Malcolm Gladwell, who coined the phrase “tipping point,” will talk about how he sees ideas, behaviors, and patterns moving through a population in much the same way as an epidemic. He posits that ideas can become contagious and reach a tipping point, just as a virus reaches critical mass. Learn what it takes to start a social epidemic and create change and how to push CRM and customer-related technologies, and your businesses, toward the tipping point.

CRM provides sales, customer service, marketing, business analytics, and e-customer tools and techniques to support an organization’s business strategy. The growth and transformation of the CRM industry since its inception in the early 1980s has been staggering. Following years of booming growth, the industry took a hit in the early 2000s. Lots of good lessons were learned, and the industry is back with a roar. The people/process/technology mix is increasingly understood, new implementation options abound, and mobile applications, communications, and devices have added an entirely new twist to the next generation of CRM. Hear how these developments are shaping best practices for implementation excellence and how to harness these enhancements to ensure your organization’s future success.

Since 2000, the CRM industry has had varying degrees of success in utilizing real-time technologies and processes to help organizations gain instant access to needed customer information. Building on the impressive advances that have been made in both technology and process, the CRM industry is now facing a far-more-challenging issue: how to effectively integrate Web 2.0, social networking and user-generated content into future CRM tools and techniques so that we secure tomorrow’s customer base. No organization can duck having to put into place the needed CRM tools and techniques required to address the “always-on, always-connected” customer or partner. So here’s the choice: Proactively tackle this new challenge or roll the dice and hope to be able to follow the leaders. Come learn more about the issue and how best-in-class organizations are addressing “beyond real-time CRM.”