[May 03, 2012]

Lithium Extends Social Support Leadership with New Lithium Response™

LITHIUM NETWORK CONFERENCE--Lithium Technologies, the leader in Social Customer Experience, today unveiled a new product that reduces the cost of handling customer issues in social channels: Lithium Response. Lithium's latest product addition expands the industry's most comprehensive social support solution to encompass online self-service, peer-to-peer communities and the contact center.

Lithium Response, unveiled at the Lithium Network Conference (LiNC) 2012, allows brands to handle large volumes of support conversations on Twitter (News - Alert), Facebook and the broader social web without scaling out massive teams of social agents.

Designed from the ground up to meet the specialized needs of customer service teams, Lithium Response automatically identifies, categorizes, and prioritizes posts that require follow-up and routes them to the right set of resources, maximizing agent efficiency. Importantly, Lithium Response gives agents the ability to easily embed suggested content from their Lithium-powered communities in replies to service issues, directing customers - and anyone else watching the conversation - to where they can find answers through low-cost online channels.

Consumers are more empowered, connected and vocal than ever before, and social media allows them to express opinions about brands - both negative and positive - with unprecedented reach and speed. Yet, more than 70 percent of customer complaints expressed on Twitter go unanswered by brands¹. What's more, nearly half of consumers say they are more likely to share negative experiences with a brand because of social media².

"Social media has shifted the balance of power in consumers' favor, and to succeed in this new reality companies must meet their customers wherever they choose to engage with the brand," said Rob Tarkoff (News - Alert), Lithium President and Chief Executive Officer. "At the same time, brands need a social support strategy with a scalable cost model."

"With the addition of Lithium Response we have taken another major leap forward in helping brands build an end-to-end strategy for social support that uses peer-to-peer communities to engage customers as extensions of the support team, driving down the cost of service through social channels," Tarkoff said.

Already recognized as the leader in social customer support solutions, Lithium has been ranked in Gartner's 2012 report Critical Capabilities for Peer-to-Peer Customer Community Software.

Key Features of the Comprehensive Lithium Social Support Solution

• Resolve More Issues Through Self-Service Support - Lithium Tribal Knowledge Base empowers customers and employees to turn the best community conversations into published knowledge articles. New landing pages andtemplates make this process even easier.
• Turn Customers into Agents Through Peer-to-Peer Support - Through social apps and gamification, Lithium Communities motivate customers to resolve each other's issues online, helping brands save millions in support costs each year. New peer-to-peer support capabilities include better access to answers through improved search, automated content recommendations, group spaces for collaborating on the resolution of customer issues and solution templates that package Lithium best practices for support communities.
• Deliver Cost Effective Social-Web Support - Lithium Response boasts various features that help contact center agents identify, prioritize and reply to large volumes of service issues on social channels with links that show customers how to find answers in Lithium Communities. Lithium also reduces the volume of inbound support requests that hit the contact center by empowering community members to reply to service issues on Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter through Lithium LevelUp for Facebook™ and Lithium Twitter Integration.
• Increase Contact Center Efficiency - Lithium CRM Integration escalates the most urgent issues to the top of the queue for rapid resolution. Lithium is teaming with visionary brands to implement "swarming" methodologies that bring the right experts to the table to share knowledge and resolve customer issues faster.
• Deflect Calls from Mobile Users - Lithium Mobile enables customers to find answers and share knowledge on the go. New enhancements include an improved user experience, suggested answers that appear before new posts are submitted, and dashboards that provide experts with rapid access to unanswered questions.

• "Our customers are so helpful we do not need a traditional customer service center, but use our community support forums instead. This saves us costs and overhead without sacrificing service: any question asked on the community is answered within 90 seconds on average; our customers rank our customer service nine out of 10 and our 73 percent Net Promoter Score equals that of Google and is just one percentage point shy of Apple's (News - Alert). What's more, we create a huge volume of content with our community that drives more and more traffic to our website. In fact, we see 30 percent of all organic traffic going straight into our community," said Vincent Boon, Head of Community, giffgaff.
• "When a Customer Support Engineer in the Cisco Technical Assistance Center doesn't know how to resolve an issue, they use Lithium to reach out to experts across the company who 'swarm' the problem and share their knowledge. Once the answer is found, the conversation is turned into a Lithium Tribal Knowledge Base (News - Alert) article for other engineers to find, and the team of contributors is rewarded with recognition through the Lithium Social Reputation Engine," said Cisco's Steve Young, Senior Director of Technical Services.

Analyst Quote

• Michael Maoz, Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst for Customer Strategies Research, said: "Gartner predicts that by 2014, organizations integrating communities into customer support will realize cost reductions ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent³. The results from early adopters suggest that a side benefit accrues to Marketing, as community participants are more positive and engaged with the Brand. The strategy to achieve this is to build a customer engagement hub that combines social, collaboration, content, analytics, CRM integration, analytics and synchronization with the customer service contact center."

Lithium is showcasing the new capabilities of Lithium Response during LiNC 2012, taking place May 2-4 at the InterContinental Hotel in San Francisco.

About Lithium Technologies

Lithium helps companies unlock the passion of their customers. Lithium software powers amazing Social Customer Experiences for more than 300 iconic brands including AT&T, BT, Best Buy, Sephora, Skype and Telstra. Lithium helps companies grow brand advocacy, drive sales, reduce costs and accelerate innovation to create a brand nation that redefines the customer experience. For more information, visit http://www.lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own brand nation - the Lithosphere. Lithium is privately held with corporate headquarters in Emeryville, Calif. and offices in Europe and Asia.

All trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.

¹ Twitter Study by Maritz Research and evolve24, September 2011

² Joint "Variance in Social Brand Experience" study by CMO Council and Lithium, December 2011

³ Gartner Predicts 2012: CRM Customer Service and Support Staggers into the Posthuman Age, Nov. 11, 2011

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