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

At Lithium, we have a ton of passionate contributors typing furiously to share the latest thought leadership in customer engagement, the coolest new customer story or interesting takeaways from a webinar. Sometimes awesome content gets buried in the shuffle so moving forward on the Lithium community, we will be rounding up top stories, news and resources you need to know in case you missed it. If you want to stay up to date with our top content and send them straight to your inbox, check “Customers Only: Product Releases” on this form  to subscribe to our bi-monthly customer newsletter.   Here is our first roundup of the #ICYMI series:   The 2016 Lithium Digital Customer Excellence Awards (Lithys) have been extended! Get recognized for your digital excellence. Submit your Lithy nomination by April 27th and you could join the digital elite by taking home a trophy at LiNC! Check out our video  for some inspiration. Click here to submit your entry .       Accelerate your success with Fast Track Services We're excited to announce the launch of a new set of services: Fast Track! With nearly 15 years of community and social customer experience, Fast Track packages our expertise into targeted, short-term engagements to help you drive more ROI. Get started here for more information .              Lithium named an Elite vendor in the 2016 CRM Watchlist Lithium was named an Elite Winner in the 2016 CRM Watchlist! We were credited for the impact that our products, services and innovations create for our customers and the industry. Here is the full report.         StarHub transforms into a global social media leader StarHub, Singapore’s fully-integrated info-communications company, generated an impressive S$2.8M in sales revenue and over S$500k in customer support cost savings through their community. Awarded the “Most Socially Devoted Brand" by SocialBakers, learn how they became a digital leader. Learn about their journey.       Lithium Developer Network (LDN) delivers new Chrome extensions for Studio Inspired from a hackathon and from one of our partners, Hinterlands, check out how the new Google Chrome extensions for Studio make development easier. Read more on the Tech Blog.         9 gamification patterns you need to know Gamification is a proven way to engage community members and keep them coming back for more. Chief Scientist, Dr. Michael Wu, has patented a continuum of techniques for choosing the right gamification plan, depending on the behaviors you want to drive. Download the whitepaper.     Release Notes February 2016 | LSW Release Notes February 2016 | 16.1 Release Notes March 2016 | LSW Release Notes March 2016 | 16.2 Release Notes   Announcements April-November | Now Open: Global Registration for Certification and Training April 19 in Palo Alto | Lithium at Churchill Club: The Social Transformation of Business April 26 in Copenhagen | Lithium Meet-up May 12 in San Jose | Lithium at Next Bank Silicon Valley      ... View more