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Lithium Boosts Social CRM Suite With Genesys Integration, Scout Labs Acquisition

May 18, 2010

Forget the famous Energizer Bunny ads. The true power of "lithium", as in Lithium Technologies, is in enabling Social CRM.


Lithium Technologies has done just that in two deals the week of May 10-14: an integration of its community platform with customer service software from Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company and acquiring Scout Labs, which makes social media monitoring solutions. Lithium has some serious clients that will gain from these developments, among them: AT&T, Best Buy, PayPal, Research in Motion, Sony and Univision.

The Genesys integration will, says Lithium, "extend the social networking capabilities of Genesys and deliver an improved customer experience by incorporating community as an intelligently integrated online channel, preserving continuity of service and driving contact center efficiencies."

Lithium's integration with Genesys will enable contact center agents to obtain access to tribal knowledge and proactively engage customer communities, such as community forums and user groups. Enterprises will be able to monitor and address customer issues outside of the center and better understand conversations taking place across the customer community.

The integration goes beyond the simple access to community posting for contact center agents. Lithium can flag community activities that require enterprise attention. The Genesys software suite can then determine the business value and priority and assign that interaction to the ideal resource, be it in the contact center or beyond.

To illustrate: a post from a gold customer that has gone unresolved for 24 hours could be automatically escalated to an agent for immediate attention. Combined with Lithium's Social CRM suite, the solution seamlessly integrates social channels with traditional CRM to provide dynamic customer engagement. This unparalleled implementation cuts across all delivery and customer communication channels to add new value to online communities.

The joint solution will provide these key benefits:

Unifies cross channel conversations and delivers a consistent experience as customers transition from the forum to voice and non-voice channels

Reduces support costs over 40 percent by allocating a company's most valuable resources to higher value business tasks, while the community handles lower value postings

Drives intelligent analytics and insights into customer behavior

Creates a more profitable customer experience and multi-channel choice for customers

Benefits from the community's innovation. As members respond to questions, the joint solution incorporates the most highly-rated answers into the corporate knowledge base.

"Today more than ever, companies must better understand their clients and manage the quality of their customers' experiences," said Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-Founder of Lithium. "By integrating our expertise in social customer relationship management with Genesys' leadership in contact centers, we are giving our clients an opportunity to provide seamless and exceptional customer experiences and deliver an unparalleled level of integration. Furthermore, our clients will better be able to develop exceptional products, promote their company by incenting the most valued community users, and drive higher conversion rates and brand awareness."

"Social media and communities has become a critical channel for customer service," said Nicolas De Kouchkovsky, Chief Marketing Officer for Alcatel-Lucent's enterprise business. "By working together, we enable enterprises to improve social experiences and maximize efficiencies by optimizing the combination of forum and agent resources. Furthermore, enterprises can harness their resources in the contact center and beyond to avoid leaving the 'socialsphere' unattended."

Adding more power to the joint solution is Lithium Technologies' purchase of Scout Labs, whose social media analytics engine will permit Lithium to create what it says is "the first Social CRM platform that empowers companies to listen, engage, and act on their social customers' conversations across the web."

Lithium will fully integrate Scout Labs' social media monitoring and analytics into the Lithium platform while continuing to offer Scout Labs' solution as a stand-alone product. The integrated platform will provide wide and deep insights into customers' behavior within customer communities and broadly on the social web.

"The acquisition advances Lithium's vision for Social CRM - the creation of a customer network across the social web that delivers value from customer conversations by helping companies promote authentic interest through word of mouth, innovate on their products; and support customers through peer-to-peer engagement," says the company.

Scout Labs' coverage of customers' conversations on the social web augments Lithium's applications for fostering customer interactions and developing brand advocates within a community. Together they create a strategic platform for listening, engaging, and acting on customers' conversations wherever they occur.

"Scout Labs brings an analytical approach that our customers have told us is crucial for Social CRM," said Lyle Fong, Lithium's CEO and co-founder. "They record social interactions anywhere on the web and develop a contextually rich analysis of customers' behavior over time. When combined with our own deep customer engagement data, this will give our clients the most detailed picture available of their customers' social behavior - giving them a competitive advantage as they plan and execute social media marketing and support programs."

(TMC is holding a new event on Social CRM, The Social Customer Summit. Co-located with TMC's ITEXPO in Los Angeles, Calif. Oct.4-6, The Social Customer Summit is a two-day conference that will cover this dynamic new channel, including integration with the contact center. Check back often at ITEXPO West 2010 for more details.)


Brendan B. Read is ContactCenterSolutions's Senior Contributing Editor. To read more of Brendan's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Michael Dinan



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