How do you truly measure the quality of the customer experience you are delivering? How do you know you’re getting better? Amazon and Google know that the answers to these questions involve helping customers get stuff done as quickly as possible. Task completion gets you in the right ballpark, but it is speed that wins you the game of excellent customer experience. This keynote stresses how the relentless pursuit of customer convenience drives customer loyalty, retention, and revenue growth. Learn how to speed to success by measuring your results.

Join us for this expert panel to explore why B2B sales based on relationships are in peril—and learn what your company can do about it. Recent surveys suggest that almost 60 percent of the B2B purchase process has been completed before a salesperson is even contacted by a prospect. The companies that win in the information economy are hiring “sales nerds”—subject matter experts with great communication skills who take a data-based approach to helping customers make informed purchasing decisions, and compete in the marketplace.

Learn how B2B buyers are engaging with your brand and digital content in order to screen you as a vendor; how you can uncover anonymous sales opportunities using analytics; and how you can reframe the traditional sales process to thrive in the new buyer-empowered economy.

Decades ago, Peter Drucker observed that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Today, as related to sales transformation, that sage advice could not be more relevant. In this session, using case study examples, Jim Dickie profiles how companies such as Aon Insurance, Fairchild Semiconductor, and SAS have successfully dealt with the culture change needed for their companies to maximize the impact that process, CRM, and knowledge can have on their organizations’ ability to turn how they engage customers into a strategic competitive edge. Attendees to this session also receive a copy of CSO Insights’ “2017 Sales Performance Optimization Key Trends Analysis,” based on a survey of more than 1,000 small, medium, and large enterprises.

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available, doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

Your organization’s most important assets are your customers and your data. Sustainable competitive advantage lies in maximizing these assets to drive top-line and bottom-line performance across the entire enterprise. This session discusses how any organization can leverage, improve and enhance their data to drive more compelling and meaningful customer experiences. DigitasLBi will showcase how we enable our clients use the power of data to uncover actionable insights, deliver innovative programs that increase engagement and deliver positive economic impact. This session will include a real-life case study demonstrating how Dunkin' Brands (Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins) is using data-driven customer experiences to increase sales, loyalty and satisfaction to consumers, franchisees and shareholders.

Join this session to hear the digital transformation story Microsoft is creating for its customers with Dynamics 365 which unites Microsoft’s CRM and ERP capabilities with its powerful productivity and business intelligence tools. Hear compelling customer stories and be the first to view fascinating new Forrester research around digital transformation.

The traditional sales process is in a period of rapid disruption. With 24/7 internet connectivity, most buyers have a wealth of information at their fingertips before they ever contact a salesperson. It is no longer sufficient for salespeople to function merely as human conduits for product information. Salespeople need to evaluate where customers are in the buying cycle, provide customized solutions on-the-fly, and then step in and function as a knowledge broker while building rapport. This session provides an adaptive selling framework and identifies the five critical steps salespeople must master to be successful in this new era of salesmanship.

Most sales efforts are driven by the concept of a sales funnel—bring in enough prospects at the top and qualify and engage them in the middle, and ultimately some fraction of them will buy your product. The concept has guided sales meetings for decades—but now it’s on its way out. The traditional sales funnel assumed two things: information asymmetry and a consistent sales cycle, both of which are disappearing. Sales managers must rethink the pipeline. This session addresses how pipelines are changing, how to leverage your existing CRM tools to meet new pipeline challenges, and how to evaluate the potential benefits from sales force automation changes. Learn the five keys to ensuring successful change management.

Is digital marketing technology living up to its promise? Using crowdsourced marketer satisfaction scores and usage data metrics, this session looks at the current state of technology supporting modern marketing organizations. Learn what users really think about the usability, implementation, ROI, and other key features of the most popular tools, and find out what business problems marketers are facing and whether there are tools available to help improve business outcomes.

Marketing teams have become the guardians for their organizations’ customer experiences. While it is important to acquire customers, retaining them has become more challenging. With diverse customer needs and a splintering of traditional marketing segments, how can marketing deepen customer relationships, and do it at scale? This session offers key takeaways, case studies, and practical steps on using predictive analytics to expand customer relationships; using data analytics to pinpoint customer pain points; and using AI, machine learning, robotics, and other technologies to evolve what we mean by customer relationship management.

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available, doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

By 2018, more than half of all consumers will use mobile first for all of their online activities, according to research from Gartner. As a marketing professional, mobile should be a way of life by now; to keep up with customer expectations, customer relationship management (CRM) technology needs to ensure access to valuable organizational customer data, anywhere, anytime, and on any device. This session explores how mobile CRM can take your organization to the next level, regardless of the platform you choose. It looks at how mobile systems are deployed across the leading CRM platforms and provides best practices for integrating CRM technology with marketing automation and customer analytics.

A positive customer experience is critical to a company’s brand and, ultimately, its bottom line. With the proliferation of technology and devices, the customer has become smarter and more powerful. Customers now decide when and how they want to interact with brands, which has had a direct impact on the way companies sell to their customers. While macro trends such as social, mobile, cloud, big data and IoT are forging a new era of engagement, customers are ultimately becoming far more disruptive than the technology itself.

Salesforce’s VP and CTO for Customer Connection, Charlie Issacs, will address how companies of all sizes can create new business practices that leverage technology to strengthen customer relationships and accelerate sales and growth. Attendees will hear actionable takeaways on how to create a customer-centric business and long-lasting brand loyalty.

This highly interactive presentation will offer tips for embedding a “think like an owner” mentality into your customer service staff and explore other fundamental questions, like what customers want, how customer service can drive customer loyalty, and, the role of social media in customer service. Ultimately, you want customers to have positive interactions with your company and then share those experiences with their peers. Once that happens, you can win referrals by tapping into their influence as brand advocates.

Most B2B marketers are struggling to put ABM in practice. While web trends and studies indicate that the pace of adoption and investment in ABM is accelerating, 47% of marketers still don’t believe they have the skill necessary to be successful at it. ABM is still a fairly new concept, so marketers can’t draw on a lot of expertise or best practices just yet. This session covers the major steps in building an ABM strategy, which include segmenting accounts and look-alike accounts, using data tools regardless of budget, creating contextual experiences through website personalization, and best practices for creating content for ABM.

Every organization needs to gather, organize, analyze, and exploit the deluge of data coming from both traditional media and increasingly the digital firehose. Discover how best-in-class B2B, B2C, and B2B2C organizations such as ExxonMobil, Amazon, Marriott, Uber, Disney, and others take an integrated approach to customer engagement. Learn how they are integrating customer profiles, traditional media, social media, ecommerce, emerging technologies, and customer experience management to ensure they and their customers thrive in the digital deluge. This session covers the drivers behind the digital deluge and the components of an effective integrated customer-centric strategy; how to optimally gather offline and online information about your customers, analyze it, and derive actionable insights from it; and case studies of organizations already successfully implementing an integrated customer-centric strategy.

At the heart of a successful integrated customer-centric strategy is a solid CRM system containing clean, accurate, and comprehensive customer profiles, or customer master files, that get enhanced using tools such as identity resolution to seamlessly integrate offline and online customer data. New business analytics tools in turn leverage customer profile data to optimize sales, marketing, and service processes, and ultimately drive optimal customer experiences. Learn how to maximize your investment in CRM tools and techniques. This session covers the role of CRM as the hub of an integrated customer-centric strategy containing holistic customer profiles populated with timely, relevant customer information; how to put together a multiyear road map through 2030 that exploits CRM to ensure that your company thrives; and case studies of organizations successfully leveraging CRM as the core of their integrated customer-centric strategy.

Imagine if you could hire someone who learns quickly. Someone who is always available, doesn’t require overtime pay, and will never ask for a wage increase. Someone who could help scale your service organization, but could also make your existing employees better at their jobs. Sound too good to be true? It’s not! Learn how a digital employee can provide immense value to organizations by managing repetitive tasks, freeing agents to focus on higher-value customer-centric activities, improving the routing of questions to answers, changing the dynamic of how you manage your workforce, and much more.

Drawing from research from his recent book, Silicon Collar—which looks at a century of automation and its impact on jobs—Mirchandani demonstrates, through a wide series of examples, how it is, in fact, customers, not workers or unions, who are often the road blocks to automation. In doing so, he highlights the importance of getting the perspective of customers as companies look to implement artificial intelligence, robotics, and other automation in their operations and customer-facing processes.

Cloud-based CRM implementations are becoming more complex, more mission-critical, and more closely integrated with on-premises and other cloud properties than ever before. While the appetite for more complexity has grown, the tools, processes, and cultural mindset have not kept up. The result is that CRM in the cloud is facing the same threat that on-premises software implementations have faced for the past 20 years: an excessively high failure rate and a culture of mediocrity that favors getting the job done over getting it done right. This session focuses on how companies can eliminate failure and waste in CRM implementations and stop the cycle of mediocrity.

Customer Service and Marketing have historically been like two ships passing in the night. While both played an important role in organizational success, rarely are the disciplines ever aligned. This presentation will discuss the new role marketing must play in order for companies to move toward being truly customer centric. Case studies will be used to demonstrate the importance of marketing's role in establishing consumer expectations across all touchpoints, how organizations should approach the design of consumer segmentation and personalization strategies, the role business intelligence and analytics plays and why financial modeling is vital to staying ahead of shifts in customer service demands.

Join your peers as we celebrate the grand opening of the Customer Solutions Expo. Visit with conference sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other attendees while enjoying light hors d’oeuvres and drinks. Open to all conference attendees including Discovery Pass and Exhibits-Only pass holders.