In 2020, Khoros assembled a Customer Experience (Customers for Life) department, a team focused intently on improving users’ experience. Part of my role in Customer Experience focuses on Journey Mapping to understand what our users perceive at each stage of their journey with Khoros.
Between November 2020 to February 2021, we interviewed Community Managers and Developers to learn what it's like being a Khoros community user. The conversations we had were detailed and incredibly insightful, illuminating experiences that were happening to many different users and surfacing feelings that were specific to a cohort of profiles.
We wrote up these conversations and shared them internally so our Khoros teams had access to as much detail as possible to learn from what you, our customers, were saying. Using these conversations, we drew out the most common and feelings at each stage of the community journey and presented our findings back to the business to determine what moments Khoros should place focus on improving.
This blog summarizes the stages of the journey that we identified for immediate attention, and details the plans Khoros has to improve our community users' experience at these moments.
1. Learn
Almost every user we spoke to seemed to have a different experience of learning the platform. We heard that some used Campus certification; a few jumped in and learned as they went; some used an internal handbook to get up to speed; one user even told me they read every single Atlas article to become a product expert. (Disclaimer: This approach is not Khoros’s expectation!)
Whilst we want users to upskill on the platform in a way that best suits their learning style, there is an opportunity for Khoros to provide further training guides and learning advice, dependent on your role, requirements of the product, and experience level.
Teach Me
- Khoros is rethinking the way our new users learn the platform and embracing an approach of instructional guides. The Product Content team is actively working on new content and learning solutions, including step-by-step guides, role-based content hubs in our Getting Started documentation, and more visual content (videos and interactive walkthroughs). Check out the Marketing Getting Started Guides for a feel for what we’re launching for Community soon.
More Visual Content
- The resources shared on Atlas to help you use the platform are thorough in detail but they can be text-heavy. Many of you communicated that you were visual learners and would love to see more visuals and videos to support you. We’re balancing your desire for more videos with our evolving platform and use cases: our team would hate to create content that goes out-of-date when the product improves and doesn’t reflect what you see in the platform. We are committed to building more visuals and videos in foundational content for our developers and are focusing on conceptual information that stays consistent in the long term. Keep an eye out across Developer Docs for more eye-catching resources launching soon as a first iteration of this.
Finding Answers on Atlas
- We know you value the ability to connect with peers on Atlas to learn more about community features and use cases. We’re embracing the challenge of a growing knowledge base and are focused on increasing accepted solutions across our topics and auditing our resources to make sure that we only have the more relevant content available. Over the past 9 months, we’ve increased accepted solutions by 20% and archived 2000 more topics than in the previous 9 months to minimize older content and increase findability. Recently we've also been flagging threads to our internal SMEs to have experts chime in on your posts, giving you Khoros’s thoughts and perspective on your questions.
2. Customize
We heard that many of you have sophisticated community needs and you partner with Khoros to deliver the best community experience to your customers. Whilst many of you recognized that Khoros offer unparalleled community features through intricate customizations, we heard non-Community Managers alluding to the benefit of more self-serve capabilities from Khoros, and Developers suggesting that a smoother experience building, testing and deploying customized code would be extremely valuable.
You may have seen the work Khoros has already undertaken to simplify and accelerate community launches. The thinking that started in Project Hermes has continued at Khoros and we are building a more expansive community project to modernize and simplify the design and configuration of Community.
This is a big undertaking, spanning many teams at Khoros and we’re looking forward to sharing more details around what this will mean for you as soon as we can. Khoros would love to incorporate more of your feedback into the building of our vision; if you would like to help us in the creation of this new user interface and are able to dedicate time to look at the work we are doing and give us feedback, we’d love to involve you. Please keep an eye on our Community Blog and reach out to your Customer Success Manager to learn more.
3. Seek Help: Support
When the time comes that you have a question or something looks like it’s not working how it should, our Support agents are here to help you. We heard you generally like working with Support and believe the process has improved in recent years. We also heard that the experience with Support is not consistent. You’d like to see improvements to the speed of support, the number of updates you receive on important cases, and the efficiency of communication on cases to require fewer back and forth responses to get you to resolution.
Our Technical Support team has embraced that feedback and is making changes to improve your experience. Here are some of the things we’ve been working on behind the scenes, and some of the key focus areas going forward to meet this goal:
Efficiency and Transparency
- We heard community managers and developers alike highlight that you want transparency on ticket resolution and bug fix time. Khoros is testing out more robust ways to add more expertise to cases sooner, communicate bug fix timeframes, and increase transparency on what priority your case is, to give you peace of mind on what’s being worked on and what’s a lower priority.
Instant Responses
- We are leveraging our Bot technology, Maia, to provide immediate responses for a wide range of actions like getting a quick status update on your case, escalating a case that needs attention, and checking on product status / outages. And we are continuing to enhance it by adding other useful fast and easy tasks.
These were the key moments of the journey we identified for improvement and I will update this blog as these plans become a reality. Please let me know if you have any questions about the journey mapping project or anything here. I will be speaking with more users across our product suite in the coming months - if you’d like to take part and talk about your experience with Khoros, don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll schedule a time to speak.
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