Join us for 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 a light continental breakfast, good conversation, and networking with top leaders in the field. This is a truly unique opportunity and conference highlight.

Conversational interfaces, or intelligent “chatbots,” are defining entirely new categories of products and services. Deep learning technologies are empowering businesses to gain critical insights from unstructured text in transcribed calls, chats, and social media. Contact centers have been early adopters of these artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Customers can seamlessly communicate across channels with automated assistants that delight customers, providing them faster and better service. AWS is making AI more accessible, available, and easy to use, enabling customers to accelerate their usage of AI in contact center workflows. Learn how AI-powered applications are providing business value by rethinking traditional applications and transforming customer experiences, and how to leverage these innovations in your workflows instantly

In 3 years, Amazon's Echo went from being an unknown device to the leader of the hottest technology category today. This session focuses on how devices such as the Echo, Google Home, Apple HomePod, and others are beginning to shape the rules of modern customer engagement, from both a B2C and B2B perspective. It also highlights how CRM vendors are integrating these technologies and strategies into their offerings to engage the growing number of voice-first customers.

Intelligent assistants are a misunderstood bunch. They are the digital employees that are revolutionizing customer care in all sorts of industries. Yet they are also the subject of marketing hype and techno- babble that confuse customer care and contact center professionals. For several years, Opus Research has developed, maintained, and refined its Intelligent assistance landscape to help visualize a common technology framework and foster a shared vocabulary among customer experience professionals. This presentation discusses the latest revisions and describes learnings from hundreds of companies with thousands of deployments.

According to Forrester Research, nearly half of consumers already engage in automated conversations with intelligent assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. Keyboards, screens, and remote controls are being replaced by more intuitive ways of interacting with devices—most notably, voice communications. This presentation provides fresh insights into how you can use voice and AI to deliver differentiated customer experiences, streamline operations, and take advantage of new revenue streams.

This session looks at the many different methods organizations have for gaining meaningful adoption of CRM. Attendees learn how to establish baseline diagnoses of core CRM issues, the pitfalls to avoid during implementation, and best practices for salvaging CRM initiatives that are on the downward slide. It discusses concepts related to how users think, methods for diagnosing the root cause of issues, and a framework for aligning technology with business goals. Attendees leave this session with a knowledge of the most common problems with CRM implementations, how to avoid or remedy them, and tips for setting and keeping the right course for a positive CRM experience.

Open to all conference attendees and Networking Pass holders, a solution session 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. Check back for session details or follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

There’s no doubt about it: AI is the next phase in the evolution of CRM. We are seeing a lot of hype, many promises and also failures. In this sessions we would like to share some of the best use cases in CRM, case studies and best practice guidelines.

Science, technology, and the internet are disrupting the lives and livelihoods of just about every employer, employee, customer, and supplier. Within the next 20 years, we will be able to digitally connect every person and every object in the world. But it’s very expensive today to get the data necessary. New internet protocols such as IPv6 are helping companies monitor entire ecosystems of people, places, and things, potentially over extended lifecycles, lifetimes, and generations. But, at the same time, companies need to think about data ownership, privacy, cybersecurity, and ethics. This session can help by developing frameworks for evaluating risks and responding to them, identifying obstacles to progress, implementing and promoting sustainable stewardship, and incentivizing the accountability of leaders in business, government, and the technological and scientific communities.

How are the newer experience technologies such as VR and AR changing what we know or what we don’t know? How will immersive tech impact on CRM? Learn what new data is available. What if we didn’t see time, space, and matter as constraints but rather as opportunities for innovation? What would that mean to our customers and our CRM world? Join us for a conversation about the next interfaces for man and machine—where they are, where they’re going, and why you should care.

Transforming from a customer experience approach to a customer engagement direction requires organizations to transition from just delivering experiences to fully engaging customers. This means looking beyond recommendations and focusing on relevance. But how can we become relevant and aligned and stay that way? In this session, attendees discover why they need to question everything they do and every role and responsibility within their organizations, how to enable employees so they feel capable of engaging, and how to start designing experiences that add value across the whole customer journey.

According to Forrester Research, nearly half of consumers already engage in automated conversations with intelligent assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. Keyboards, screens, and remote controls are being replaced by more intuitive ways of interacting with devices—most notably, voice communications. This presentation provides fresh insights into how you can use voice and AI to deliver differentiated customer experiences, streamline operations, and take advantage of new revenue streams.

Join us for a case study featuring an NBA team’s rebranding journey and its cultural transformation from a sales-focused organization to a customer-centric brand. Learn how social anthropology and instinctual moral clustering turned casual fans into super fans.

Open to all conference attendees and Networking Pass holders, a solution session 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. Check back soon for session details or follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

As business models and go-to-market strategies evolve and customer acquisition is becoming more complicated and influenced, today’s businesses demand more from their CRM solutions. Companies who seek competitive edge require a modern architecture that is seamless between functionality and modules and fully controlled by their organization without infrastructure or database sharing.

Dave Buchanan, CEO at X2Engine, provider of X2CRM will share what companies should expect from their CRM providers. He will share a case study about a client who got their X2CRM deployment up and running in eight weeks, which replaced a legacy salesforce.com solution that took 6 years to implement.

This session focuses more on how to achieve customer engagement than why. It covers the kinds of frameworks, strategies, programs, cultures, operations, and measurements needed to make a serious effort at engaging customers in more meaningful ways. It also weighs the costs and benefits of the considerable investment involved and includes case studies, data, and lots to think about.

Successful business owners and decision makers have always known the importance of keeping up with customer needs, but the bar for customer engagement is rising, especially among small and midsized businesses. This session focuses on new initiatives and technologies SMBs are implementing to support business goals across marketing, sales, and customer service. Attendees learn about how technology can become a business enabler and accelerator, the drivers and challenges for business transformation, the top business initiatives SMBs are using to grow their businesses, and the technology investments SMBs can make to improve customer engagement and build new business models.

Blockchain. Smart Speakers. Conversational Interfaces. Augmented Reality. Which one of these (or other) technologies stands the best chance of radically changing CRM/Customer Engagement as we know it by 2020? An all-star panel of vendor executives discuss which technologies could be a complete game-changer and put CRM on a disruptive path in the not too distant future, and share their thoughts on what CRM will look like after that disruption. 

According to Forrester Research, nearly half of consumers already engage in automated conversations with intelligent assistants such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana. Keyboards, screens, and remote controls are being replaced by more intuitive ways of interacting with devices—most notably, voice communications. This presentation provides fresh insights into how you can use voice and AI to deliver differentiated customer experiences, streamline operations, and take advantage of new revenue streams.

The marketing technology landscape has experienced tremendous growth in the past few years. This session looks at the technologies, including artificial intelligence, account-based marketing, customer experience, customer data platforms, and talent management, that are driving this growth; the overall vendor landscape; what these changes mean; and how they will affect individual companies. It dives into alignment and go-to-market strategies, new perspectives where data now serves as intelligence, and why these areas will become game changers for your organization and careers.

Do you have the right talent and processes in place to support your customers’ and company’s engagement expectations? For B2B companies, it is imperative that marketing and sales work together as owners of a flexible and agile engagement architecture and operations. During this session, The Pedowitz Group shars its recent research, which analyzes trends, case studies, and interviews with dozens of companies of different sizes and industries facing these same challenges to find out what they are doing to develop and support leaders in the engagement economy.