Khoros on Khoros: How our Strategic Services team uses Khoros Service to elevate social media customer care

Khoros Strategic Services is a global team of innovative thinkers with expertise in social media marketing, analytics, paid marketing, and digital care.

They partner with world-class brands, developing and executing data-backed marketing and customer care strategies that drive meaningful results.

This blog explores how they use Khoros Service to solve challenges and satisfy customers, including the platform's configuration process, uses, and features.

How do you approach setting up Khoros Service for a specific customer?

We evaluate the customer's workflows, pain points, and brand strategy through in-depth discovery calls and stakeholder interviews. This process helps us identify the most relevant platform features and areas for optimization in moderation from the perspectives of various team members.

Using best practices from our extensive experience across different industries and customers, we tailor the configuration to meet the customer's unique needs and KPIs, ensuring maximum efficiency.

How do you tailor Khoros Service to a customer’s needs?

We start by conducting discovery calls with the customer’s stakeholders. We go through a detailed process to understand their unique requirements, such as moderation priorities, compliance needs, and measurement preferences. We thoroughly review their established KPIs and goals, including typical inbound volume, SLAs, and response rates.

We also consider factors like team structure, escalation processes, and reporting needs to customize the tag strategy, measurement frameworks, routing workflows, and moderation views. Some teams may need an extensive tag structure for reporting, while others may not. Some customers have a smaller team that needs to be agile on the platform, while others have a large team with individuals who have specialized roles and only need to see a specific view. For example, some agents might draft a response while others approve it. We can set up the platform so team members can easily prioritize tasks according to their roles.

Based on this review, we configure Khoros Service for optimal efficiency and alignment, maximizing the use of available features.

How does Khoros Service help you reach your customer’s social media customer service goals?

Khoros Service is essential to help customers achieve their social media customer service goals. It offers robust routing and prioritization options, streamlines workflows by highlighting important engagement opportunities, deprioritizes irrelevant items, and utilizes automation.

The platform's extensive measurement capabilities enable us to monitor progress and adjust strategies accordingly. Customizable workflows, automation tools, and analytics dashboards empower our team to align our efforts efficiently with each customer's specific objectives.

What features of Khoros Service are most important to your team?

The most crucial features of Khoros Service for our team are Manage View and the bulk action functionality, which streamline the processing of inbound comments by allowing us to handle tasks in batches instead of individually. Tags and Lucene Rules are also essential, as they enable us to filter items within Smart Views for more efficient queue management, particularly during periods of high inbound volume.

For example, if a customer wants to prioritize incoming messages that contain the term “lawsuit” or “class action,” we can create a tag for those terms using a Lucene Rule that enables us to mark incoming messages containing variations of the terms as a high priority. When teams log in for the day, they can easily organize their tasks based on the priority levels assigned to conversations. We can also assign certain tags to certain team members to automatically escalate high-priority conversations to the right people.

Additionally, Shared Dashboards and Manage Views are indispensable for monitoring team output, identifying trends, and managing compliance and SLAs, especially for larger teams and during crisis situations.

How does Khoros Service impact productivity and efficiency?

Khoros Service significantly enhances productivity and efficiency by allowing users to monitor multiple channels simultaneously and prioritize the most relevant conversations for quicker response times. Its advanced configuration helps teams quickly navigate through irrelevant noise, saving considerable time.

Compared to native moderation, Khoros Service offers a comprehensive view of conversation threads and comment history, providing valuable context for more informed moderation decisions. Additionally, features like the Agent View prevent duplicate actions, ensuring queues are cleared more efficiently, while performance dashboards help identify and address any inefficiencies.

What best practices do you deploy to stay ahead of the curve?

Our team stays updated on new product releases and enhancements in Khoros Service to maintain a competitive edge. We continually seek ways to optimize our configuration. We achieve this by actively participating in product release meetings, fostering strong relationships with the product team, and providing regular training updates to ensure proficiency with the latest features.

We also emphasize automation wherever possible, using tag rules and routing strategies to streamline processes and identify trends. In the research process, we work to uncover areas where we can help boost efficiency, whether it’s automating a manual handoff process or identifying an opportunity to create new tags. This ensures the platform is in a prime position to:

• Identify and enrich conversations by ingesting, tagging, classifying, and prioritizing them. These parameters control the prioritization of queues and routing rules.

• Route to the best resource, including bots or queues for agents and team assignments, skill-based routing, route based on channel, priority assignment, and seamless handoff to a team member.

• Optimize resolution quality and time.

Regular monitoring through dashboards and monitor walls helps us proactively uncover issues, and our willingness to update workflows ensures alignment with current project needs and goals.

What type of metrics do you track for customers in Khoros Service?

We track various metrics in Khoros Service tailored to each customer's needs, including inbound volume, total responses shared, response rate, and time to agent response (TAR). Additionally, we monitor conversation tag volume and agent performance metrics such as conversation and response handling time, and time spent in different agent states. These metrics enable us to focus on continuous improvement and demonstrate the value of community management and social care at scale.

Operational Dashboards effectively showcase these key metrics, and the ability to create Shared Dashboards for each project allows us to tailor our approach to better meet our customer's KPIs. Overall, Khoros Service facilitates easy segmentation of metrics by various criteria such as channel, item type, and sentiment, providing comprehensive insights into customer engagement.

How does your team use Khoros Service to create reports for customers?

Our team creates reports for customers using a combination of data exports and in-platform dashboards within Khoros Service. We often set up Shared Dashboards or Monitor Walls for real-time monitoring of performance and response activities, utilizing Smart Views to focus on specific projects or conversation themes. We leverage data exports to further segment data for recurring reporting needs, providing granular conversation details for deeper analysis and meticulous historical performance records. Dashboards can also be easily exported into PDF format for quick sharing, ensuring comprehensive and tailored reporting for our customers.

How do customers leverage the information you provide to optimize their strategy?

Customers leverage the insights provided by Khoros Service to optimize their strategy around team priorities, social care approach, and content creation. Reports focusing on conversation trends, audience sentiment, and brand perception inform content strategy, while team performance metrics aid in analyzing support team and agent performance.

By analyzing conversation volumes and sentiment, they identify areas that need more support and validate the effectiveness of campaigns or content. This data guides internal stakeholder presentations and aligns their content strategy, with Care’s capabilities playing a vital role in delivering impactful services.

Additionally, volume threshold alerts and boolean rules facilitate crisis strategy and identify engagement opportunities for outbound visibility, empowering customers to make informed decisions and drive strategic outcomes.

Khoros Service is a solution that helps enterprise businesses scale their customer service operations quickly. It seamlessly blends synchronous and asynchronous modes of customer engagement. ​​

We are firm believers in the idea that every component, whether it is AI-powered bots or business applications, should work together to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of customer engagement strategies.

Our customer service software allows brands to serve customers on their digital channel of choice with unmatched operational insight to boost satisfaction and reduce costs. When you unify multiple channels in a single solution, you empower your agents with the ability to engage across all touchpoints, including but not limited to:

• Messaging apps like WhatsApp, Apple Messages for Business, and Line

• Social networks like Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn and WeChat

• Review sites, like Google Play Store, iOS App Store, Yelp, and Trustpilot

• Brand-owned channels, like web chat, in-app, Email, SMS, and Voice

• Owned communities, forums, and knowledge bases