World-class customer service is not simply a matter of smiling employees who say “please” and “thank you.” Everything your customer sees, hears, or touches impacts their experience. “Everything speaks.” This program highlights how delivering world-class service requires careful orchestration of the entire customer experience. Attendees will discover the key points of contact that make or break the customer experience; how to elevate the customer experience from ordinary to extraordinary; and customer service processes that make service excellence “business as usual.”

CRM is the business philosophy that lets you know your customers better, share information more thoroughly, and interact more completely. In business, this can only be achieved through the integration of people, business processes, and the use of CRM technology. This nontechnical session shows you a step-by-step game plan on how to successfully implement CRM strategies, technologies, and processes into your business.

Increasingly, buyers and influencers are turning to social media and digital communities to exchange ideas and become informed about products and services. To be relevant in this new digital paradigm, salespeople must go where the buyers are—moving forward in the purchasing process—and into social media. This requires a whole new set of skills and competencies from salespeople as they learn to establish reputations, build networks, engage with prospects and customers, and ultimately develop trusted relationships in social media. Learn how businesses are enabling social selling—leveraging new technologies, processes and controls, marketing capabilities, and sustained activation programs—to embed digital go-to-market strategies into the fabric of the sales organization.

Today’s consumers expect to interact with businesses on their channels of choice including text, mobile apps and social — with self-service options quickly becoming their preferred mode of interaction. Join us for a look at “Consumer Engagement 20/20”. Learn how to enhance the customer experience and lower costs by empowering consumers through new text and messaging self-service options, while elevating the role of your agents to subject matter experts when help is needed.

The CSO Insights’ 2016 Sales Performance Optimization study found that 30% of the firms surveyed have implemented a sales enablement function within their company, with another 10% planning to do so in 2016. In benchmarking companies which have successfully done this, we have seen significant increases in sales performance, including 51% improvements in revenues per rep, margin increase of 29%, new sales rep ramp-up time decreases of 33%, overall sell-cycle decreases of 39%, and more. During this session, Jim Dickie shares five of these case studies and then provides the project road map companies are using to integrate technology, process, and knowledge to turn how they sell into a competitive advantage.

Open to all conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders, Solution Sessions are presented by conference sponsors. Sessions are educational, and the presentations, which typically focus on products and customer case-studies, provide a good opportunity to learn more about specific customer service technologies that are currently available for customer service and support departments. Follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

In the age of the customer, businesses around the globe are looking for ways to transform traditional operations with more effective customer engagement strategies. Many transformation projects have been spearheaded by marketing and remain in a digital silo. SugarCRM CMO Jennifer Stagnaro will explain why CRM and CX need to be linked with individual stakeholders from both the buyer’s and seller’s organizations along the entire customer journey. Stagnaro will highlight several real-world examples of B2B and B2C brands that have leveraged the flexibility of the Sugar platform to merge their CRM and CX strategies and achieve positive results. 

Architects need a blueprint for taking an idea to a finished project. The blueprint provides structure, accountability and repeatability. Similarly, marketers need a blueprint for managing the “always on” customer journey to better understand how to manage interactions across all channels, learn about successes and where to make corrections and streamline marketing processes. The three pillars for winning cross-channel strategies—data, content and delivery; Streamlining marketing processes for greater velocity and efficiencies and Extending campaign management into a digital marketing ecosystem.

This session is designed to help marketing, sales, research, and marketing communications professionals identify insights that do not just describe prospects but actually create competitive marketing superiority and superior growth. This session is all about how to get introduced, instead of being lulled by marketing automation and blindsided by old, widely held beliefs. Attend this session to learn why your company needs a prospect-centric mindset and how to unify your company’s view of your prospects, plus the six ways to increase your prospect intelligence to win more business.

The Willing-to-Buy framework (WTB) is a tried-and-true tool facilitating the important sales qualification and disqualification process. Whichever CRM package your firm uses, the WTB framework can be successfully implemented to allow for predictive analysis techniques to determine where valuable time and money is best invested. Determine whether your prospect is ready to do business; learn how to refine your entire sales process with your current CRM system, adding urgency and decision-making capability to your event management process; and focus on real sales opportunities while spending less time on “hopium.”

In a lively and entertaining presentation, get enlightened as to the ugly truths about human behavior that marketers can capitalize on to formulate better sales and marketing strategies. Research indicates that humans are “hard-coded” to be lazy. We integrate that insight with the mental efforts that humans use to process our messages. We identify some very insightful conclusions on how marketing (social media, sales, promotion, and advertising) must reformulate and reformat their marketing messages for optimal understanding and retention. Combine that with eye-opening discoveries by psychologists showing that social media is uncovering levels of narcissism never seen before, and we soon realize new opportunities in our strategy development.

Defining and building personas are starting to have more of a presence in strategic marketing initiatives, and it’s only a matter of time before the practice becomes a mainstay. And it’s going to become increasingly important to integrate your persona mapping directly into your CRM system of record to gain the most effective results. This session presents a soup-to-nuts account of building effective personas and discusses the importance of successfully integrating them in your CRM system to see maximum results.

Today’s consumers expect to interact with businesses on their channels of choice including text, mobile apps and social — with self-service options quickly becoming their preferred mode of interaction. Join us for a look at “Consumer Engagement 20/20”. Learn how to enhance the customer experience and lower costs by empowering consumers through new text and messaging self-service options, while elevating the role of your agents to subject matter experts when help is needed.

Not all lists of prospects are valuable. Some, like those focusing on intent data, can be more valuable than a list of leads created using traditional methods. This session provides marketers with the information needed to take advantage of intent data while avoiding the pitfalls created by overzealous vendors and their own wishful thinking. Topics covered in this session include sources of intent data for business and consumer marketers, successes and failures in applying intent data, ways to test intent data for practical value, and how to incorporate intent data into your customer data systems.

Open to all conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders, Solution Sessions are presented by conference sponsors. Sessions are educational, and the presentations, which typically focus on products and customer case-studies, provide a good opportunity to learn more about specific customer service technologies that are currently available for customer service and support departments. Follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

As organizations look for new ways to differentiate themselves and their customer experience, Microsoft continues to redefine the way businesses deliver intelligent and transformative customer service and engagement. Join Microsoft GM of Customer Service Solutions Bill Patterson for a look at the future of customer service and engagement which includes community, virtual assistants and IoT.

Adding Intelligence to each consumer interaction is paramount to presenting a unified experience. Customers expect great CX at every touchpoint—and, frequently, they are not getting it. But it's not easy for organizations to deliver. Actually, it's never been more difficult. This session puts CRM at the center of the CX discussion, showcasing how to harness Productivity, Intelligence, Mobility and Unified Service across the entire service lifecycle.

Learn how to successfully map customer journeys and take action on what you learn. Attendees can collaborate on building a journey map for a familiar customer experience—taking a trip to the local coffee shop to get a cup of coffee before a meeting. This session identifies the on-stage actions, the backstage processes, our customer emotions, and key moments of truth. It explores how the good parts of the journey could be improved, and how the customer experience fracture points could be mended. Attend this session to learn how to bring customer journey mapping to your own organization, how to pick the right customer journeys to map, and how to translate maps into action.

The session looks at current marketing programs/approaches and how segmentation and personalization engines are falling short with customers and prospects. To be successful with digitally savvy customers, marketing must move beyond outdated practices and leverage new technologies, better data-rich customer profiles, and a journey model that connects with individuals in a scalable and repeatable methodology. Through survey data and case studies, this session examines how to optimize your programs for the digitally savvy customer.

With advances in artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, block chain tech, and robotics, organizations have new tools to redesign their customer experiences. Driven by a data-to-decisions paradigm, insight economies emerge to help provide context, self-directed journeys, and intention-driven models. Learn what it takes to craft these new experiences and what leading organizations are preparing for in the years to come.

In April 2013, OCIO implemented a major technology reorganization, which enabled the group to provide more mission-oriented and value- added services, while strengthening its partnerships with staff in each office and region. The reorganization reflected OCIO’s need to understand and manage the full voice of the customer (VoC) to ensure that major areas of improvement were identified. To achieve this, OCIO formally implemented a CRM program to better understand its business needs and behaviors, and foster coordination and collaboration to define, understand, and satisfy customer requirements. Attend this session to learn how to establish a successful CRM program within the federal government and the particular challenges that might come up.

Today’s consumers expect to interact with businesses on their channels of choice including text, mobile apps and social — with self-service options quickly becoming their preferred mode of interaction. Join us for a look at “Consumer Engagement 20/20”. Learn how to enhance the customer experience and lower costs by empowering consumers through new text and messaging self-service options, while elevating the role of your agents to subject matter experts when help is needed.

There is no doubt that working with citizens and other government constituencies is not the same as it was 20 years ago. Citizens have more access to information from and about the government and are more demanding. Former GSA CIO Casey Coleman outlines what is necessary in the 21st century for government agencies to do to work more effectively and engage better with the citizenry they serve.

Open to all conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders, Solution Sessions are presented by conference sponsors. Sessions are educational, and the presentations, which typically focus on products and customer case-studies, provide a good opportunity to learn more about specific customer service technologies that are currently available for customer service and support departments. Follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

It's time to radically rethink CRM. Most systems are plagued by poor adoption and incomplete data. You need complete transparency into all customer communication to anticipate service disruption, win advocates, and deliver incredible customer experiences. Next-gen systems address adoption challenges, solve the data problem, and help deliver on CRM’s promise.

Digital transformation is the new reality - changing how we communicate and engage with customers. Organizations need to blur the lines between marketing, sales, commerce, service, and communities through digital transformation. Attend this session to learn actionable strategies on how to exceed customer expectations by delivering better, faster, richer, and more personalized digital experiences.

We live in an era where “the cloud” and “sensors” don’t mean things related to weather. With all the interest in personal and machine data, along with the much easier availability of individual data via sensors and the cloud, how does a government not only protect the information of its citizens, but its own, more publicly exposed, data from hackers and hostiles? Learn from Chuck Brooks, thought leader in cyber-security and citizen engagement, how a government prepares itself and what that means for a company preparing itself in this compelling, fascinating discussion.

Companies and vendors are using disruption—especially digital disruption— to justify the reason for their latest CRM and customer experience investments. The problem is that more than three-quarters of these investments are not delivering growth, let alone disruptive growth. This session highlights what B2B and B2C leaders are doing differently to deliver real return, real growth, and real disruption.