Migros Enhances and Expands Migipedia Community with Lithium

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 6, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Migros is the largest Swiss retailer and one of the top 40 largest retailers in the world. Lithium now powers their hugely popular online community Migipedia.

For years, Migros had empowered customers with a vibrant community that brought people together discussing food, cooking, healthy eating, product ideas and a variety of other passion points central to its supermarket business.

As the community grew in popularity, Migros' internal resources were under tremendous pressure to keep up with new technology demands, community best practices, and key features and functionality that community members had experienced in other forums and wanted incorporated into Migipedia. To meet the increasing expectations of their community members and internal technical requirements, Migros migrated to a more scalable solution, offloading software upgrades and routine maintenance to Lithium's cloud community platform which incorporates a range of innovations—such as gamification—for richer community member engagement.

As Rob Tarkoff, president and CEO of Lithium Technologies noted, "I am excited that Migros has migrated Migipedia to Lithium. Migros is pioneering new approaches to every aspect of the retail experience and understands that passionate fans and happy consumers are powerful brand allies in a world of extreme customer expectations."

While Migros was thrilled with the depth of sustained customer engagement on Migipedia, it was hard for the company to track important or trending issues over time, or to solve customer needs in real-time via Migipedia or other social channels where consumers were expressing their desires, satisfaction or discontent for the world to see.

Head of Online Communications & Community Management of Migros Cooperatives Federation Sergio Mare observed, "We are delighted to extend our work with Lithium and our users have already started enjoying our new and improved Migipedia. At the same time, we have better analytics and an integrated response mechanism for social activity thanks to Lithium Social Web (LSW)."

Migros had previously deployed LSW for social customer service, monitoring and managing direct customer response via social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Thanks to LSW, Migros is tracking customer contacts over time, solving customer needs faster, and routing challenges or complaints to employees who can help customers get the most from Migros.

Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, Lithium's platform is software as a service, or SaaS. This means that product updates and features are available to Migros as Lithium unveils them. Migros doesn't need to spend time reconfiguring systems or servers or software—Lithium does all that for them. So as Lithium rolls out improved ratings and reviews and more mobile applications, Migros can benefit from the technology enhancements almost instantly.

As Rob concluded, "Migros now gets to tap all our expertise and our vast innovation engine on-demand so they can enhance the Migipedia experience. They also get to effectively outsource the infrastructure investments in community to us—offering them the latest technologies and industry-leading benefits at a fraction of the in-house cost."

The relaunch of Migipedia was complemented by a refresh in community designs completed by Advico Y & R. Web development experts from Smartive, Liip AG, 89Grad and web developers Stefan Sicher and Roland Schilter contributed significantly to today's Migipedia.

About Lithium Technologies
Lithium's software helps companies reinvent how they connect with their customers. Lithium works with more than 300 of the world's best brands— including Best Buy, Indosat, Sephora, Skype and Telstra — to respond on social networks and to build trusted content on a community they own. The 100% SaaS-based Lithium Social Customer Experience™ platform enables brands to build and engage vibrant customer communities to drive sales, reduce service costs, accelerate innovation and grow brand advocacy. For more information, visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own community. Lithium is privately held with corporate headquarters in San Francisco and offices across Europe, Asia and Australia.

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

SOURCE Lithium Technologies