The results are in: Khoros Kudos 2022 winners

Every year, global companies submit their customer engagement stories to the Khoros Kudos contest — and every year, we’re blown away by the wins that our customers come away with. Each time we think we’ve hit a ceiling, one of our incredible customers proves us wrong. This year was no different.

Across 11 amazing categories, we got 77 submissions, each one more impressive than the last. From incredible growth in just one year to rockstar communities and more, these submissions knocked our socks off. But of course, there can only be one winner in each category. So without further ado, here are your 2022 Khoros Kudos winners.

Holistic Engagement Platform | Viessman

One of our new categories in 2022, Holistic Engagement Platform recognizes a Khoros customer that aligns multiple Khoros solutions to create a unified platform for customer engagement, connecting people, processes, and technology across every channel and touchpoint. The submissions for this category ranged from incredible contact centers and marketing organizations to expertly run communities. The one constant? They all integrated Khoros solutions to create an omnichannel customer experience.

The Holistic Engagement Platform winner this year is Viessmann, a company that sells HVAC equipment on a large scale. Viessmann realized that customers and others were talking about the brand across various channels, without a unified connection among them. That’s why they built a new community, where customers and other brand advocates could gather to share information and details about the company. As positive reviews piled up, so did specific questions, so Viessmann implemented Khoros Care to handle the inbound volume. This proved to be a huge success because it allowed the Viessmann team to quickly route all customer conversations to the appropriate teams, saving precious time and money.

All that success with Khoros Communities and Khoros Marketing made Viessmann want to round out the rest, so it implemented Khoros Marketing as well. This allowed Viessmann to connect customer conversations to marketing and social media campaigns, which drove more effective creative content.

Kudos, Viessmann!

You can read more about Viessmann’s success here.

Best in Class: Community | Three Ireland

One of the most competitive categories every year, the Best in Class: Community award recognizes a brand community that didn’t just serve customers, but actually encouraged brand growth. Three Ireland did an incredible job with that this year.

Three Ireland is one of Ireland’s leading mobile operators. It uses its Khoros community to help power its digital transformation strategy, which it calls Three Vision. The community helps Three Ireland provide a digital-first support option, but this year, it grew into so much more than that. One of the main goals of Three Vision was to offer Three Ireland customers more than just a support community by providing best-in-class engagement experiences and incorporating product innovation and insights. Most importantly, Three Ireland used its community to drive business growth and sales in 2022.

Kudos, Three Ireland!

To read more about Three Ireland’s community success, check out their full Kudos submission.

Best in Class: Digital | Orange Belgium

The digital category recognizes a customer who has used digital customer engagement channels (such as mobile messaging, web chat, and more) or conversational AI (customer- and agent-facing bots) to reduce costs, grow revenue, and drive greater employee and customer satisfaction.

Orange Belgium, a leading prepaid mobile service provider in Belgium and Luxembourg, was a clear winner in 2022. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has seen a significant rise in contact center volume. This year, it increased its offering of digital channels, allowing customers to contact it in a wide variety of ways, including Instagram, Twitter, and web chat. Customers have been very happy with the updated communication.

Orange Belgium also launched a new brand this year, called Hey! Hey! is a 100% digital brand, so it was very important to keep the experience consistent with a user base who prefers digital interaction. To achieve this, Orange Belgium partnered with Khoros to build a Hey! chatbot. Over a quarter of customer inquiries have been handled by the chatbot in 2022, and in the past year, Orange Chat has an 88% CSAT.

Kudos, Orange Belgium!

Read more about how Orange Belgium did it here.

Best in Class: Insights | Intuit

Reliable insights into the customer experience are absolutely essential for any brand. The best Insights submission this year came from financial tech company Intuit. In recent years, Intuit has faced a challenge: during tax season, the busiest time of year for Intuit’s customers, Intuit was unable to spot trends quickly. Customers were prioritizing their most important clients, but Intuit didn’t have a tool to track when those priorities shifted or customers faced challenges. Khoros Care enabled it to track trends in real-time, rather than relying on customer service teams to spot them. This helped the development team prioritize bugs and form release dates.

Kudos, Intuit!

Best in Class: Social | BMW x Accenture Song

Social media is often a brand’s most public interface with customers and prospects. It’s crucial for digital marketing and brand reputation. A great social media presence can bring a brand closer to its customers and encourage engagement.

The 2022 Best in Class: Social award goes to BMW x Accenture Song. BMW imports cars to a lot of different countries, and their social media campaigns have to reflect that. What works in one market won’t necessarily work in another; it has to be localized and tailored to each region’s cultures, customs, and values. BMW x Accenture Song used Khoros Marketing to manage 29 social media accounts in 16 markets, each with its own content and needs. Content distribution is focused and targeted to meet specific needs, with advanced analytics to provide real-time feedback. The results speak for themselves: since 2020, impressions are up 30% and reach is up 76%.

Kudos, BMW x Accenture Song!

You can read more about BMW x Accenture Song’s use of Khoros Marketing in their full submission.

Bottom Line Savings Rock Star | Flexera

IT consulting company Flexera used Khoros to boost its bottom line in 2022. The Flexera community strives to connect people who have questions about the brand to people who have answers. The goal is for the community to be the first place customers go to solve their problems, decreasing strain on Flexera’s contact center. With forums, knowledge bases, and at least one blog dedicated to every Flexera product, the community is a wealth of information for any customer looking to find answers.

With increased engagement and traffic, the community is a success in its own right. But even more importantly, Flexera has used the community to deflect 31% of cases, leading to over $1.3m in savings.

Kudos, Flexera!

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

Engagement for Good | Truth Initiative

A new category this year, Engagement for Good recognizes a customer who has leveraged the Khoros platform to make a substantial impact in their community. We can’t think of a better example than Truth Initiative, a nonprofit that helps people break smoking, vaping, and other nicotine habits.

Truth Initaitve’s EX Community is key to success. In the community, it provides an anonymous, 24/7 place where users can tackle tobacco addiction together, regardless of age, socioeconomic status, or other factors. Hundreds of thousands of members have used the EX community to help them quit smoking, but recently, more and more have been coming to Truth Initiative to quit vaping.

Truth Initiative does more than just a community, however. It also runs the Truth Campaign, an enormous national multimedia effort aimed at helping people understand the risks of tobacco use, with a specific focus on vaping.

Kudos, Truth Initiative!

You can read their full submission here.

Keep Calm and Carry On | Zoom

The Zoom boom of 2020 saw a 2,900% increase in daily usage, and with all those new users came new products and lots of customer support inquiries. It was a struggle to handle every inquiry using a contact center alone, which is why Zoom partnered with Khoros to build a community, and within just five months, the community had over 100k members.

Zoom’s key for providing an excellent customer experience — and deflecting support volume — was agility. Zoom wanted a platform that could grow and adapt when needed. It also wanted the community to underscore the human connections that make Zoom so popular.

With over 130k members, 3.9m unique visitors, 8.6m page views, and lots of positive feedback from users, Zoom’s community has been a smashing success.

Kudos, Zoom!

To read more about how Zoom achieved such great results, click here.

Partners for Life | Palo Alto Networks

Global cybersecurity leader Palo Alto Networks takes home this year’s Partners for Life award. Its LIVEcommunity is an important part of its business, providing customers a hub to get help, work through issues, or learn more about the company. In 2022, Palo Alto Networks partnered with the Khoros Business Value team to do a full audit of LIVEcommunity’s look and feel, as well as its performance.

It started with a community facelift, giving users a cleaner, more streamlined experience.

Of course, the look and feel changes were just the beginning. Palo Alto Networks also relied on Khoros advice to create a new training program for community team members, build strategies for future community enhancements, and implement brand-approved discussion post icons to show customers trusted solutions:

The result of the audit was a simplified user experience, enhanced self-service support, and increased engagement. Member entrances increased by 10%, discussion posts and replies grew by 15%, and Kudos usage increased by 20%.

Kudos, Palo Alto Networks!

To learn more about Palo Alto Networks’ community, read its full Kudos submission.

Rookie of the Year | F5, Inc.

F5 is a global tech company based in Seattle. It onboarded Khoros with the main goals of increasing content delivery speed, maintaining SEO compliance and trust, and increasing engagement in its DevCentral community. Once Khoros was up and running, DevCentral showed almost immediate improvement, with a 36% increase in natural search visits and a 279% increase in lighthouse performance.

Kudos, F5, Inc.!

To read more about how they supercharged their SEO capabilities, read their Kudos submission.

The Innovator | General Motors

Last but not least is The Innovator, recognizing a customer that has taken advantage of Khoros’ AI capabilities to push conventional boundaries in the market. GM has done exactly that with its Khoros-powered customer service strategy. GM uses Khoros to route inquiries from every channel into one place, making it easy for agents. GM also found that by routing conversations based on a customer’s situation instead of just brand or topic, it could more effectively serve customers’ needs.

GM also leverages natural language processing to analyze conversations and pick up on important trends. GM was especially interested in conversations about safety, so it used English and Spanish language detection to tag and analyze conversations about safety.

Kudos, GM!

To learn more about how GM uses AI to enhance customer experience, click here.