Press Releases

France's Groupe Casino taps Lithium Social Customer Experience platform to ensure continuous deep consumer engagement

Paris and Emeryville, Calif. - March 1, 2012 – Lithium Technologies, the leader in Social Customer Experience, today announced the opening of its Paris office as the company continues to enjoy strong momentum in its international business. Lithium also announced that France's retailer Groupe Casino has built its C'Vous community on Lithium's social customer experience platform, marking a key recent customer win in the EMEA market.

The C’Vous community from Groupe Casino, Lithium’s newest customer in France, allows its consumers to deeply engage with its different stores. C’Vous enables the public to actively participate and provide input on the product and service mix via its multiple high-profile chains that include Géant Casino, Casino Supermarchés, Casino Proximité, Franprix, Leader Price.

Lithium President and Chief Executive Officer Rob Tarkoff said: “With C’Vous, Casino is an excellent example of how companies worldwide are reshaping how they engage with their customers in today’s always-connected, highly social world. The EMEA market is critical for Lithium and France plays a crucial role in our continued growth in the region.”

Lithium employs sophisticated technology to serve a simple goal: allowing the world’s most iconic brands to harness the power of social communities to transform their business with a complete social customer experience platform with proven ROI. Lithium employs business analytics and a deep understanding of gamification to allow brands to identify, engage and empower their strongest advocates.

“Gone are the days when it was enough for brands to simply have a social strategy based on Facebook or Twitter, or just count Fans and Followers,” said Tim Wirth, Lithium’s Regional Director, France & Belgium. “Companies must go beyond simply increasing brand awareness. Brands must monetize their social efforts and fundamentally change their relationships with customers.”

“We want to offer customers a place to exchange and share information, and our strategy actively seeks direct feedback and advice from our social customers,” said Adrien Moreira, one of the creators of C’Vous. “While this will clearly lead to increased customer satisfaction, we strongly believe that engaging our customers on this level will lead them to become active customers, creating with us the products and stores of the future.”

Lithium’s latest EMEA customer win and the opening of its dedicated French operations follows numerous recent milestones:

• In January, Lithium completed a $53.4 million round of financing, led by prominent new investor New Enterprise Associates and including new investor SAP Ventures as well as all existing Lithium investors and several key industry advisors.
• Lithium saw significant additional investment in its products and services by existing customers.
• Lithium enjoyed continued new customer penetration of strategic vertical markets, including retail, consumer products, travel and leisure, technology, telecommunications, automotive and financial services from industry leaders such as BSkyB, McDonalds, Nestle, Nissan, SuccessFactors and Telstra.
• Appointment of several key executive leaders, including President & CEO Rob Tarkoff, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales Jim Drill, and Senior Vice President of Business Development & Global Alliances Ed Van Siclen.
• Strengthening of Lithium’s Board of Directors with the appointment of former Documentum Chairman & CEO Jeff Miller.
• Launch of the company’s monthly, seamless SaaS upgrade model – Lithium.now – and Lithium’s LevelUp application suite for the Facebook Platform.
• Announced “Lithium Technologies Positioned in the ‘Leaders’ Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for both Social CRM and Externally Facing Social Software”.
• Published clear evidence of Industry leading ROI models for its platform with the Lithium Customer Success Book.
• Published the “Science of Social” book by Dr. Michael Wu, Lithium Principal Scientist, Analytics.

About Lithium

We help great companies build brand nations for their most engaged customers. With Lithium, clients such as Best Buy, AT&T, Sephora, Univision, and PayPal turn their customers' passion into marketing, product development, sales, and customer service assets. For more information, visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own nation–the Lithosphere. Lithium is privately held with headquarters in Emeryville, California. Lithium also has offices in London, Paris and Zurich.

***

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