Customer experience company Lithium Technologies has launched its biggest product rollout in the company’s history, tied together in a total community strategy aimed squarely at addressing the customer experience across digital channels.
The new products and features announced help demonstrate the company’s innovation, momentum, and leadership in a market that is seeing strong growth and greater strategic importance. The new features include Lithium Monitor Wall and Shared Dashboards, Experts and Mobile Agent, a new Integrated Profile, updated Ratings/Reviews and a new Value Analytics feature for Lithium Communities, an improved Salesforce Connector, a broader set of listening APIs, and a new software developer kit (SDK). Lithium’s announcements
As Rob Tarkoff, president and CEO of Lithium Technologies, said, “Customer expectations continue to grow more extreme and corporate executives see this, with 82 per cent reporting higher customer expectations versus just three years ago.
“Companies must now compete at a whole new level to keep pace with emerging digital experiences. The brands that survive—and thrive—will be those who adopt a Total Community approach and find innovative ways to delight customers, deliver real-time service, and win loyalty for the long haul. Our Total Community offering is the essential platform to help companies innovate around customer experience, care, and marketing. I am excited about what these new products can do for our customers—and equally excited about how this translates into momentum in our market.”
The new Lithium products unveiled build on the company’s longstanding strengths in customer service and support while adding new capabilities to meet brands’ marketing and promotion needs as well.
“We are the only company in our space who taps an audience of this scale,” added Tarkoff. “We recognise people across a broad range of social networks, communities, and online experiences. The insights we deliver to our customers are a real advantage for us in Total Community. The products we’re announcing today bring these data advantages front and centre.”
The new offerings
Lithium Shared Dashboard and Monitor Wall. Big data doesn’t mean a lot unless it can deliver big insights and those insights can be easily shared with the right groups. Both Shared Dashboard and Monitor Wall products help teams (and executives) get those big insights on customer trends and issues in real time.
The new features make it easier than ever to involve stakeholder groups throughout the enterprise, configure and update dashboards on the fly, and beautifully visualise data trends that help make the customer voice ‘real’ for the organisation.
These insights can be instantly actioned to solve a crisis or share a win—and handle both service and support needs as well as marketing opportunities. These capabilities keep Lithium at the cutting edge for leveraging the voice of the digital customer throughout the enterprise.
Lithium Mobile Agent and Experts. Those on the frontlines of customer care won’t always have the right answer at their fingertips, but this doesn’t alter customer expectations for fast, accurate responses. Companies today try to handle this with fragmented, cumbersome, and mostly manual processes that don’t adequately address the need. LSW Experts allows customer care teams to quickly and easily tap into the expertise that sits throughout the organization, reaching these ‘special forces’ on demand—via web and mobile—to get customers the answers and resolutions they need as swiftly as possible.
Lithium Integrated Profile. Lithium is also debuting Lithium Integrated Profile to help companies better understand their customers across their activity on all types of digital properties. While the Klout algorithm has been recently enhanced to represent the intersection of expertise and influence on the social web, until now this hasn’t been connected with the rich profile information available in branded communities. The Lithium Integrated Profile is essentially an expanded and improved Klout Score that takes existing Klout inputs and adds Lithium-powered communities to the scoring algorithms.
Integrated Profiles make it easier for consumers to present a more holistic digital view of themselves across disparate networks and experiences. Consumers can now more easily find like-minded others, identify topics that impact their personal online/social brand, get credit for their expertise across broad social networks and communities, get more personally relevant content and a more personalized experience from brands, and easily seek out and identify experts as needed.
For brands, the Lithium Integrated Profile helps brand community or social response teams easily identify experts in topics important to their community and/or brand, more easily identify and reward passionate customers and influencers, understand their customers holistically (and not just through the limited scope of a CRM record), elevate and create content that is more relevant and engaging for top experts and influencers, and deliver a more personalized experience that helps increase community engagement.
Ratings/Reviews. Lithium knows that great experiences drive great results and has announced improvements to Ratings/Reviews, making it easier for brands and users to see which products or services are faring well—and why. The improved Ratings/Reviews and the multimedia capabilities across the platform encourage customers to share their ideas, opinions, and inspirations in multiple ways. This ability for brands to create more immersive, engaging experiences for their Total Community is driving an increase in marketing-led community efforts and fueling Lithium’s growth among retailers and lifestyle brands.
Value Analytics. Lithium is also unveiling Value Analytics, a powerful new feature that uses integrated surveys in conjunction with foundational analytics built into the Lithium community platform to measure community return on investment (ROI). Value Analytics helps community managers determine the purpose of a community visit, success rates, intent to call, and net promoter scores among other valuable insights. This helps service teams improve key metrics such as call deflection rates and helps marketers tailor community content.
Salesforce Connector. Salesforce Connector provides seamless integration between Lithium and Salesforce so customer-related processes and data can be shared between the two systems. This updated version improves case management when a case initiates in the community or initiates in Salesforce and is brought into the community, improves the use of knowledge base articles and ‘accepted solutions’ within Salesforce, enhances search from within Salesforce, allows use of content created or hosted within Salesforce inside the community, and improves community-related metrics within Salesforce dashboards.
Listening APIs. The new listening APIs help companies keep up with the constant proliferation of social networks and third party communities, so they can continue to be responsive to customers across the web. The APIs allow LSW to ingest data from any social network or third party community, furthering LSW’s ability to uniformly track, monitor, and engage with customers wherever they are in the digital landscape.
Lithium-Klout SDK. Finally, the new Lithium-Klout SDK enables developers to use their own source control and tooling, such as integrated development environment, to customise and integrate the Lithium platform. The SDK makes it easier, faster, and cheaper for customers, integrators, and agencies to develop on the Lithium platform and centralises the development experience across the Lithium Total Community Platform.
