This paper describes how a company can integrate Lithium's social customer platform with a CRM system and customer support workflows

1. 1
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
There is now broad recognition that how people communicate with each other and
with their favorite brands has changed. Communications are more immediate, more
public, and more distributed. As companies focus on improving and managing the social
customer experience, they need to incorporate their customers’ social interactions
with internal CRM systems and processes. This paper describes how a company can
integrate Lithium’s social customer platform with a CRM system and customer support
workflows.1
The goal of this integration is to get closer to your customers and provide a
better social customer experience.
Lithium provides a platform for customer communities which foster interactions
between customers and with the brand. We provide a complete set of social applications
that allow you to listen, engage, and act on your customers’ conversations, practicing
better social CRM—creating relationships that are good for the customer and good
for you.
The integration between your online community and your CRM system drives value
along three main dimensions: managing support cases, getting more value out of user-
generated-content, and knowing your customer better. We’ll look at the social CRM
workflows across all three.
what is Lithium’s Social CRM connection?
This paper describes a social CRM integration from the business user’s perspective,
answering questions such as: What’s possible? How does it work? How does it make
things better? Behind the scenes are Lithium’s application programming interfaces
(APIs) which expose all the goodness in the community. With a little magic from a
Systems Integrator, your community software can talk to your CRM software, and
your customer gets the oh-so-desirable “seamless experience.” To learn about the
technical capabilities of our APIs, go to the Lithium Community and check out our API
documentation. Now, let’s get started.
managing support cases
You want customers answering each other’s questions; that’s why you’re investing in
your customer community. However, the first priority is providing an excellent customer
experience, which means that if fellow customers don’t respond, your support team
should. A social CRM connection escalates unanswered issues into support cases and
when appropriate, routes the resolution back into the community. It does this with three
main features:
1
Lithium provides an integration module to connect to Salesforce CRM systems. The Salesforce CRM
connector does everything described within this paper and more. If you’d like to learn more about our
Salesforce CRM integration, check out the Resources page on www.lithium.com.

2. 2
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
1. Incident Escalation—Automated or Manual
2. Case Update / Interruption
3. Post Resolution Back into the Community
Manual Escalation
In its simplest form, a post can be escalated into a support case by the community
administrator or moderator (essentially any user who has the permissions in the
community to escalate to the CRM system). The concept is to create a case in the CRM
system for posts which have not received a satisfactory or conclusive reply. When the
moderator escalates a topic, there is an option to specify “Reason” and “Comments;”
this data can populate the appropriate fields within the case record.
Automatic Escalation
Your organization may have service level agreements or response-time targets which
specify the period of time by which a community members’ post or question will be
answered. To meet this target, Lithium can be configured to automatically escalate an
unanswered post or query into the CRM system based on the time elapsed since the
message was posted.
Case Update / Interruption
Once a topic is escalated as a CRM case but before the support agent has responded,
there may be replies posted under the topic within the community. It is helpful for the
support agent to get a view of these responses and replies—so that his or her response
can incorporate all the relevant information. Additional posts or replies may be
appended to the CRM case in real-time through the Lithium APIs.
Post Back Resolution to the Community
Within the CRM system, when a support representative resolves a particular case, he or
she may post the resolution back into the community as a threaded response under the
original topic; thereby closing the loop on the case.

3. 3
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
how does it work in real life?
Automated Escalation of a Case
1. A customer visits the Community or self-service portal and posts their question
to the support forum.
2. No one in the Community responds, and the question remains unanswered.
3. After 24 hours, an automated job escalates the post and creates a case in the
CRM system. Escalation triggers can be configured to any duration and can
exclude posts from designated roles such as administrators or employees.
4. A case is created in the CRM system and gets assigned to an agent according to
whatever policies are in place.
5. The agent has answered the question multiple times and resolves the customer’s
issue. To minimize the number of calls on this topic, the agent captures the
response and posts it back into the community.
Manual Escalation of a Post
into a CRM Case
Customer-Generated Article to be Pulled into CRM Knowledge Base

4. 4
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
Closed-Loop Response
1. A community moderator sees a question
with a response, but no satisfactory
answer. She recognizes that the request is
best answered by the company’s support
team, and escalates the case.
2. A case is created in the CRM system and
gets assigned to an agent according to
whatever policies are in place.
3. The agent struggles to answer this
difficult question so reviews the additional
responses that have been added to the
thread. Suggestions from community
experts help him eliminate some potential solutions and give him ideas on other
routes to try.
4. A resolution is finally discovered, and the agent posts a description of the
resolution back into the community.
By integrating the social web and online communities with existing workflows and
internal systems, companies can divert issues away from a paid support force and
ensure that customers receive excellent customer service.
information sharing
We see it again and again—the majority of content created in a customer community is
authored by a few dedicated superfans. These are product gurus who spend hours each
day contributing to the greater good by answering questions and offering guidance or
explanations. Service managers can identify the very best of this community content and
integrate it into the CRM Knowledge Base for use by other agents. Federated search
can expose content beyond the community and the support team. Customers can find
community-generated answers from any portal or interface through an integrated
community and corporate search.
Like most Lithium
capabilities, this
permission-based
feature can be granted to
superfans as part of the
gamification concept of
reward and recognition.
Entrusted superfans can
escalate posts from other
members or initiate a
direct request of their own
to the support team.

5. 5
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
Promoting User Generated Content
The Consortium for Service Innovation has research showing that the majority of
customer support calls are for issues that start as unknown and therefore have no
known or documented solutions. Peer-to-peer customer communities provide an
excellent source of information addressing these issues. Any topic or post on the
Lithium community can be transferred into the CRM system’s knowledge base where it
becomes available to support agents throughout the company.
Federated Search
The Federated search feature is enabled within the CRM system so that the business
users may perform a combined search spanning both systems from a single location
and a single instance. The federated search may also be incorporated within a self-
service portal for customers and end-users. The search is performed across all
community boards within a Lithium community.
Customer-Generated Article to be Pulled into CRM Knowledge Base

6. 6
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
how does It work in real life?
Solved Problems Get Promoted and Incorporated Into the CRM Knowledge Base
1. The Lithium system identifies high quality content through social indicators such
as peer recognition kudos, Accepted Solution tags, and Tribal Knowledge Base
articles.
2. The CRM system can request top kudoed content, recent Accepted Solutions,
recent TKB articles, or recent top-kudoed articles.
3. Lithium provides all the relevant content for incorporation into the CRM
knowledge base.
4. CRM administrators can view that information in a queue of content if they want
to make case-by-case decisions on what to include, or to edit out extraneous
information before incorporating it into the CRM knowledge base.
Agent Solves a Case With a Community Generated Solution
1. A customer opens a support case via phone, email, or chat.
2. The agent looks for solutions in the community, finds a customer generated
solution, and resolves the case.
3. To deflect more calls in the future, the agent may send a link from the community
to the customer. This helps familiarize the customer with the peer-support
network.
Companies can capture the content produced by their community experts and use it
to augment the company’s knowledge stores.
customer intimacy
Marketing, sales, and support teams in almost every organization want to know their
customers better. CRM systems aggregate information from other applications to
provide a 360-degree view of customer accounts. Community data can enrich the CRM
record with information that provides a direct view into that individual’s relationship
with the brand and the company’s products. The personal yet brand-specific nature of
community data can be extremely helpful to sales representatives trying to match what
they sell to the customer’s needs. Key integrations include:

7. 7
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
Mapping Community Member Profiles and Activity to CRM Customer Contact Records
Companies can use community demographic and behavioral data in CRM or marketing
automation tools to target customers more effectively.
Synchronizing Community Member Activities and Recent Comments, Questions,
and Responses
Companies can improve their customer knowledge and sales representatives can speak
to customers on a more intimate basis when they know what the individual has read and
said about the products.
CRM Customer Contact with Community
Profile Data Pulled In
Recent Customer Activities and Posts

8. 8
customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
how does it work in real life?
1. The CRM system matches community members to customer contacts based on
the email address or Facebook ID.
2. Lithium provides the community member’s social profile to get mapped to the
CRM contact record.
3. On user-sync, data is sent from Lithium to the CRM system. This is uni-
directional; CRM system data is not sent to Lithium.
The following table highlights some of the information that can be transferred to the
contact record:
community inputs to rules engine outputs
The CRM system is often integrated with a rules engine that can estimate the business
value of an interaction and then assign the interaction to the optimal resource. When
combined with Lithium, the rules engine can incorporate community data as inputs to
its assessment of a post’s business value. Higher value posts are typically handled by
an agent, while lower value postings can be handled by community members. Moreover,
customer interaction history is retained to ensure consistency if a customer jumps to
alternate channels. When done well, this pairing will deflect less important calls, which
reduces support costs, and route higher value calls that present an opportunity for
upsell, which can improve customer spending.
Community Member Profile Information Community Participation Metrics
Email Address or Facebook ID Logins
Lithium Community User Name Minutes Online
Lithium User ID Page Views
Is User Deleted Posts
Rank Messages Read
Roles Private Messages Sent
Registration Time Private Messages Received
Last Visit Time Average Message Rating
Biography

9. customer community CRM integrations
for Social CRM
9
Lithium
lithium.com | © Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
conclusion
Social CRM combines the power of online customer communities, broad social
networks, and traditional CRM systems to deliver a better way of managing customer
relationships. Customers in online communities and on the social web provide peer-to-
peer support, brand advocacy, and new product ideas. To capitalize on these customer
contributions, companies must join the conversation and participate in the social dialog
happening around them. Integrating one’s online community and CRM system provides
the most satisfying and cost effective social customer experience.
about Lithium
Lithium helps companies unlock the passion of their customers.
Lithium software powers amazing Social Customer Experiences for more than 400
iconic brands including ATT, BT, Best Buy, Indosat, Sephora, Skype and Telstra.
Lithium helps companies grow brand advocacy, drive sales, reduce costs and accelerate
innovation to create social communities that redefine the customer experience. For
more information, visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our
own community–the Lithosphere. Lithium is privately held with corporate headquarters
in San Francisco, Calif. and offices in Europe, Asia and Australia.