Khoros a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave: Social Suites, Q4 2019

Social media is a rapidly evolving business channel that can be hard for brands to keep up with. To assist B2C marketers in this, Forrester has completed The Forrester Wave^TM: Social Suites, Q4 2019, in which Khoros was named a Strong Performer and performed better than or as well as the competition on 90% of the criteria evaluated. In this post, we’ll outline important report takeaways for brands and what they can expect in this evolving space. To read the full report, download your copy here.

The Forrester Wave^TM: Social Suites, Q4 2019 is the first report of its kind — rolled up from discrete Social Waves around listening, social media management, adtech, onsite social, and word of mouth platforms. The report was specifically designed for social marketers at B2C brands.

According to the report: “Social suite vendors also know that social media can’t remain in a silo; companies demand meshing social media programs into enterprises’ broader activities… this category is still a work in progress.” This statement recognizes that while businesses still rely on social media today, they are increasingly engaging with customers and prospects in digital channels beyond social.

The report had this to say about the Khoros platform: “Fresh off a new name and branding earlier this year, Khoros has made positive moves to unite social customer listening (though it relies on third-party social listening platforms for deep listening), marketing, customer response, and its signature social community platform — the only one of its kind in this evaluation.” And “notably, customer references overwhelmingly praise Khoros’ unique product coaching support.”

The Forrester Social Suites Wave is a helpful tool to narrow a shortlist of vendors that offer multiple social point solutions. We recommend that, when conducting a social technology evaluation, buyers consider the unique goals of their business to prioritize what matters to them.

If you’re a B2C marketer who needs all of these social tools in one place, this Wave shows that Khoros is a top choice. For B2C and B2B marketing and care leaders who want to engage on digital channels, Khoros leads with a product offering and proven ROI that goes “beyond social.”

This Wave touched on several “table-stakes capabilities” for social media, like social organic publishing and monitoring. However, it also included more niche capabilities, like social adtech. Forrester mentions that, instead of using social adtech solutions, most “customers rely on social networks’ free native ads managers or outsourcing to media agencies buying advertising across channels.”

But when you look beyond social — at the full landscape of digital customer engagement — there are so many more exciting opportunities on the horizon. These non-social opportunities were acknowledged in strategic product vision, but not in evaluating current capabilities.

Some of the most promising opportunities for customer support and marketing professionals are private messaging and automation. Khoros customer Sprint found that 70% of their customers expressed positive sentiment using messaging to contact the brand. As marketing and customer service teams continue to become inundated with messages and channels, automation can help route and even answer questions efficiently. These features weren’t evaluated in the report, although they are rapidly growing in brand usage and customer popularity, as they allow brands to serve customers faster, at a lower cost than ever before.

Online community professionals have a lot to look forward to as well. Think about the power of branded communities today, and the ability to prove ROI via organic SEO and call deflection. A leading technology company and customer of Khoros earned $2.2M in SEO value. In this Wave, social community was only weighted at 1% of the overall current offering score. Critical capabilities like Knowledge Base and Search were not covered in this Wave at all. With new capabilities including community syndication, online communities can be shared anywhere on your website and influence the full customer journey.

Khoros is proud to be named a strong performer in this Wave. But more importantly to us, Forrester rated our customer support/deployment and services a 5/5, proving our history of outperforming the market in our ability to partner with customers, serve their needs, and drive their success — outcomes clearly linked to ROI.

If your business is looking to create customers for life on social media and beyond, we’d love to have a discussion. Request a demo today to discuss your unique needs and how we can help.