The results are in: Khoros Kudos 2021 winners

This category recognizes a customer who successfully integrates Khoros to strategically align people, processes, and technology to connect with their customers in all ways.

The big award this year goes to JMP (pronounced “jump”). JMP’s overall goal is simple: to empower users with interactive analytics solutions that live right on their desktop. They discovered early on that one of the best ways to empower customers is to keep them connected — not just to the brand, but to one another. That’s why JMP uses the Khoros platform to maintain a highly interactive brand community, where users can come to share ideas, ask questions, or just chat. To date, they’ve launched three programs within the community:

• InsideJMP. This program, for JMP employees only, uses community boards to distribute news, announcements, and important information. Employees can easily find content even months after it is released. This has helped the brand cut down on inefficient email silos, replacing them with a far more accessible platform.

• Discovery Summit Series. Using Khoros’s knowledge base functionality, JMP offers a central location for attendees of the JMP Discovery Summit conference to access conference presentation materials. The richer experience, the option to watch and rewatch content, and the ability to connect with presenters and fellow attendees after the event have taken it to the next level.

• JMP Wish List. This innovative space allows users — mainly existing JMP customers — to submit ideas for software enhancements and new features. It’s the first of its kind at the brand, and once again leads to higher internal efficiency by breaking down feedback silos between customer support, sales, and other divisions.

With all these great features bundled into their community, it’s no wonder that JMP is taking home the All-Ways Connected award.

Kudos, JMP!

You can read more about JMP’s success here.

Three Ireland, one of Ireland’s leading mobile operators, takes home the Care award this year.

One of Three Ireland’s biggest goals in the last two years has been to support customers on all channels, including social media. As Social Media Team Lead Dearbhaile Culhane says, “No query is too big or small and regardless of why the customer needs support we want to ensure that their experience with us is positive, worthwhile and memorable.”

With the Khoros platform, Three Ireland’s digital contact center has been able to handle a 286% increase in daily inquiry volume without sacrificing the best-in-class SLAs that keep customers happy. They used the Khoros Welcome Response bot to ask basic, introductory questions up front, drastically cutting down on the amount of time agents spent on interactions.

Kudos, Three Ireland!

To read more about how Three Ireland leveraged Khoros for Contact Centers, check out their full Kudos submission.

As always, there was stiff competition in the community category, but educational tech company PowerSchool emerged as a clear winner.

The PowerSchool community has a tall task. With 12,000 districts and more than 45 million students to support, the brand has no choice but to provide a best-in-class community to offer peer-to-peer interactions for parents, teachers, administrators, and of course students. The unified platform allows all customers across more than 60 products to easily access support resources, product updates, an Ideas Portal for enhancement requests, and more.

But the really impressive numbers? This year, PowerSchool added 70,000 new community members and saw 50% YoY growth in member logins, as well as nearly 40% growth in posts. They used their online brand community to support users through the COVID-19 pandemic — exactly when they needed the most support.

Kudos, PowerSchool!

Read more about how PowerSchool did it here.

TV 2, the company behind Denmark’s most-watched television channel, takes home our Marketing award this year. But winning this award doesn’t have anything to do with television programming. Earlier this year, TV 2 noticed a troubling trend on their social media channels: a proliferation of hate speech and harmful comments — especially on posts about their reality shows.

TV 2 decided to take a strong stand against hate speech, producing and airing several videos on the topic, as well as giving public interviews denouncing online bullying. But perhaps even more importantly, they took action on their own channels. Having already used the Khoros platform for several years, TV 2 decided to take advantage of natural language understanding and sentiment recognition features to automatically identify and eliminate hateful comments.

The result? They reached over 1.8M Danes with anti-bullying messaging and reduced hateful comments by 2,000 per month. Several Danish news outlets told the story of their success, and their social media channels are healthier than they were before.

Kudos, TV 2!

Read more about how they did it here.

The Better Together award recognizes a customer who has successfully implemented at least two out of three Khoros solutions — Care, Community, and Marketing — as a synchronized customer engagement platform. Sky UK, a D2C media and entertainment company, integrates Care and Communities to create a seamless customer experience for anyone who needs help.

They use their community for peer-to-peer support, helping them deflect costly and time-consuming inquiries away from their digital contact center. But some inquiries do need intervention by an agent, and that’s where Care comes in. They created an “escalate” option for superusers in their community, so that these users could help direct inquiries to the right place without disrupting that near-100% peer-to-peer environment they’ve worked so hard to create for over six years. This allows agents to reach out in the rare cases when a superuser can’t solve an issue on their own. Positive feedback came pouring in, contributing to Sky UK’s 82% CSAT score.

Kudos, Sky UK!

You can read more about Sky UK’s use of Care and Communities in their full submission.

Planning and productivity software company Anaplan had an incredible 2021 in terms of ROI for the Khoros platform, enabling them to take home the Bottom Line Savings Rock Star award. That’s because they use their Khoros community for call deflection, saving valuable time for agents to deal with complicated inquiries. The community allows users to support one another without ever going to Anaplan’s digital contact center to solve their problems.

The proof here is really amazing: to begin, a 17% YoY decrease in minutes to first reply and a 94% YoY decrease in minutes to first solution in the contact center. Taking into consideration how much each of these deflected inquiries would have cost, this translates to multiple millions of dollars’ worth of savings due to the Khoros platform.

Kudos, Anaplan!

To see exactly how Anaplan achieved these results, check out their Kudos submission here.

This category, which first appeared last year in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, remains just as important in 2021 and beyond, as brands still have to respond to crises and take care of customers when it matters most. In 2021, few did this as well as lab and pharmaceutical equipment manufacturer Promega.

At the beginning of 2021, Promega recognized the need to educate their audience on social media about the function and importance of COVID-19 vaccines. They used the Khoros platform’s social listening capabilities to track the social media conversation about vaccines, tailoring their content to fit what they saw as an important need for information. They even produced videos and blogs about mRNA vaccines, to help the public understand the idea and share news of successful results.

Kudos, Promega!

You can read their full submission here.

The most impressive of our many newcomers this year was Esri, the world’s leading brand in the geographic information system (GIS) industry. Esri had three main reasons for migrating their community to the Khoros platform this year:

1. Their legacy platform couldn’t provide the insights and capabilities needed to improve adoption and engagement with internal stakeholders and users;

2. Their legacy platform’s disconnected interface decreased users’ confidence that they were using an authoritative source for Esri products. This also impacted how users felt about the community's value.

3. New member registrations and activity had plateaued in comparison to company growth due to limitations and legacy issues.

Esri’s results have been impressive, headlined by a 62% YoY increase in new member registrations. But that wasn’t the only indicator that their new community is a success. In just the first month of their brand new Khoros community, new member registrations increased 150% over average, page views increased 36% over average, and unique visitors increased 17% over average.

Their thank you video explains it best:

The Small but Mighty award goes to a customer with fewer than three team members and an annual budget under $250K, but who has still used the Khoros platform to crush it in customer engagement. This year, that’s ReachOut.

ReachOut is a mental health service in Australia — in fact, the most accessed one in the country for young people and their parents. Now, their Khoros community helps them offer services to over 12,000 members, with improved navigation and new features covering a wide spectrum of topics. They’ve also implemented a “check-in” feature to gauge users’ distress level (low, medium, high) in order to provide recommendations on how they can best leverage their time in the community:

In less than a month, ReachOut saw mobile usage (the most common way to access the community) increase by over 7% and usage of daily check-in recommendations increase by over 12%.

Kudos, ReachOut!

To learn more about their community, read ReachOut’s full Kudos submission.

This award is all about scale — it goes to a customer who has used the Khoros platform to grow rapidly in their customer engagement strategy. A lot of companies did a good job of that this year, but none better than Adobe.

The software and digital experience brand uses their Khoros community’s gamification features to offer “badges” to users for accomplishing certain milestones. The more they engage, the more they can earn — and this translates into a healthier overall community. The community even has leaderboards to show which users have offered the most helpful solutions to others; this helps cut down on support costs in Adobe’s digital contact center. Adobe even takes advantage of translation features to make every post in the community available in over a dozen languages.

Since these gamification features launched, Adobe’s community has had over 530,000 page views per month and over 170,000 unique visitors per month. In May 2021, they awarded over 100 badges (on average) to users every day. They’ve also seen a 75% MoM increase in post likes and a 17% MoM increase in comment likes.

Kudos, Adobe!

To read their full story, click here.

Khoros solutions don’t just decrease costs; they also increase revenue — and the Top Line Growth All Star recognizes a customer who uses Khoros to do just that. This year’s winner is global financial technology platform Intuit.

Intuit’s Khoros community focuses on their Quickbooks product, which alone accounts for millions of customers. Intuit uses the community largely for peer-to-peer support and SEO. Like many businesses, they faced heightened inquiry volumes in their contact center, yet they managed a 211% YoY increase in deflection. Other results were similarly impressive, including a 169% YoY increase in community traffic and a 98% YoY increase in community solutions views. Perhaps most important of all is their best-in-class rating for B2B response

Kudos, Intuit!

If you’re interested in reading more about their community’s success in 2021, check out their submission.