The world of CRM and customer experience has not only changed dramatically, but escalated in its importance at businesses. Join four CRM influencers over coffee and breakfast in an informal panel, moderated by conference chair Paul Greenberg to discuss what’s going on in the world of CRM. What is its future? Be ready with your questions and they’ll be ready to answer.

Even though customer experience (CX) is a major priority for 2016–2017, strategists face a challenge that technology alone can’t solve. How executives see customers and how they see brands/ businesses are combining to create an experience divide that requires a shift in leadership to solve. The future of CX is a balance of BX (brand experience) and UX (user experience) all rooted in human-centered design. His new book, X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, is testament to his work. Brian Solis share his views on closing the experience divide and more so, building relationships through the design and cultivation of meaningful and shareable experiences.

In this session, Ben Chaib talks about how he has increased his lead engagement by 33%, using artificial intelligence software. Learn how he is using automated two-way email conversations that interpret each lead’s intention and sentiment in much the same way a live sales representative would but at a fraction of the cost. Attend this session to learn how to increase your lead engagement rate up to 50% or more, how to swiftly determine the hottest leads, how to dramatically increase the number of contacts per lead, and why most leads aren’t being followed up and what you can do about it.

Though their longer-term objectives may differ—as one works toward a bookings quota, the other a leads quota—sales and marketing teams often have to lean on one another to meet and exceed their day-to-day goals. That’s what makes alignment so crucial to the success of a modern business, allowing for collaboration, communication, and much-needed cross-pollination. But where should today’s businesses start in encouraging alignment, when sales and marketing seem almost to come from different planets? In this presentation, find out how cloud technologies, such as marketing automation and CRM, are making true alignment possible and how relations between sales and marketing teams are continuing to evolve via programmatic strategies and real-world examples.

Join Microsoft Dynamics CRM General Manager Jujhar Singh as he discusses with CRM Evolution Chair Paul Greenberg the future of customer engagement. Come listen over lunch to see how Microsoft is revolutionizing business process and productivity while innovating for the future which includes virtual assistants and the Internet of Things.

This session provides insights into how IT and marketing functions view primary accountability for the results of customer engagement initiatives. Learn which goals organizations should set for exploiting Big Data for customer engagement excellence and innovation, which information sources are critical and important for effective customer engagement, best practices for creating alignment between line-ofbusiness and IT executives, benchmarks on maturity levels in omnichannel customer engagement initiatives, how to select the right performance metrics for assessing ROI, and average ROI gained as a result of successful deployments.

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.

Customers have the choice to interact with your brand through several channels; how can you ensure they have a consistent and positive experience at every touch point? This session examines the components of building a successful omni-channel relationship with your customers to improve profitability and deliver an enriched customer experience.

To maintain a competitive advantage, take the right actions, and capture new opportunities, your business needs to move quickly. In order to do this, decision-making needs to happen at the speed of business. Join us as we review how Salesforce uses Wave Analytics to answer questions and uncover new opportunities so they can get smarter about their customers.

Learn how a commercial lending institution can predict which entities in a CRM system are likely, and which are not, to accept an offer for a product or service. Additionally, salespeople and their managers have access to reports, showing the targeted records, along with all activities and pipeline associated with these records. Lastly, the logic presented by the model was programmed into the CRM system so that newly created records may be appropriately scored. This presentation shows how the project was conceived, designed, and put into production, resulting in significant revenue.

Your employee and customer expectations are changing with evolving mobile technologies. Everyone your company interacts with—your sales staff, customers, prospects, and leads—expects you to offer mobile capabilities. This presentation outlines the current mobile landscape and demonstrates how mobile CRM can help you better serve (and sell!) to your customers. This session covers the keys to mobile project success, the role that mobile CRM plays in the workforce, best practices on how to build a mobile CRM application, how to use mobile CRM to drive user engagement, and primary features of an enterprise mobile application.

Digital transformation is about using technologies to improve, connect and radically change business processes, enhance customer experiences, and harness innovation. This session reviews approaches to delivering contextualized, personalized experiences across all channels to foster loyalty and encourage advocacy. It covers new personalization techniques and shares the latest consumer data regarding the acceptance of new marketing channels such as mobile marketing and the role it plays in delivering a truly omnichannel experience.

General Mills’ CRM program is among the largest and most robust in the industry. Its platforms, including Betty Crocker, Pillsbury, Box Tops for Education, Tablespoon and Que Rica Vida, serve tens of millions of consumers annually. To harness the power of these relationships General Mills and 84.51° partnered to bring user behavior and shopper behavior together; providing a cohesive view of the consumer that enables a more personalized consumer experience and ultimately strong sales performance for GMI brands. Learn General Mills’ revolutionary approach to building meaningful and growth-driving consumer relationships. This session shares lessons learned and best practices around iterating to great, content and data demands from personalization, operating with the pace and change of digital CRM tools and capabilities, identifying the right measurement tactics, and building the right partner team.

Join Microsoft Dynamics CRM General Manager Jujhar Singh as he discusses with CRM Evolution Chair Paul Greenberg the future of customer engagement. Come listen over lunch to see how Microsoft is revolutionizing business process and productivity while innovating for the future which includes virtual assistants and the Internet of Things.

The average consumer interacts with a brand across a variety of different channels over his lifecycle. Yet many organizations take a disconnected approach to these interactions, resulting in inconsistent experiences, frustrated customers, and missed business opportunities. How can organizations best meet the needs of customers—no matter which channel they’re using—to build long-lasting relationships and boost the bottom line? Attend this session to learn what customers expect across channels, how to effectively deliver what they want, take a segmented customer approach to determine the most affective segments to target, identify the most common organizational barriers to developing a successful multichannel strategy, and how to overcome them.

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.

Join, Elena Brown, global support services, at Meridium to hear impactful contact center best practices powering significant cost savings (hundreds of thousands), decreasing time to resolution (days to hours) and escalations up to 70 percent. Also learn tips to gain valuable customer insights and streamline internal processes to deliver next generation service experiences for not only customers, but business to business and service technicians!

With everything the latest technologies have to offer, many companies are still hanging on to the old way of providing customer service. In the “age of the customer” we redefine the Digital Self-Service experience by providing personalized guidance for every consumer at their moment of need, and insights for the business to continuously optimize the digital service journey. Join our session to learn more.

Traditional marketing gives us a mechanism to understand buying behaviors and create custom offers when you know who the customers are, but it’s been more difficult to see, measure, and market to the general public in an anonymous environment such as a retail store. This session reveals how a major beverage company used inexpensive, low-power sensors for location, motion, temperature, and humidity, coupled with Big Data, to better understand its customers’ buying patterns at the point of purchase. Attend this session to learn the five key steps that you can take to implement an Internet of Things (IoT) solution that will reduce costs, stimulate sales, and improve margins in retail and other industries.

Customers are empowered by increasing control over the retail process, as the digital, global marketplace delivers ever greater choice and saves them time, money, and hassle. The challenge for companies and brands across all service categories and channels today is to engender loyalty, but the loyal customer is an endangered species. Richard Shapiro presents a dynamic road map for organizations that want to create loyalty in the age of the empowered consumer. He demonstrates why and how brand culture must be infused with a “people first” approach, and details a strategy for achieving a personalized, welcoming, and nurturing customer experience that begins with the initial transaction and is continuously and authentically reaffirmed.

Are you ready to implement cloud-based CRM? Hear how Merck implemented cloud telephony, sales CRM, and service CRM into its U.S.-based contact centers—across nine contact centers at three companies. Learn how to officially weave the customer experience into your strategy and build the business case for CRM, avoid common implementation errors, make the implementation seamless to the customer, and meet the needs of the future through omnichannel services.

Join Microsoft Dynamics CRM General Manager Jujhar Singh as he discusses with CRM Evolution Chair Paul Greenberg the future of customer engagement. Come listen over lunch to see how Microsoft is revolutionizing business process and productivity while innovating for the future which includes virtual assistants and the Internet of Things.

The location and method that a customer wants to use to communicate is an extremely critical piece of social media. From Facebook to Twitter, social networking is transforming the world of customer service, enabling businesses to interact with customers like never before. We need to get ready for the next phase in customer support— social customer support. Learn how to identify good and bad social media customer support strategies from top companies, including Southwest Airlines, Birchbox, and Purina. Understand social media customer support best practices, how to map a customer’s journey, and improve customer engagement. Find out how to set up a social media customer support team, including how to create a decision tree.

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.

Providing excellent customer service means having knowledge of customer interactions that happened 2 minutes ago or even last month, regardless of channel. In this session you will learn how a cloud contact center solution gives agents the context they need to drive better customer experiences and improved business results.

Hear about major trends in CRM that focus on improved outcomes and adoption including everything from Configure Price Quote to Machine Learning to Contract Management to incentive compensation, with lots in between. Don’t enhance your CRM implementation without attending this session. Attendees will receive a workbook and additional training materials.

It’s no secret that providing great customer experiences has become increasingly complex. Successfully managing the customer relationships of today requires leaders to better know their customers, maximize their resources, and align their people, processes, and technology with their desired outcomes. Join ICMI’s Justin Robbins as he shares ICMI’s recent customer experience research and provides the seven lies that prevent great customer experiences. He arms you with actionable and relevant tips to bring back to your organization and shares stories from his experience in leading best in class customer service organizations.

Now that we have turned the corner regarding CRM and its importance in the enterprise, many firms still struggle to connect the dots between strategy and execution. This session addresses how companies can overcome the most common challenges related to culture, process, and methodology. More importantly, attendees can learn how to drive change in the areas that affect bottom-line results. Learn how to understand technology requirements and bottlenecks and create a plan for success that leverages today’s best practices.