One of the things we like about the Khoros customer engagement platform is that it not only has a robust feature set that comes ready to use out of the box, but it’s also extensible. With the right systems integrations and customer support expertise powered by an agile DevOps team, the sky is the limit on what functionalities can be added to your Khoros platform to deliver a superior customer experience.
In this article, I examine five box-bursting innovations we have developed and deployed for our customers on Khoros.
Automated, multi-directional content syndication
You can’t expect users to use extra-sensory perception to figure out which thread, on which board, or in which platform the solution they need is posted. Instead, you have to understand where and how they spent time online and surface content to them there.
Your enterprise community content may be distributed across different categories or topical areas. Or you may manage more than one community, each dedicated to a different product or service offering. At the same time, you may have users that prefer to self-support on other platforms like Reddit or Facebook.
Content is often relevant to a variety of users searching in different places. But without automation, the only way to surface it on multiple platforms is manually – and you know what that means: it only lives in one place and is not delivering its full value potential (unless your company has an army of people dedicated to content syndication).
But automation is not enough – you need functionality that dynamically and multi-directionally syndicates content so that if someone comments on it or adds to it, all instances of the content are updated. Essentially any interaction format may be syndicated, whether it is a discussion thread, knowledge base article or blog.
Publishing content across multiple platforms lets all users, including those who don’t visit your community, comment and engage with it, in addition to giving visibility to the subject matter experts.
The dynamic syndication can be automated according to a customizable set of rules.
Improved access to SMEs through integrations with collaboration platforms
It is often difficult to get participation from the most qualified subject matter experts (company product team and engineers) - not because they don’t want to support the product and customer, but simply because the online community is not embedded in their daily workflow. This barrier is removed with a direct bi-directional integration with the collaboration platforms they spend the most time on - like Slack or Teams. This way, their contribution is just one click away in a “channel” on their current platform, rather than on a separate platform they may not have time to visit. This functionality can be configured to customize the degree of automation: it can automatically send a subset of (or all of) the content from defined areas of the community, or the syndication can be done manually by a moderator.
iTalent Digital has a pre-built connector called CollaborationConX that links your collaboration platform with your Khoros community, saving time for your SMEs and facilitating access to them for your customers.
Intelligent enterprise search (aka federated search)
The search bar on the Khoros platform allows users to search the community. But what if the information they are looking for resides on another platform? iTalent Digital, in partnership with Coveo, can turn your Khoros community search bar into a unified search engine that intelligently scours any cloud platform it is connected to (including your SaaS product) and surfaces the content right there in the community.
This same search functionality can be added to your other platforms (including your support ticket portal) and products so that your Khoros community content is surfaced there, as well.
Dynamic machine translation
When companies manage online communities in multiple languages, the English-language community normally has vastly more engagement and accepted solutions than the non-English ones. Even though English is still the most commonly used language for web content with almost 60% of websites offered in English, the number of non-English web pages on the internet is rapidly growing.
Not making valuable content and subject matter experts available in non-English languages causes companies to miss out on a huge opportunity to serve its global customer base. But as is the case with content syndication, translating content manually is simply not feasible given the real-time or near-real-time nature of online conversations.
That’s where automated machine translation comes in. Machine translation has vastly improved in recent years to the point where it’s adequate for the purposes of most online interactions. iTalent’s dynamic translation connector, LanguageConX, allows companies to apply their own dictionaries to the translation tool to ensure industry-specific or company-specific terms are translated accurately.
Because LanguageConX is deployed in conjunction with the content syndication connector (CommunityConX) described above, dynamic multi-directional conversations can take place between users who write and read everything in their preferred language, no matter what language it is originally published in. That’s the magic of dynamic machine translation! Now users from around the world can get support from an SME with whom they would otherwise not be able to engage due to the language barrier.
Point-of-consumption reporting
Khoros offers embedded analytics functionality that helps you understand user activity in your community. But because your users engage with your content and your company across multiple touch points, you need beyond-the-box integrations and analytics capabilities that allow you to import data from external sources and mash it up to paint a holistic picture of your customers’ journeys and experiences.
iTalent Digital has created Khoros community analytics solutions built on Power BI and Google Big Query that allow you to do just that. Add as many data sources as you wish and customize the reports to suit your needs.
Visit Microsoft AppSource to learn more about iTalent’s Power BI-Khoros Community Analytics solution.
Conclusion
The CX-improving possibilities of Khoros’ extensible platform are limited only by your imagination and the competence of your DevOps team. iTalent Digital’s thorough knowledge of the Khoros platform combined with our award-winning, world-class DevOps teams and deep systems integrations expertise can turn your most pressing customer experience needs into reality. Contact us today at khoros@italentdigital.com to speak with us about your goals.
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