20 years ago, social support was a cutting edge business practice. 10 years ago, it was a forward - thinking operational strategy. Today, it's a business imperative. The cycle of innovation in social media today is screaming fast and still accelerating. With each advance, our customers will only become less patient, more demanding. Social customers today expect support from us on Facebook and a response from us when they Tweet about our brand - and they don't care about our internal siloes. They expect a unified, positive experience at every touch point and they can do plenty of damage to our brand through social media if they don't have one. Jumping onto the social support train is now a business imperative. We can't afford not to board if we expect to compete in the next generation.

1. social support—
a business imperative

2. share this whitepaper
contents
1 intro
2 the new consumer
3 the evolution of social support
4 social support today: integration
5 next generation social support
subscribe to
request a demo
SocialMatters
we help companies unlock the passion of their customers.
The Lithium Social Customer Suite allows brands to build vibrant customer communities that:
reduce service costs with grow brand advocay with drive sales with innovate faster with
social support social marketing social commerce social innovation
lithium.com | © 2012 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved
2

3. share this whitepaper
intro
Social support is the use of social channels—forums, blogs, thought possible. We need their input, feedback and problem
social networks and other social media—to supplement or solving capacity to scale our support function properly.
replace traditional customer service and support channels.
Resource optimization. Business comes in peaks and valleys.
If your organization hasn’t invested in it, you’re going to be
When peaks are created by market conditions, new product
playing catch-up—it’s been around for 20 years now. Even
introductions, even natural disasters, we find our traditional
before the public Internet cranked into high gear in the mid-
support channels overwhelmed and slow to respond. Social
nineties, smart brands were reaching out to digital customers
support gives us the opportunity to service those peaks without
and developing support communities over commercial
over-building our service function in order to meet them.
services like Compuserve and AOL.
Increased revenue. Interestingly enough, when we service
With its 20 year history, among all the business uses of the
customers wherever and whenever they want, they buy more.
social web, social support is one of the most established and
Customers who use social support channels buy more, buy
mature areas of practice. The list of companies today saving
more often and stay our customers longer than those who
millions annually deflecting service calls while increasing
don’t use social support channels.
customer satisfaction at the same time is impressive—
Autodesk, Best Buy & AT&T to name a few. Social support Social support has helped businesses to provide service at
has proven itself to be both better and faster than traditional scale, weather the peaks and valleys of service demand with
support channels, adding significant dollars to the bottom less pain, and even drive revenue for two decades. It’s been
lines of those brands that have leapt in. a smart business decision that yields impressive ROI for
some time. But in this digital and social age, social support
And call deflection is only part of the story. When companies
has become far more than just smart business. It’s become
first undertake social support efforts, they usually initiate
about survival in the face of an increasingly demanding and
it as a cost savings measure, but quickly find a number of
impatient consumer.
added benefits:
Scalability. As products continue to get more and more
complex, smart social brands find great benefit in tapping the
crowd for customer experience knowledge. Real customers
will use our products in many more ways than we ever Real customers will use our products in
many more ways than we ever thought
possible. We need their input, feedback
and problem solving capacity to scale our
support function properly. 1

4. share this whitepaper
the new consumer
bad customer experience is costly
57%
No matter how fantastic our products are, if our customers
don’t have positive experiences at every point of interaction
with our brand, they take their wallets elsewhere. Any of consumers are
not likely to spend more money
way we look at it, delivering a poor support experience is with a brand after a negative experience
an expensive miss—57% of consumers report they are
unlikely to spend more money with a brand after a negative
experience. Worse yet, since the explosion of social media,
40% of consumers others away
likely to steer
say they are
after a negative brand experience
their dissatisfaction has the capacity to spread like a virus.
In addition to taking their shopping dollars elsewhere, 40%
of consumers say they are also likely to steer others away
from a brand after a poor experience.1 The good news is, your social customers want to help. They’re
already coming to the web for answers. 63% of consumers
Moreover, it’s getting harder to meet those expectations. 47% are searching online for others like them when they need help
of consumers expect service within 24 hours.2 Brands today today, and that number is only going to climb. The transition
find deep challenges with scaling the most basic service and to self-service is well under way. The phenomenon of peer-
support, let alone meeting the expectations of an amazingly to-peer support is already strongly rooted in today’s culture—
demanding audience. business just has to jump in and make that peer-to-peer
experience better.
20 years ago, social support was a cutting edge business
practice. 10 years ago, it was a forward-thinking
Because great customer experiences pay killer dividends.
operational strategy. Today, it’s a business imperative.
54% of consumers say that greater than one quarter of the
value they feel from consumer experiences is from the overall
experience they have with a company. 50% of consumers are
great customer experience pays dividends
likely to recommend a company through their online social
47%
of consumers say they are likely to
networks after a good experience. 47% say they are more likely
to spend more with brands after they have positive experiences.
spend more with brands after they
have positive experiences.
If we can deliver a positive support experience, we have
a much greater chance of having satisfied customers,
getting the benefit of word of mouth marketing, and having
of consumers are likely to recommend a
50% company through their online social networks
after a good experience.
repeat customers.
2

5. share this whitepaper
the evolution of
social support
So, what’s going on under the hood? How does social support Wave 2: Better Access, Greater Availability,
work exactly and how does it create so much value? Better Content Organization
The second major evolutionary step for social support was to
Put simply, it’s much less expensive to have customers
begin looking for ways to increase the active use of customer
helping customers, than employees helping customers. When
forums and support communities. We began to think about
businesses invest in social support, they put together the
providing easier interface to the community and simplifying
infrastructure—both the technology and the methodology—
the process of asking for help. We developed social apps
that lets customers help each other. Over the past 20 years,
like Q&A widgets to make help more accessible from pages
the advance of that infrastructure has developed in a series
throughout the website, not just on community and support
of cumulative waves. Each new technology or methodology
pages. Today, social customers routinely use Q&A widgets
builds upon, adds to previous conventions rather than
from product, portal and home pages.
replacing them.
Also in Wave 2, we began to think about how support content
Wave 1: Cultivation
might live outside of the threaded discussion box. We started
In the first wave of social support, we saw the appearance
to organize our content in more familiar and meaningful
of customer forums. These were places online, most often
ways. We delivered more page-oriented experiences and
found through search engines, where customers could find
populated them with more robust content. We began to create
other folks like them, openly discuss their service issues
knowledge bases—searchable repositories brimming with
and receive help from one another. This wave was about not
tips, tricks, answers, solutions and advice.
only getting those forums built, but in developing a sense
of community around them. This was the birth of the online Wave 3: Extension
customer community, when brands first pioneered the use With the arrival of social media, customer experiences started
of social media to connect with their social customers. happening in more places than just the website. When social
Forums are still a fundamental building block of the most customers needed their questions answered, they began to
sophisticated social support systems today. look for our brand presence across the larger social web.
In the 3rd wave of the evolution of social support, we went
offsite, enabling social support on public social networks like
Facebook and Twitter.
3

6. share this whitepaper
social support
today: integration
If there is one word that defines cutting-edge social support Integrated “Outside-in” Culture.
today, it’s integration. Today’s social support leaders are Brands that approach customer experience—social
deeply integrating social support across all manner of web included—as a way of doing business are winning big today.
experiences, with internal business systems and processes, An “outside-in” culture thinks in the customer point of
and into their corporate culture. view and brings that point of view into the business as an
organizing principle. As such, outside-in business cultures
Web integrations.
are capable of understanding the complex, interdependent
From single sign-on to federated search, the most successful
relationships our customers have with the whole of our
social support offerings today are making peer-to-peer
business, not just with our front-line employees. These
support experiences more available and easier to use from
forward thinking innovators are breaking down customer
anywhere and everywhere social customers might be. With
experience into its component parts and aligning each of
smart integrations, forward-thinking brands are embedding
those parts to business metrics. In doing so, they become
social content on Facebook, Twitter and mobile devices,
more integrated, less siloed, and begin practicing customer
bringing the value of peer-to-peer interactions to as many
experience improvement as an integrated business discipline.
customer experiences as possible.
Business system integrations.
Brands at the top of the social support game today capture
social customer integration data and leverage it across
every aspect of the business from service to sales to PR to
The brass ring for the most leading-
product marketing. Especially in the practice of CRM are top
edge social brands today is to use social
performing brands today reaping enormous ROI by using customer interaction data to move beyond
technology, traditional process automation, and established experimentation and to create repeatable,
workflows to bring social customer data into the fold and measurable, high-quality experiences.
create real business change. Things like bringing business
issues reported through Twitter into Salesforce, appending
customer records accordingly, and using business
logic to route, respond and auto-escalate where needed. The
brass ring for the most leading-edge of social brands today
is to use social customer interaction data to move beyond
experimentation and to create repeatable, measurable,
high-quality experiences.
4

7. share this whitepaper
next generation
social support
What’s on the horizon? Social support leaders will continue We can only expect the competitive climate in today’s
to make peer-to-peer support easier to find and use both economy to become increasingly fierce. The cycle of
on-domain and off. They’ll deliver more real-time, more innovation in social media today is screaming fast and still
personalized experiences. We’ll see a greater merge of direct accelerating. With each advance, our customers will only
support with social, as agents have access to social data right become less patient, more demanding. Our customers expect
in the call center. We’ll see deeper and more diverse roles support from us on Facebook, a response from us when they
for superfans, the 1% of our most deeply engaged social Tweet about our brand and they don’t care about our internal
customers who contribute the majority of content. We’ll siloes. They already expect the whole thing to be a unified,
see increased informal employee participation in support positive experience and they can do plenty of damage to our
communities, greater integration of support and marketing brand online if they don’t have one. Jumping onto the social
and an increased focus on social innovation as we tap our support train is now a business imperative. We can’t afford
social customers for ideas and insights. not to board if we expect to compete in the next generation.
resources
1 Kelton Research consumer survey, 2012
2 Social Business Advantage in 2012, CMO Council
Lithium social software helps the world’s most iconic brands to build brand nations—vibrant online communities of passionate social customers.
Lithium helps top brands such as ATT, Sephora, Univision, and PayPal build active online communities that turn customer passion into social media
marketing ROI. For more information on how to create lasting competitive advantage with the social customer experience,
visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own brand nation – the Lithosphere.
lithium.com | © 2012 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved
5