Lithium Technologies - Customer Service Team of the Year
Company: Lithium Technologies, Austin, TX
Company Description: Lithium helps brands connect customers, content & conversations at the right digital moment. Lithium delivers awesome digital customer experiences at scale for the world’s biggest brands. Comprising Social Media Management and Communities, the Lithium engagement platform enables brands to manage multiple digital touchpoints, facilitate millions of conversations, and drive smarter decisions.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Team of the Year - Recovery Situation - Technology Industries
Nomination Title: Focusing on Values
Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes: REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION
Lithium Technologies was initially founded in 2001 in San Francisco, CA as a tool to build social communities. Now, Lithium has joined forced with Spredfast under a new name, Khoros, to create an engagement platform that is comprised of a complete set of solutions for social customer service, social media marketing and crowdsourced innovation. By allowing brands to listen, respond and act on customers’ conversations, our products help creating deeper customer relationships and foster brand loyalty and advocacy. We are a proud team with a client base of over 2000 brands and growing.
Lithium and now Khoros lives by our core values. It is these values that have helped us not only grow financially, but also strengthen every new product we launch or acquire. This success did not come without a wide gamut of challenges — chief of which was the introduction of a new senior level management team. A few other glaring challenges to address were:
- Being acquired in mid-year 2017 required realignment
- New product launches
In order for us to successfully navigate these changes, we needed directives from our new leadership. Our executive team came up with various initiatives to ensure we tackled these challenges in a thorough and logical fashion. The results we achieved speak to the thoughtfulness and impact behind them. To name a few:
1. Heal Desk Initiative: The Heal Desk is a proactive, metrics-driven process implemented for “at-risk” customers. The roots for this initiative derive from Lithium’s “We Win Together” value. Since inception, 90.61% of annual recurring revenue has been saved.
2. TSIA certified organization: The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) is a research and advisory firm that has introduced tiered certification levels for customer support. In 2017, all Lithium support team members completed the “Service Ready” TSIA certification program. The team is currently undergoing certification for the “Diagnostic Troubleshooting” program as well — fostering repeatable, tangible troubleshooting methodologies. This certification reflects Lithium’s core value — “We set the Standard.” It is not the support alone — but the efficiency, reusability and effectiveness of support — that drives our analysts’ ambitions to succeed.
3. Focus On Quality: Quality is our passion at Lithium, and our integration with a powerful quality management tool helps us remain one step ahead.. This had an uplifting effect in customer satisfaction, soaring our Net Promoter Score (NPS) from 23.53 (two years ago) to 55.31. We measured against the question: "Would you recommend Lithium Support to a friend or colleague", with our most recent metric including data gathered after our acquisition of JiveX. Quality at Lithium means taking customer feedback to heart — which is driven by our core value — "We build trust everyday."
4. Support Bootcamp: To fill in the technical gaps, ramp up new hires, and create a roadmap for absorbing new products — Lithium set up a bootcamp to train employees on our latest product updates and sales tactics. Our bootcamp is slated to begin November 19th. “We Love to Learn and Teach” was a core value driving this initiative. Bootcamp trainings will serve to help disseminate important information pertaining to company updates, such as fresh mergers or acquisitions which would bring in more products.
Every member of Lithium’s has pulled together to face these challenges in customer service head-on to elevate our brand; and keep our focus on “Customer Delight” everyday. Accomplishing these goals was a team effort across every line of business, region and individual employee. Lithium is proud to say that not only have we sustained all the challenges and acquisitions that have come our way, but we've come out shining and stronger than ever on the other end.