Lithium Technologies, the leading platform for enabling brands to support, serve and engage customers across digital channels, announced the launch of Lithium Messaging. For brands who use the Lithium platform, they can now centrally manage digital customer service across social channels, online communities and – with the launch of Messaging – web chat and mobile apps.
For consumers, they get fast and secure customer service in their channel of choice.
New research1 shows 58 percent of consumers have been forced to move to a different channel when making a customer service request. Forty-nine percent were left feeling less positive about the brand as a result, with 30 percent considering taking their business elsewhere. The message for brands is simple and clear – they must resolve customer issues in-channel with minimal effort, or risk losing them.
Ushering in the next generation of digital customer service, Lithium Messaging offers a personal experience that customers are used to when interacting with friends and family. Delivering a direct channel from the customer to the brand, conversations are secure and threaded, ending the inconvenience and needless repetition of information that customers are often required to provide.
“We take the security of our customers and their personal data very seriously as we work to provide the best possible experience to solve their issues quickly and effectively,” said John Glenn, Sprint’s Vice President of Customer Care Strategy, Operations, Transformation. “Lithium Messaging lets us engage customers in open dialogue on the social channel of their choice in a safe way. The implementation of this platform has already resulted in a 77 percent reduction in calls back to a customer and a significant increase in positive customer sentiment.”
Leveraging the same workflows as Lithium’s market-leading Community and Social Media Management products, Lithium Messaging processes a brand’s digital conversations across web chat and mobile apps – tagging, prioritizing and routing customer queries to the right agents for fast and accurate responses. Whether a customer reaches out to a brand on Facebook Messenger, SMS, their community, or their mobile app, Lithium processes that interaction for fast resolution, and offers the brand unified analytics to track success.
In addition, Lithium’s Secure Verification capability allows brands to authenticate Messaging customers before requesting any private information to keep that interaction secure – often a requirement in many industries that need to securely resolve customer issues. And this is all handled without the inconvenience of diverting to a different channel.
“The world of customer service has been absolutely turned on its head over the last decade,” said Lithium CEO Pete Hess. “Just as the invention of the phone and the call center revolutionized customer service in the 1980s, messaging and social channels are forcing brands to rethink how they serve and support customers in this digital-first era. Now that there are secure options like Lithium Messaging in the market, brands can provide seamless and secure service in the locations their customers want. Almost three quarters of customers will leave a brand and never come back if they feel they’ve been treated poorly 2. Why risk it?”
“Customer service channels can no longer exist in a vacuum,” said Lithium CTO Raju Malhotra. “Previously brands struggled with disparate customer interactions across different channels, and with customer data residing in different systems. The powerful workflows in Lithium Messaging allow brands to operationalize and scale 1:1 conversations across multiple digital channels – social, web chat, mobile and communities – resulting in a better experience for the end customer.”
Lithium will support all of the major platforms that consumers are turning to for their one-to-one conversations with brands, including Twitter, Facebook Messenger, SMS, WeChat, Communities, web and mobile apps. Additional integrations with major platforms will be introduced throughout 2018.