Press Releases

Emeryville – 20 October, 2010 – Lithium Technologies, the leading provider of Social Customer Solutions, today announced that Lenovo, one of the world's leading PC manufacturers, has deployed Lithium Service, the comprehensive customer service and support solution built on Lithium’s Social Customer Suite. Lenovo chose Lithium Service to create a social support environment that can take customers' issues from a simple tweet to a fully-formed knowledge base article. Lenovo's customer community has emerged as a key element of the company's knowledge-centered support strategy and a primary means for identifying and surfacing potential customer issues before they cause bigger problems.

"The Lenovo Support Community has been growing steadily over the last two and a half years along with other social channels like Facebook and Twitter," said Mark Hopkins, social media program manager at Lenovo. "The evolving Lithium platform is a key solution that ties all these social avenues together into a collaborative social workflow. We can now draw questions in from multiple social venues, facilitate discussions, identify solutions, refine into valuable content and push back answers to customers through multiple social channels."

Broader Service, Better Service

Community-driven service has traditionally been justified as a cost-saving measure, but leading organizations are increasingly engaging their customers to make service better, not cheaper. Better service comes from social customers' knowledge and their presence in a multitude of channels. To foster customer-driven service improvements, organizations have evolved a broader set of requirements, including:

• The ability to identify potential support issues in non-branded channels, such as Facebook, Twitter and third-party forums and blogs, so organizations can address issues proactively.
• Granular identification of expertise among social customers, and improved ways to reward sharing of that expertise, to ensure that customers have the right incentives to participate.
• Tools to manage user generated content throughout its lifecycle, from initial inquiry all the way to knowledge base article, so customers can be part of a process of continuous improvement.
• Measurement tools that assess the broad impact of service efforts on customers' attitudes to optimize ongoing efforts. Michael Maoz, a research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research notes the following trends:
• Customer-retention strategies will face increasing disruption as the new consumer (or citizen or partner) come to expect greater power to collaborate in determining what defines great service from a business.¹
• By 2011, the two most significant changes in the contact center will be agent access to real-time decision support and a view into the customer's activity, including Twitter, on the organization's Web site and beyond.²
• By 2015, customers will rate your customer service primarily on the degree of customer engagement that it affords them in process and transaction design.¹



The Lithium Service Solution

Using Lithium, organizations can implement service programs across multiple social channels and across the lifecycle. Key components of the solution include:

• The Lithium Community Platform: Lithium Service sits on top of the company’s industry-leading community platform, reputation engine and sophisticated analytics.
• Lithium Social Media Monitoring: Lithium Service takes advantage of millions of social customers' conversations to identify potential support issues and to quantify customer satisfaction levels over time and by social channel.
• Routing: Through a single interface, Lithium Service enables agents to route incidents to a CRM or ticketing system, to a designated customer expert, to the broader customer community, to an employee, or to a Twitter stream. Agents can also respond to Tweets inline.
• Knowledge Base: Lithium Service includes a knowledge base designed to be created and maintained by customers, with final editorial control in the organization's hands.
• Q&A: To generate answers quickly, a lively question and answer system enables casual visitors to ask expert peers for advice and information.
• Facebook: Lithium's Facebook application enables customers to ask questions of customer experts through Facebook -whether or not the experts are active on Facebook -increasing Facebook's value as a peer-to-peer support channel.
• Community Success Services: Lithium Awareness includes moderation, measurement, and advisory services specifically geared to the triage and routing of support incidents.

Ultimately, enterprises create content assets that increase in value over time as customers engage with them.

"We created Lithium Service to meet the emerging needs of clients who see their customers as a source of strength and reach," said Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-founder of Lithium Technologies. "Our clients have seen repeatedly that a support community can be the foundation for a comprehensive program of customer engagement whose value goes well beyond support and service. Social customers who enjoy helping other customers are typically the most active and influential members of a company's customer base. So they can influence awareness and purchase decisions down the line."

¹ Gartner Summit Presentation, The Customer Service Processes and Technologies Most Critical to Your Organization, Michael Maoz, June 2010.
² Gartner, Inc., Predicts 2010: Customer Service Meets Social CRM, Michael Maoz et al, December 1, 2009.

Lithium Social Customer Solutions

The Lithium Service solution is a key component of the Lithium Social Customer Suite and runs on top of the Lithium Community platform, which has set the standard for social customer engagement.

Lithium Service is one of the company's first three business solutions tied explicitly to the customer lifecycle, leveraging the power of social customers to drive measurable business results. Lithium Commerce and Lithium Awareness are described further in separate announcements.

About Lithium Technologies

Your customers are everywhere. Lithium helps you find your social customers, understand their influence, and build lasting relationships. For market leaders such as Best Buy, AT&T, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), Univision, and PayPal, Lithium is the leading provider of social customer solutions that deliver real business results. The Lithium Social Customer Suite offers complete social monitoring, comprehensive community platform, and actionable analytics across millions of blogs, forums, and social networking sites. Our technology is proven in high-volume, growth environments and provides security, open and custom APIs, and multi-language support. Founded in 2001, Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, California. For more information, visit www.lithium.com. Or, engage with us on Twitter, Facebook, and our community – the Lithosphere.

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Lithium Media Contacts:

Michael Paige, Corporate Headquarters & Global, michael.paige@lithium.com , +1 (510) 318 7014
Sandra Teuber, Central & Southern Europe, sandra.teuber@lithium.com , +41 (79) 223 7356
Prelini Chiechi, UK & Northern Europe, prelini.chiechi@lithium.com, +44 (7826) 912788
Imogen Riley, APAC & Australia, imogen.riley@lithium.com, +61 413 274 210