Have breakfast and an interactive chat with many of CRM’s leading influencers. What is driving customers? What are leading-edge technologies? What about hype versus reality on artificial intelligence? This is an excellent opportunity to hear from the people driving the industry in an uncensored, unfiltered format. All of your questions are fair game, and will be answered to the best of our ability. Enjoy good food, good conversation, and the networking with top leaders in the field. This is a truly unique opportunity and conference highlight.

Customer engagement has been one of the top-of-mind initiatives at companies large and small for the last 3 years. Yet doing it right still remains something of a mystery to many institutions. Who is doing it right? What is “right” when it comes to doing it? Paul Greenberg outlines what it is, how it works, what to be thinking about, and who is doing it well.

As organizations begin pursuing customer engagement-focused strategies, many others still wonder whether customer engagement really matters and struggle to find ways to engage more customers. This session shines a spotlight on customer engagement, providing clarity on the topic and specific recommendations to maximize engagement-related efforts. It discusses how to successfully engage customers from the perspective of a marketing practitioner, drawing on many real-world examples from the Marriott Rewards program.

CRM typically focuses on the shorter-term sales pipeline that moves well-defined opportunities through the funnel. As a product leadership company, much of Gore’s long-term growth depends on new product development initiatives that could require years to reach technical feasibility, validate market acceptance, and commercialize. This case study shares how Gore has used CRM tools and practices to support R&D, business, and finance users to collaborate, evaluate, and document product development and track new projects from concept to pipeline to actual revenue growth. At Gore, CRM has become a key data source for strategic planning and portfolio management, and it can be the same at your company.

Does it seem like all the businesses around you are hurtling toward digital transformation at warp speed, while you’re still trying to figure out where to begin? Don’t worry; you’re not alone! This presentation provided fresh insights into a more holistic (and more human) approach to digital transformation—an approach that has the potential to change your customers’ lives, not just your technologies.

There’s no denying the interest and attention artificial intelligence (AI) has today in the enterprise. But how should your organization leverage the power of AI to improve the way it interacts with customers across all phases of the customer lifecycle? This panel brings together top executives representing some of the leading vendors in the CRM industry to discuss many important topics surrounding AI and how it will change customer engagement in the enterprise, including:

• What’s driving the push for AI 
• The different areas of AI (machine learning, deep learning, etc) and the roles they play in customer engagement strategy and implementation 
• How AI is changing traditional aspects of CRM/customer engagement 
• How AI is effecting CRM platform development and infrastructure 
• How AI is impacting the adoption of new tech initiatives, including chatbots, digital assistants and IoT 
• What organizations need to do to find success with AI from a customer engagement perspective

Open to all conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders, solution sessions are presented by conference sponsors. The sessions are educational, and the presentations typically focus on solving real-world problems using case study examples, with a question- and-answer period that follows. Details will be posted shortly so check back soon, or follow us on Twitter at #CRMevolution.

The digital economy completely changes how we engage customers. Success hinges around the human element and how you connect – transforming how people collaborate. Attend this session to learn strategies on how to engage with this new breed of digital customers and how to market, sell, and deliver great customer service in an omni-channel world.

Brian Gardner, author of ROI From CRM: It’s About Sales Process, Not Just Technology, challenges conventional thinking on CRM with this practical, real-world session on getting ROI from CRM. Is it possible to reap a return on your investment in CRM? Yes, but the key is focusing on your team’s processes—not the technology itself. Gardner talks about the importance of starting small with his Start Slow and Grow philosophy, helping to ensure buy-in at all levels of an organization. Attendees also learn about his simple yet effective five-step CRM Audit and hear real-life examples of companies that have taken this approach. Whether you are starting from scratch or already have CRM in place, his system can identify which processes to focus on first, as well as what it will take to get it all done. The final step of his CRM Audit is a road map to help you target areas of your business that will provide the greatest ROI in both the short and long term.

CRM is the business philosophy that allows you to know your customers, prospects, and partner ecosystems more thoroughly and enables you to share information more effectively. In business, this can only be achieved through the integration of people, business processes, and CRM technologies. This session offers a step-by-step game plan on how to successfully implement CRM strategies, technologies, and processes into your organization. This is a non-technical session designed for business professionals.

A CRM solution can be one of the most productive systems in any organization, regardless of its size. Planning, evaluating, and selecting the right solution is one of the most important decisions you can make, but that process is a project in itself. This session addresses how to assemble the right team within your organization to help in the selection process, how creating a well-crafted RFP will assist potential vendors, how to define project requirements, how to create a short list of potential vendors, how to evaluate and score their replies, how to make recommendations to senior leadership, and, eventually, how to close the deal. If you are considering shopping for a CRM system in the near future, this session offers invaluable information to consider before you begin the process.

Does it seem like all the businesses around you are hurtling toward digital transformation at warp speed, while you’re still trying to figure out where to begin? Don’t worry; you’re not alone! This presentation provided fresh insights into a more holistic (and more human) approach to digital transformation—an approach that has the potential to change your customers’ lives, not just your technologies.

In many instances companies continue to struggle with adoption of their CRM initiatives. This session highlights a particular scenario in which an organization had switched CRM products and was on its second failed implementation. It was considering moving to its third product in 4 years when we suggested a different approach, one that completely changed the results without requiring a change in platform. Attendees learn how to take an objective approach to their CRM and how to use adoption concepts to make a meaningful shift in how users think about their CRM technology, as well as methods for implementing changes that equate to success.

Open to all conference attendees and Discovery Pass holders, solution sessions are presented by conference sponsors. The sessions are educational, and the presentations typically focus on solving real-world problems using case study examples, with a question- and-answer period that follows. Details will be posted shortly so check back soon, or follow us on Twitter at #CRMevolution.

Let’s not forget why we’re all here. CRM is the business philosophy to improve the relationships between your business and customers. Mission accomplished? No, not yet.

It’s time to reconnect to CRM’s original mission.

Join Phil Venville being interviewed by conference chair Paul Greenberg on the current state of play, why customer engagement is the new frontier for CRM and how businesses can build more meaningful relationships through the customer journey lens.

Today’s customers are increasingly self-defined by their smartphone persona, and they in turn increasingly define the companies they’ll do business with by those organizations’ smartphone persona. Phone conversations are becoming less important than smartphone apps and mobile websites to customer relationships. The good news is that digital interactions can reduce your cost per contact. The bad news is that, unfortunately, too many organizations have determined their contact center strategy without planning for this change. How can you adapt in mid-stream without breaking your budget? This session provides the information you need to increase customers’ digital adoption and save on OpEx while you’re at it.

Customer engagement and customer experience are more important than ever. As customer demands increase, system landscapes are becoming more complex, and mixing cloud and on-premises solutions doesn’t make life any easier. With budgets and resources limited, business units and IT departments are not as aligned as they could be, which leads to unnecessary friction that ultimately destroys customer value. Using real-world examples of organizations confronting these dilemmas in their digital transformations, Wieberneit introduces a model that helps organizations become agile and stay focused on improving customer experience in a consistent way.

As speech-to-text, machine learning, and other technologies make it more natural and efficient to get answers and perform routine tasks, customers increasingly will expect the companies they patronize to provide better engagement experiences without forcing them to click, type, or swipe. Through a variety of case studies, this session focuses on how digital assistants, chatbots, and other conversational user interfaces are changing the way we interact with customers and their devices throughout the customer life cycle.

Does it seem like all the businesses around you are hurtling toward digital transformation at warp speed, while you’re still trying to figure out where to begin? Don’t worry; you’re not alone! This presentation provided fresh insights into a more holistic (and more human) approach to digital transformation—an approach that has the potential to change your customers’ lives, not just your technologies.

CRM provides the tools for modern business, but we often forget to identify modern needs. This session reviews how CRM supports business agility and enables businesses to take on the challenges presented by social media, the demands of mobility, and the subscription economy. With examples from current research, this session gets you thinking differently about your business and CRM.

The advent of artificial intelligence in the world of CRM has caused many ripples of disruption. Everything has been called into question, but there are few realistic models of what the world would look like if machine learning were to be applied to CRM—and how organizations would leverage this new technology. This session showcases the latest advances in this 5-decades-old discipline and shows you how leading organizations around the world are using artificial intelligence to improve the way they deal with customers, debunking the idea that analytics, data, and AI are the same thing.

Mix and mingle with other attendees as well as speakers and our conference sponsors during this networking reception. Admission is included with the purchase of a Discovery Pass or higher. (Not included with an Exhibits-Only pass.)