Hughesnet’s Story
From cost savings to improved customer support, explore the early ROI and successes Hughesnet enjoyed from upgrading to Next Generation Khoros Communities.
About Hughesnet
For more than 25 years, Hughesnet has been the leading high-speed satellite internet service in rural America. Michelle Rodriguez and her team specifically support customers who find themselves without phone coverage or disconnected from the Internet by providing them with methods to contact Hughesnet for support assistance.
Reasons for change
Michelle and her team were introduced to Next Generation Khoros Communities through a demo by their Khoros account manager. They were intrigued by the platform’s robust and user-friendly features, including the ability to easily view what a member sees for troubleshooting and make changes without the need for HTML coding. Michelle envisioned leveraging these features to increase the speed and ease with which she could connect with customers needing assistance during outages due to weather or natural disasters. With coding no longer required to make changes, she could quickly and easily create an alert banner in the community with critical information to support customers in need. Once she saw this was possible on the new platform, she was convinced.
Solution
Hughesnet upgraded from Khoros Communities, Classic version, to Next Generation Khoros Communities in early 2025. They introduced single-sign-on (SSO) to enable customers to access the community easily. The Next Generation Khoros Communities delivered on its promise of offering a modern UI that was easy to navigate for customers, and a WYSIWYG back-end that allowed Michelle to manage the Hughesnet community without developer resources.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“Just the other day, I made some changes to a content suggestion that was coming up at the bottom of some pages. I decided to remove it, knowing full well that if someone asked me to put it back, I could do so. Next Generation Khoros Communities makes it super user-friendly to make changes and revert them."
Michelle Rodriguez
Social Media Manager II at Hughesnet
“I asked [our account manager] if alert banners are available on Next Generation Khoros Communities where we can post alerts at the top of the page. When I was told that this is available, I said, ‘I’m sold. Let’s do this.’ So now we can tell our customers, ‘Hey, there's something wrong. We're working on it. Don't worry about it,’ and it'll be right there right in front of them.”
Michelle Rodriguez
Social Media Manager II at Hughesnet
Top achievements
Michelle and her team leverage Accelerated Community Management (ACM) to oversee and manage community engagement across social media platforms and their entire digital ecosystem.
Hughesnet has successfully upgraded from Khoros Communities, Classic version to Next Generation Khoros Communities.
Post upgrade, Michelle and her team are empowered to make changes in the community more quickly and easily, without the need for coding experience or a dedicated developer.
Early results
Time savings
Cost savings
Improved customer support
“Our Khoros account manager reached out to us and said, ‘We have this cool new product called Next Generation Khoros Communities. Do you want to try it out?’ I said it looks really cool and the features are useful to us, seeing as we don’t have a dedicated developer. They were nice enough to handle the development and all that for us.”
MICHELLE RODRIGUEZ
Social Media Manager II at Hughesnet
What's next
Hughesnet has identified key goals for the future of their community, including:
Growing its member base
Boosting community engagement
Increasing member retention
Driving re-visits
Tracking time on site
Decreasing time-to-answer