jacob? [Brian] I am one of the founders at Topbox and my role is pretty simple, to evangelize customer experience insights in how we can help our clients better their relationships with their customers, which is a really easy job because it's so important and such a near-and-dear thing to all companies as the battlefront for customer experience has arrived, so it's such an important element off everybody's strategy. [Jacob]I’m a Principal Product Marketing Manager where I provide customer and market inputs for our Communities and CX platform. By talking to customers, doing research, and reading a lot of content, I try to uncover interesting problems and help a lot of different groups of people figure out how to solve them. Interested in learning more about Khoros CX Insights or need more questions answered? Schedule a demo HERE. Don’t forget to submit more of your CXI questions in the chat below or connect with us on Maia (the lower right corner Khoros bot).ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsKhoros Engage 2021: Don't Miss It!
Ready, set, Engage! On Tuesday, September 14, (that's 15 September for our friends in Australia, New Zealand, and Asia), join speakers and panelists who are industry leaders in messaging, community engagement, chatbots, artificial intelligence, social marketing, and much more. And stay tuned, more announcements are still to come! Our agenda is now live, so you can plan to make the most of your day and enjoy the dynamic general sessions, thought-provoking breakout discussions, practical tips, and virtual networking you expect from Khoros Engage — all from the comfort of your own home, or wherever your laptop may take you. Not registered yet? Sign up now! Email the Khoros Events Team with any questions.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsEvent recap: Forrester CX NA Conference 2022
In the sweltering southern city of Nashville, Tennessee, Customer Experience leaders gathered to discuss the emerging customer experience trends in our rapidly changing world. Three key trends were identified and discussed across the three days and several information sessions. These three trends displayed the importance of centralizing a brand's customer engagement hub. Without the ability to form deeper customer relationships from interactions across the digital space, your brand could fall short of its future customer experience goals. In 2018 during the Lithium and Spredfast merger, the idea of centralization was first envisioned to change the way brands and customers interact. Today in 2022, Khoros is proud to offer a platform to help your brand achieve its centralization and customer experience goals. Having Business Agility is vital to success. Forrester's first core trend discussed how a brand's agility heavily affected its overall success. The COVID pandemic changed almost every way that brands and customers interact with one another. More people are buying, working, and connecting online more than ever before. The brands that maintained their agility and experimented with their digital strategy successfully improved their customer experience scores. [Read about top brands in our Kudos submissions] The volume of customer interaction data allowed brands to leverage and identify emerging challenges and react in real-time. Agile brands that succeeded in the evolving customer engagement world used various customer support and community technologies. While every brand and customer interaction with the brand will vary, developing an omnichannel center for your digital customer engagement will almost certainly increase customer sentiment and revenue and decrease unnecessary costs. As with all forms of digital technology, there are seemingly endless options to utilize. For a Forrester top-rated experience, consider the Khoros contact center and our award-winning communities. Combining omnichannel agent desktops and robust conversational AI, Khoros customers have found higher agent productivity, satisfaction, and most importantly, higher business outcomes. It's quickly becoming apparent that brands with a widely used community page often perform better when compared with brands without one. The beauty of a Khoros community is that they provide several solutions in one. Customers can connect with one another around your brand, increase their sentiment, and reduce your care agent's call volume by providing self-service answers to support questions. Use customer data in all aspects of your business. Customer data is everywhere – phone calls to the contact center, tweets, and posts on social media, customer transaction history, and a brand's online community. As long as your brand leverages your customer data, it's child's play to implement it into your business strategy. In a data ocean, it's hard to know what to fish for. Forrester analysts cited that leveraging the correct data is critical to making informed decisions, especially when it comes to optimizing operations and improving the customer experience in the contact center and self-service apparatuses. Khoros does the same with our Customer Experience Insights. Through our information path, you can see exactly what your customers are looking for in their support questions or interactions with your brand and respond faster and with higher levels of support. DoorDash makes perfect use of the Khoros platform in our case study. Leverage social media marketing Forrester noticed that the brands with the best social media marketing cited the highest Customer Experience score. This one is simple. Six billion people own a smartphone worldwide, and almost every mainstream social media platform has hundreds of millions of users at the very least. Khoros' partners understand the power of social media. Our social media management tool will condense all your social channels into one easy-to-use place, making it easy to protect your brand, measure what matters, and elevate your content and scale social interactions. Having control over your social media and understanding the ever-evolving strategy succeeding brands use is vital in excelling and improving your customer experience and business outcomes. Even small brands like Reachout found incredible success in 2021 and have been highlighted in our Kudos Awards. The Bottom Line The 2022 Forrester Customer Experience event confirmed what Khoros has been developing and strategizing on for years. Recapping the emerging trends in one event shows the level of care and understanding Khoros strives to deliver to our customers and, by extension, your brand's current and future customers. Check out why Forrester continues to rank Khoros as a top-tier company and how it can help you empower your Customer Experience. Khoros is named a leader in the Forrester Wave: Social Suites Forrester Report: Getting to know your customers If you attended this year's Forrester Customer Experience event, leave a comment below with your favorite keynote speaker!ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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