Executive summary

Khoros was built from two digital customer engagement software powerhouses: Spredfast and Lithium. When the two companies became Khoros in 2018, we revamped our existing online community to focus on onboarding more users and driving deeper collaboration between the digital engagement and community professionals there. A big part of that was making it easier for new visitors to navigate between our products, website, and community to find the information and interactions they’re seeking. With over a decade of content, including over 150,000 unique posts across blogs, forums, and knowledge bases, we turned to AI and automation to help users better navigate and interact. In 2020, we built and deployed a chatbot on both our website and our community to help answer common questions, locate valuable content, assist in community registration and navigation, and quickly connect users to chat with Khoros experts.

Conversational support and service

The underlying purpose of our chatbot, Maia, is to make it easier for our customers and prospects to ask questions, get answers, and connect with other users. So as we built out the various conversation flows Maia would use to address customer inquiries, we modeled them closely after our Product Coaching team’s characteristics — helpful, detail-obsessed, and thoughtful.

Most brands don’t even think to add web chat or chatbots to their communities because they think it will detract from human interactions or engagement in the community. If a chatbot could quickly answer your question, you might not post it to a support thread, and that could detract from that community’s goal of creating high-value conversations and answers that other users can discover and benefit from. But what about users who want to ask a question, or locate a conversation, but find it too difficult or intimidating?

New community users and one-time visitors rarely know where to begin. Intelligent bots can help users who don’t know how to navigate the community, or who might otherwise hesitate to ask a question. If a bot can point a visitor in a helpful direction — say, a community thread with the same question and a dozen good answers already posted — that user will be more likely to engage in the forum.

Brands want their communities to be easier for customers to use, and stickier once they do — but the average bounce rate on communities is still 40%. A chat window and a chatbot offer another option for visitors who may prefer a conversational experience to find information rather than using a search bar or browsing navigation menus. In this way, adding a bot to our community didn’t detract from human interaction on our community; quite the opposite, in fact. It also helps community moderators by reducing the amount of duplicate posts for common questions they have to remove, merge, move, or edit.

Conversational Marketing

In addition to making life easier for existing customers and community members, we deployed Maia onto our website’s homepage to help visitors and prospective customers find the information they need faster.

We know a certain percentage of people would rather have a conversational experience than dig around a site or product catalog for an answer — so we offer them the option to click through quick reply buttons and carousels to learn more about specific features and solutions. By integrating to our sales team’s calendar tool, Maia makes it easy to schedule a meeting or demo to learn more without having to send an email, fill out a form, or go through some other tedious back-and-forth that hurts conversion rates.

Combined with the ability to request a human agent to answer more complex questions, Maia is an important component of a conversational marketing strategy that drives more qualified, high-interest leads by taking the friction out of engaging with Khoros.

Results

Maia makes it easier for customers and prospects to engage with Khoros and find what they need within our community and on our website. After deploying Maia, we also realized important gains in customer engagement, including an increase in community registrations and an increase in leads.