Lithium Delivers New Total Community Products

SAN FRANCISCO, June 2, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Lithium Technologies used its 2015 LiNC Conference to launch the biggest product rollout in the company's history, tied together in an ambitious Total Community strategy. Aimed squarely at addressing the customer experience across digital channels, the new products and features announced today 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 demonstrate the company's innovation, momentum, and leadership in a market that is seeing strong growth and greater strategic importance.

As Rob Tarkoff, president and CEO of Lithium Technologies, noted, "Customer expectations continue to grow more extreme and corporate executives see this, with 82% reporting higher customer expectations versus just 3 years ago[1]. 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 today 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. Today's announcements also demonstrate how Lithium is delivering unique value from the more than 700 million online users touched by the Lithium+Klout platform each month.

"We are the only company in our space who taps an audience of this scale," added Tarkoff. "We recognize 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 center."

LSW ENHANCEMENTS: EMPOWERING THE ENTERPRISE TO ENGAGE CUSTOMERS

Lithium's newest additions to LSW make it easier than ever to monitor and respond to customer needs across social channels and communities and share the resulting customer insights throughout the organization.

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 visualize data trends that help make the customer voice "real" for the organization. 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: UNDERSTANDING CUSTOMER EXPERTISE ACROSS ALL CHANNELS

Lithium is 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.

COMMUNITY ENHANCEMENTS: CREATING GREAT DIGITAL EXPERIENCES WITH IMPACT

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.

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.  

PLATFORM EXTENSIONS: INTEGRATING DIGITAL EVERYWHERE IN YOUR BUSINESS

Digital cannot be a silo and social cannot be separate. Lithium knows its customers want their Total Community to integrate with additional enterprise systems and tools, particularly Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Intelligence (BI) toolsets. Continuing its longstanding efforts to make integration easy for its customers and partners, Lithium has updated its Salesforce Connector, added more listening APIs, and launched a new software developer kit (SDK).

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.

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.

And finally, the new Lithium-Klout SDK enables developers to use their own source control and tooling, such as integrated development environment, to customize 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 centralizes the development experience across the Lithium Total Community Platform.

Availability

Lithium Integrated Profile, Value Analytics and the SDK are in beta now with expected availability in August 2015. All other products and enhancements are available immediately.

About Lithium:
Lithium builds trusted relationships between the world's best brands and their customers, helping people get answers and share their experiences. Customers in more than 34 countries rely on Lithium to help them connect, engage, and understand their total community. With more than 100 million unique monthly visitors over all Lithium communities and another 600 million online profiles scored by Klout, Lithium has one of the largest digital footprints in the world. Using that data and the company's software, Lithium customers boost sales, reduce service costs, spark innovation, and build long-term brand loyalty and advocacy. To find out how Lithium can transform your business—and to share the experience enjoyed by 300 other leading brands around the world, visit www.lithium.com, join our community at community.lithium.com, or follow us on Twitter @LithiumTech. Lithium is a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco.

The Lithium® logo is a registered Service Mark of Lithium Technologies. All trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.

[1] Lithium Technologies survey conducted on its behalf by Harris Poll in April and May 2015 among over 300 corporate executives who work at a company with revenue of $1B or more. See Lithium press release "Corporate America Under Pressure from Consumers' Rising Expectations" issued on June 2, 2015 for full details.

SOURCE Lithium Technology Corp.

Related Links

http://www.lithium.com