Every day, there are more and more advanced back-office and customer-facing technologies at the ready for businesses to modernize CX and CRM. The challenge that many decision-makers face isn’t just wading through the mind-numbing array of advanced technologies to deploy but whether or not they can see the extent to which their customers have moved away from current value-propositions and touch points. Brian Solis is a leading digital analyst, anthropologist and futurist. He has studied how customer behaviors, preferences, values and intent have evolved and how organizations are and aren’t keeping up. In his keynote presentation, Brian will share the world of experience through the eyes of the evolving customer and it how companies need to reverse engineer new perspectives, models, and journeys to stay relevant.

You already realize the importance of Millennials as consumers, but have you considered the impact they could make within your company? Contact centers are changing, with a new focus on handling complex and difficult interactions and "postchannel" strategies that erase your customers' awareness of channels. Digitally fluent and social media-connected Millennials can be the ideal fit for chat, social, and mobile agent support. This presentation shows how you can leverage this key demographic, along with innovative technologies, to enable the best possible customer outcomes.

Whether you are in the early stages of the planning and implementation cycle or more than 2 years into your current CRM project, showing the productivity impact and budget justification of your CRM strategy can be one of the greatest challenges. Leveraging Nucleus’ CRM Buyer’s Guide based on data from hundreds of CRM case studies, Wettemann provides a straightforward framework for projecting, measuring, and validating productivity gains across sales, marketing, and customer service. Participants learn how to credibly and consistently quantify productivity gains, communicate those gains in a business case for financial decision makers, and use milestoning and other techniques to keep productivity projections.

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.

ELIZA, one of the first chatbots ever built, was introduced more than 50 years ago, but it was not until Siri in 2011, Alexa in 2015, and Facebook’s Bots launch in 2016 that we saw anything close to mass market adoption of conversational assistants. As with these applications, most technologies that start in the consumer world eventually reach the commercial enterprise, but should chatbots be treated as traditional projects? Chatbots are essentially ushering in a new era of man-machine interaction—one that goes far beyond the now familiar "information retrieval" applications that rely on simple question-answer system constructs. As machines are starting to learn how to speak and to perform traditionally human functions, should we treat them more like humans? This is a new IT frontier. Is the goal to improve the human condition? These and other similar questions must be asked, but here is the big question: How do enterprises get this right?

Customer journeys in today’s artificial intelligence (AI)-driven world have no beginning or end. In fact, these experiences are contextually powered by AI and remain in the background, helping company executives make decisions. Meanwhile, these systems orchestrate a plethora of customer information about their preferences, identities, security, and payments across platforms and networks. Welcome to the era of Infinite Ambient Orchestration!

Let’s face it, the birth of CRM is based in data. Through CRM, we have been using client interaction data to drive better customer experiences, opportunity data to drive revenue, and marketing data to better align our products and services to the right customers. However, CRM has been plagued from inception with dirty data, incomplete data, or stale data. The purpose of this session is to talk about the ways to overcome bad data, how to leverage the right data, and how to use existing data to drive business value.

Customer experience and customer engagement are more important than ever. Still, many organizations have not made the transition from transaction-oriented, short-term-focused CRM to engagement-oriented, long-term-focused customer engagement management (CEM). This transition is complicated on many levels: people, process, strategy, and technology. It requires rethinking CRM from the ground up. Using the retail industry as an example, we showcase how to rethink CRM and transition into CEM with a simplified hierarchy of customer expectations.

As author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed.” The same is true with digital transformation: For every company leading the way, there are scores still in the early stages of change, working to determine the optimal approach for their organizations. This session discusses the biggest myths about digital transformation and the realities of how to move forward.

If you think blockchain is some far-off technology that isn't relevant to marketing, you're mistaken. Blockchain technology can be used to help marketing leaders demonstrate a clearer return on marketing investment than many current alternatives. Blockchains are helping forward-thinking marketers uncover opportunities in digital transformation, unlock new areas of value creation, protect brand reputation, and leverage existing assets and relationships to defend from potentially disruptive startups. In this session, see what you can do with blockchain today based on real-world examples from early-adopter companies.

ELIZA, one of the first chatbots ever built, was introduced more than 50 years ago, but it was not until Siri in 2011, Alexa in 2015, and Facebook’s Bots launch in 2016 that we saw anything close to mass market adoption of conversational assistants. As with these applications, most technologies that start in the consumer world eventually reach the commercial enterprise, but should chatbots be treated as traditional projects? Chatbots are essentially ushering in a new era of man-machine interaction—one that goes far beyond the now familiar "information retrieval" applications that rely on simple question-answer system constructs. As machines are starting to learn how to speak and to perform traditionally human functions, should we treat them more like humans? This is a new IT frontier. Is the goal to improve the human condition? These and other similar questions must be asked, but here is the big question: How do enterprises get this right?

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, Shutterfly created competitive advantage by successfully implementing a cross-channel personalization program. Through a renewed commitment to analytics, along with the development of a series of customer-first strategies, the company has delivered more relevant experiences to its customers, no matter where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. Its efforts have resulted in greater engagement and conversion in the short term, while also enabling Shutterfly to build stronger long-term relationships with the customers that matter most. In this session, attendees learn how to create a winning personalization program, overcome common challenges, and increase the program’s impact over time. They also hear real-life stories of other companies experiencing success with personalization.

Much has been said about digital disruption, but getting past the hype will depend on how we approach it. Doing the same old things as before will not make companies perform better, regardless of how much data they have. Marketers have to understand and engage the many customer personas they might encounter along the customer journey. They need to adapt their processes, solutions, measurements, and even their cultures to the post-digital persona. This session looks at what early adopters have been doing, what they learned, and what they would (or wouldn’t) do again and then presents a framework to help organizations embrace this new model of marketing and succeed in it.

Every organization needs to gather, organize, analyze, and exploit the deluge of data coming from both traditional media and the digital firehose. Your goal is to capture and retain customers awash in an increasingly digital sea. Learn how best-in-class B2B, B2C, and B2B2C organizations such as ExxonMobil, Amazon, Marriott, Uber, and Disney are taking an integrated approach to customer engagement. We focus on the drivers behind the digital deluge; the components of an effective engaged customer strategy; how to gather and analyze offline and online information about customers and derive actionable insights from it; and look at case studies involving organizations that have already successfully implemented an engaged customer strategy.

In the second part of this series, attendees discover how a solid CRM system forms the foundation of a successful, engaged customer strategy. But to do so, systems need clean, accurate, and holistic customer profiles that get enhanced by new tools, such as identity resolution, to integrate offline and online customer data. In part 2, attendees also learn how to maximize investment in CRM tools and techniques, how CRM fits into the closed-loop customer engagement process, and how to exploit CRM to ensure that organizations thrive in the digital deluge. Live case study examples are also presented.

ELIZA, one of the first chatbots ever built, was introduced more than 50 years ago, but it was not until Siri in 2011, Alexa in 2015, and Facebook’s Bots launch in 2016 that we saw anything close to mass market adoption of conversational assistants. As with these applications, most technologies that start in the consumer world eventually reach the commercial enterprise, but should chatbots be treated as traditional projects? Chatbots are essentially ushering in a new era of man-machine interaction—one that goes far beyond the now familiar "information retrieval" applications that rely on simple question-answer system constructs. As machines are starting to learn how to speak and to perform traditionally human functions, should we treat them more like humans? This is a new IT frontier. Is the goal to improve the human condition? These and other similar questions must be asked, but here is the big question: How do enterprises get this right?

Effective coaching is the No. 1 key to improving sales performance, and technology can be extremely effective in assisting managers to become better coaches. This presentation provides insights into how to provide sales people, as well as their managers, with targeted and meaningful feedback that will help them become consistently more successful.

How is artificial intelligence (AI) enhancing and changing the sales process? Buyers want relevant and contextual interaction with sales associates. In this session, attendees learn how to move from reactive selling to using data to understand what customers want and when, gain real-time insight on current and prospective customers, and learn to predict which accounts are ready to buy. AI is changing how companies sell products and services. This session highlights how to take advantage of emerging trends in sales tech.

Join your peers on Monday from 5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. 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.