Leading by Example: Lithium Customer Support improves NPS to 83% and reduces support volume by 7% with Lithosphere
This is Lithium's entry in the B2B Supporting category of the Forrester Research Groundswell Awards 2012.
Visit the Groundswell site for more info
To give you a sense of the broad coverage our Support team provides, there are 330+ customer implementations hosted across 3 mission-critical datacenters in the US and Europe.
Across these communities, they total 750 million messages, 41 million registered community members, and 1.5 billion page views and API calls per month. Misha Logvinov, CIO at Lithium says: “One of our core values is to “take customer success personally.” For my team, I’m proud to say that we have maintained 99.99% platform availability for our customers across the globe.”
But what is the value of a socially answered question? "Unlike a traditional one-to-one support, in a social model every solved case that is translated to a tribal knowledge base article has a multiplier effect. Exposing that solution has a value upwards of 10x to 100x of the original answer, as that is the number of people it will ultimately help," said Lithium's Director of Digital and Community Strategy, Paul Gilliham. "As Lithium is continuing to grow its customer base and the depth of the product, our social support solution should be part of our DNA. It's what we have advised for our customers for over a decade and it's fantastic to see it in action in our own organization."
To really take customer success personally, Misha sets very high NPS and CSAT objectives to ensure we’re best in class in customer care. Our NPS is at an all-time high of 83%, which is higher than Apple, Amazon and eBay. Our average CSAT score is 9.77/10, and it is worth noting that customers with Premium Support reported an even higher CSAT score. 20% of the CSAT survey responders indicated that they were able to get help in the Lithosphere (2x increase from the beginning of 2012) while scoring quality of the Lithosphere support information at 8.73/10.
So how did we get here? In the last 2 years, Misha has been bullish in incorporating social support best practices into the DNA of our support organization. Since the launch of our Support community in Lithosphere at the start of the year, we have seen our page views increase to 30,000 with 400+ posts. We introduced the Tribal Knowledge Base and to date, nearly 200 articles have been published by our Support engineers. With this valuable knowledge at the disposal of our customers, 7% of incoming support cases are now resolved by directing customers to TKB articles that has resulted in over 3,000 TKB page views.
None of this is possible without an amazing customer support team. Here are just a few comments we have received from customers who rave about our service:
"Kris was SUPER responsive and fast!! We were in a major bind and she totally saved the day. That's two days in a row I've been blown away by your awesome support team. Thank you so much!!" - Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc.
"Something broke from one code version to the next in terms of how the chrome browser worked with the WYSIWYG editor which impacted usabilty. Minor inconvenience seen by a small portion of the community - Lithium responded quickly and effectively to address. These things can and do happen, how you handle it makes all the difference. GO LITHIUM! ; )" - Lenovo
Next up – we’ll be running our own social support metrics into the ROI model so we can better quantify the savings and benefits achieved through Lithosphere. Stay tuned!
