The number one reason why customers stop doing business with brands is because they don’t feel valued by the brand. Brands no longer primarily compete on product or price; 89% of brands believe the new frontier for differentiation is customer experience (Gartner).     So how do you deliver customer experiences that are just as magical, memorable, and valuable for your customers at scale and at every stage of the customer journey?   Aside from having the right technology and strategy in place, you need to be able to measure how well you are serving your customers. The lifetime value of a customer, cost of customer acquisition, churn rate, NPS and CSAT are just a few key metrics but brands often struggle with how to leverage this data to improve their CX programs. And this gap exposes real costs to the business – 86% of consumers reported that they will not purchase from a business that has negative reviews (Dimensional Research).   A good experience often is appreciated with a brand, but a bad experience speaks louder when it comes to the digital world. Consumers are quick to report negative experiences that tarnish the perception and reliability of a brand.   While some people may rely on word of mouth to spread the good (and bad) news, brands are now tasked with analyzing the digital sentiment and metrics that are showcased throughout a customer’s journey.   Are you measuring the right metrics to get ahead of your competition?   Check out our webcast on March 15 th @ 10 AM PT “CX: Measure What Matters Most” where NetApp and SAS will discuss how they made data-driven decisions to improve their CX programs. Reserve your seat here.   And in the meantime, take a look at our How-to-Guide: Using Customer Communities to Boost Loyalty & Retention.   ... View more

When you’re on the phone with customer service, don’t you hate being transferred to agent after agent, requiring you to repeat your identification and the issue you’re calling about? Your customers hate it, too - according to a survey by [24]7,  77% cited that their top frustration with customer service is the lack of context and customer history, causing them to start over each time they reached out to the brand regardless of the channel.     In an era where 89% of brands expect to compete mostly on customer experience, understanding customer context has become a must-have for delivering great customer service, not a nice-to-have. Today, most brands see their customers as one dimensional, a CRM record, a transaction. They need to see the behavioral and social aspects of their customers, the human element, in order to create meaningful relationships with them.   How do you bring these elements together? Transform your CRM into a hub for all customer data and interactions. What you get is a social CRM solution that empowers customer care agents to deliver better customer experiences with a more streamlined case management process.     Join us for an upcoming webcast, “Seamless Customer Service with a Social CRM,” where @JeffSp, VP of Product Management, and I break it down. In this webcast, you will learn:   How to integrate data across all systems to create a shared customer profile How to leverage customer history and context to deliver personalized experiences How we integrate with two top CRM providers, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, to create a seamless flow of data between Lithium and the CRM.   Tune in on Wednesday, October 26th at 10AM PDT.   Reserve your spot here!           ... View more

  For the third year in row, we partnered with Persistent Systems to host the LiNC’16 Hackathon at Lithium HQ. Customers and partners from around the world flew in their best developers, designers and even community and social media managers to build the next great idea on the Lithium platform. For this year’s competition, we focused on solutions that delivered powerful user experiences and ways to extend the platform across other applications. Their solutions were judged on creativity, completeness, value to the end-user and applicability to other customers.   This year, we decided to shake things up. During the Hackathon Awards Ceremony at LiNC’16, we invited the Overall Winner to demo their solution in order to highlight the innovation that comes from this event. Talk about nerve-wracking! Nonetheless, the winning team killed it and took home a GoPro as the grand prize. The category winners took home FitBits.   Congrats to all of our winners and challengers! Read about their solutions below.   Overall Winner The Bridge: Amy Trice @amytrice, John Linster @jlinster, Keyai Lee @Keeeyyyaaaiii, Stephane Akkaoui @sakkaoui The Bridge won the overall hackathon for a creative customer support solution that integrates Facebook Messenger with Lithium Community and Response, leveraging APIs and a chatbot. When a customer messaged the brand via Messenger, a chatbot pulled content recommendations from the brand's community to help the customer answer their question. As a result, it encourages Facebook users to join the community and resolves support cases from Facebook more efficiently. A demo of the team's solution can be found below.           Best Customization Swiss Interactive Home: Armin Ledergerber @armled, Jan Biller Grau @MrB77, Lukas Zahnd @luk, Sabrina Heid @sabrina89 Most users begin their research and discovery with a search engine. In order to capitalize on search referral traffic, Swiss Interactive Home created a customized community experience for users that were referred to Lithium communities from search engines. Through a customized UX, their solution aimed  to drive higher engagement and registration conversion.     Best Total Community Integration Auto-Magic: Jason Nitta @jasonnitta, LaRhonda Frost, Lindsey Duncan @LiDunk, Naveen Narayan @nav2000 Auto-Magic built a content publishing solution that integrated Lithium Community with Lithium Response. It allowed users to curate and broadcast the most valuable community content across social channels.     Best Responsive UI Responsive Home: Claudius Henrichs @Claudius, Miika Oksanen, Patrick Kaufmann @patrick89, Vanessa Meister @VanessaM Responsive Home impressively developed a fully responsive solution in just 4 hours. The solution was optimized across four device categories: desktop, tablet (landscape and portrait) and mobile.     Hands down, these challengers took the bulls by the horn. Every year, we host the Hackathon to provide our customers and partners an open environment to collaborate and experiment with new ways to grow their Total Community. And every year, we are impressed with the innovations they deliver than what we could build on our own. This is why we continue to invest in the ability to customize and extend the platform. Thank you to those that helped make the event a success: Persistent Systems for sponsoring; our talented Lithium Developer Network who served as advisors and for their overall dedication to the developer community; @ArnaudL for taking beautiful photos and action shots throughout the event; @JohnDa, @MichaelP, and @sachin for serving on our judging panel; and finally, to our amazing customers and partners – we can't wait to see what you bring next year! ... View more

On June 8th at Lithium HQ, the gloves are off. Lithium customers will send their best developers, designers and hackers from all over the world to the LiNC’16 Hackathon where they will form teams and match up with other competitors to build the best customization and user experience on the platform. To get in on the action, sign up for the hackathon when you register for LiNC’16 and join the LiNC’16 Hackathon Group to meet other hackers and receive announcements leading up to the event.   Every year, the LiNC hackathon inspires developers, designers, partners and engineers to think creatively about building user experiences that drives customer engagement and loyalty at scale. Today, most brands compete on customer experience so innovation in this area is critical to stay relevant in the era of social-savvy customers.   Here are the top 7 reasons why you should attend the hackathon this year: 1. It’s the best way to learn Are you new to the Lithium platform? If you are just getting started with our APIs and find yourself banging your head against the table after reading endless documentation and still running into error codes, hackathons provide a great environment for problem-solving and digging into new technology. Every year, the LiNC hackathon connects new customers with older customers who have “been there, done that” and can collaborate to help you in areas where you’re stuck, which brings us to... 2. Head out of the office and meet new people Meet like-minded people that work on the same problems you do everyday. Hackathons offer a collaborative and supportive environment where you can think out loud and talk through issues. Also, the LiNC hackathon draws customers from all over the world with all sorts of backgrounds. By the end of the day, you will have a new friend in every country to meet up with beyond the event!   3. Create something completely new Not every company allows employees to allocate 20% of their time to new ideas like Google. Hackathons provide a low risk environment for experimenting with a new idea that you’ve been keeping in the back of your pocket, especially if you need help fleshing out the process or workflow. At the LiNC hackathon, we provide you with sandbox environments and sample data that will allow you to build a prototype without implementing it in your own community. If it works out, great - you now have a prototype to build upon when you return to the office and try it out in your own community. 4. Free food for a day San Francisco has an eclectic food culture and as fellow foodies, we will ensure you are well-fed so you can focus and use maximum brain power on hacking that new idea. Not to mention, we have a kegerator to tap into at the end of the event when you can kick up your feet and call it a day.       5. Acquire industry expertise The LiNC hackathon is a whole day dedicated to thinking about innovative ways you can create a better digital customer experience for your end-users. Attendees are other customers or partners that focus on this challenge everyday just like you. Connect with people who approached customer experience differently and learn best practices. By collaborating with your group members and experimenting on the Lithium platform, you will walk away with a better understanding of what works (and doesn’t work) when it comes to digital customer experience. 6. Win prizes Nothing inspires innovation quite like a good ol’ competition. Get recognized on mainstage at LiNC’16 for your idea. Last year, we gave away Apple gift cards to the category winners and iPads to the overall winners @ebroyles and @nicgutierrez. Read about the winning ideas here. The prizes are different every year, so stay tuned on what we have in store for you.   7. You’ll build something by the end of the day Even if you don’t walk away with a prize, the most satisfying feeling after a hackathon is knowing that you built an idea from scratch and shared it with other people all in one day. With your idea, you may inspire someone else to think differently about a problem they’re trying to solve or you may even decide to implement it in your own Lithium environment. Need we say more? If we convinced you, sign up for the hackathon when you register for LiNC’16 . After you register or if you already registered, be sure to join the LiNC’16 Hackathon Group to stay up to date on announcements leading up to the event and to form teams. See you in San Francisco! ... View more