Company: Silverpop
Categories: Best Community Business Integration
Entered by: Karen Marchione (kmarchione)
Community Name: Silverpop Online Community
Launched: May 3, 2011
When Silverpop began searching for a Community Forum solution, many of the key requirements during the vendor selection were system integration related. Silverpop chose Lithium primarily by being able to meet those requirements better than any of their competitors we evaluated.
Silverpop was able to leverage Lithium’s Single Sign-On Solution (PHP) to allow for easy integration with our custom Customer Support portal. Using the Single Sign-On Solution provided by Lithium, Silverpop’s Customer Community was developed in a way that makes it easily accessible to our customers via our Customer Support Portal and direct URL all using their same login credentials.
Single Sign on functionality is a huge benefit to our customers in that they don’t need to manage/maintain multiple user name/password logins when doing business with Silverpop, which has also fueled the adoption of our private customer community by more than 50% of our customer base.
Another key integration feature offered by Lithium and leveraged by Silverpop is their REST API tool set. Silverpop uses the REST API to pass customer data/information between the Community and our existing external systems such as Salesforce.com. For example, Silverpop was able to better and more accurately use Lithium reporting & metric tools by passing client specific data from Salesforce.com into the client’s user profile in Lithium. And thanks to Lithium we finally have a means for effectively managing all the great product ideas we receive from our customers in our Idea Exchange.
Using Lithium’s rest API, we are able to collect all of the Ideas submitted by our customers through our Customer Community and export needed data for further review and analysis. This export and review process has become a key part of our release planning cycle as it allows us to group the data in a variety of ways (by feature, status, customer, kudos, etc) and quickly identify candidates for a release.
Silverpop has additional plans this year to leverage Lithium’s API integration for the following:
- Build our own custom Twitter feed/functionality into our Customer Community.
- Build out a more robust integration with Salesforce.com for customer support case utilization.
- Build a custom integration with our QlikView Business Intelligence system to import relevant customer KPI’s.