It’s a fact—most customer experience projects fail two or more times before organizations get it right. One of the most critical reasons for failure is because leaders do not fully understanding the unique planning process. This session dives into how to build an initial—and annually revised—plan for customer experience transformation. You learn how to build a plan, get the team engaged, build your business case, measure the ROI, benchmark satisfaction, and constantly improve. Join us in this workshop, where we discuss how to create a framework for planning a new project or how to improve your current project, and a process for continuous progress. We also cover understanding the value of a customer engagement project and articulate it to management along with the strategies for engaging your team and leadership in the planning process. You participate in group planning exercises to bring back to your team. Key Takeaway: Develop an ongoing plan for customer experience innovation.

You’ve heard it before. Over and over, in fact. “Improve your customer service.” “Optimize the customer experience.” But what does that even mean? Today, when your intersection points with your customers may number in the dozens (or even hundreds), tackling customer service or customer experience holistically is impossible. You can’t magically get better at every customer touchpoint. But you can get better at the touchpoints that matter. Think Small is a fast-paced, dynamic, inspirational, and hilarious presentation that shows you how to gain and keep more customers by improving on only the three things that really matter to your customers.

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Social media, digital media, and new technologies have transformed how organizations create and distribute information to customers—but what else is needed to achieve competitive advantage? The answer is effective customer engagement and empathy. Engaging with your customer provides immense value for both sides of the exchange, which is why CX leaders should understand what’s needed operationally to ensure service and support interactions are executed in a meaningful way and value is delivered to the customer. This session discusses creating a customer service and CX strategy that defines both customer engagement goals and outcomes needed for their achievement; how to use empathy as a strategy for delivering the best customer experience; the value exchange provided through customer interactions and its benefits; and CX’s larger impact on businesses and society. Key Takeaway: How effective customer engagement and empathy can provide an experience that keeps the customer coming back.

The ability to successfully transform might be the most important organizational capability of the 21st century. But an overemphasis on agility and transformation can be destructive in equal measure. In this session you learn the scientific but counterintuitive truth about transformation, how it applies to your project, and why every organization needs it. We cover why personality tests are worthless and the science of organizational sociology, the role of leadership, and how to ensure user adoption. Key Takeaway: Use science to create lasting change and ensure adoption of your CRM project.

Join us in this session featuring CRM experts and learn how leveraging the right approach to your CRM project is like having a customized blueprint for success. In this discussion, McCutcheon interviews a panel of CRM thought leaders to get their insights on these critical stages in a CRM initiative: planning your project, designing and executing, ensuring user adoption, and planning for future directions. Key Takeaway: Learn from the experts how to turn your CRM project into a customized blueprint for success.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer relationship management from leading-industry companies in Expert Perspectives sessions. These sessions are open to all full-conference attendees and Networking Pass holders. Check back for session details or follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

Now that CRM has become a mission-critical application for almost every organization, adoption is more important than ever. Many companies, however, struggle to maintain accurate data and ensure user participation, and so fail to use CRM to create a competitive advantage. Piling onto those challenges is the negative way in which many deployments are viewed internally. In this session, we walk through a case study of one such firm with these challenges and show how they leveraged AI with CRM to transform their business. Key Takeaway: A customer success story on how to use AI for front office transformation.

This session focuses on developing a plan to optimize the management processes of your customer service, showing you how to determine where your organization stands on the path to maturation. We examine how a good self-service portal will optimize your customer service management processes, and we discuss how AI can facilitate transactions and enhance your analytics. Key Takeaway: Assess what stage your customer service organization has attained in the CRM maturity model and what improvements should be initiated in your customer service processes.

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 adrift 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. This session focuses on the drivers behind the digital deluge; components of an effective engaged customer strategy; how to gather, analyze, and derive actionable insights from offline and online customer information; and the critical role of CRM in making all this happen. Key Takeaway: Learn how a solid CRM system forms the foundation of a successful digital transformation.

Using real-world case studies from B2B, B2C, and B2B2C industries, Goldenberg shows how to achieve successful digital transformation by tightly integrating CRM with AI, social media, knowledge management, ecommerce, identity resolution, and other emerging technologies. Attendees learn how to enhance customer profiles housed within the CRM systems using data and analytics to create the needed two-way information exchange with customers required for a successful digital transformation. Key Takeaway: Learn how to integrate CRM with AI, social media, knowledge management, ecommerce, identity resolution, and other emerging technologies. Attendance at Part 1 of this series is not necessary to attend Part 2.

Machine learning, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics are all the rage. But let’s face it: Most companies are still figuring out how to use their data to transform their businesses. In fact, some of the most successful organizations in the world don’t need the latest AI tools or an army of data scientists to find their best ideas. Instead, they use simple insights to radically accelerate their near-term revenue growth. In this session, we focus on a new idea that is easy to implement and certain to work, and it doesn’t require any complicated algorithms. Key Takeaway: Don’t get hung up with Big Data; there are lots of simple ways to derive massive value from your CRM data.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer relationship management from leading-industry companies in Expert Perspectives sessions. These sessions are open to all full-conference attendees and Networking Pass holders. Check back for session details or follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

Organizations spend a great deal of time carefully lining up plans for effective communication and a great deal of money executing those plans. Like dominos, messages are carefully aligned with target audiences and sectors to achieve critical objectives. Each communication and each interaction are carefully planned, but bad CRM data can topple the most effective strategy. Without clean, correct, and complete data, messages fall flat, interactions with audiences become ineffective, and results quickly erode. This session reveals the true costs of bad data and provides specific, actionable solutions to this common problem, as well as a game-changing strategy to put participants on the path to CRM success. Key Takeaway: Participants learn best practices for avoiding data quality issues and achieving and maintaining high-quality CRM data.

Join us to discuss the convergence of AI and machine learning with CRM. Find out how CRM platforms can provide insights and plans for action, rather than just collecting data from users. We also cover augmenting CRM data with external sources to better support business processes, how an integrated approach will make it easier to connect the enterprise, and how to leverage CRM platforms as rapid application development platforms solve line-of-business use cases. Key Takeaway: Learn how major organizations are integrating new technologies to create customer-centric intelligent business applications to improve your bottom line and build brand loyalty.

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The fact that selling is harder than ever before is being validated in research, but how to deal with this fact is less clear. In this session, we review the metrics regarding the challenges sales teams are facing today. Using case study examples, we explore how companies are using AI-based solutions to reinvent how they are handling many aspects of customer lifecycle management. We highlight how some leading companies have increased lead conversion rates by as much as 234%, decreased sales cycle lengths by 34%, and improved win rates of forecast deals by 38%. Key Takeaway: Learn how other companies are successfully leveraging AI to optimize many aspects of sales.

CRM has turned 40, but salespeople aren’t celebrating. The reality is that CRM still fails to deliver value where it matters. Many users still think they put more into it than they are getting out of it. In this session, we show how AI and process automation can help serve the most important of CRM user groups—salespeople—with concrete examples of how these tools can help make CRM a better experience for every member of the team. Key Takeaway: How to implement your CRM solution so that salespeople derive more value from the experience—and sell more.

The ideal sales process will help your team increase deal size, decrease sales cycle length, improve win rates, prevent valuable opportunities from slipping through the cracks, deliver meaningful forecasts, and continuously improve sales results. In this session, you learn how best-in-class sales teams design sales processes to align with customer buying processes. Understand the different types of sales processes, why outof- the-box processes usually aren’t a good fit, steps for engaging the team in developing a process, how to evolve processes over time, and the golden rules for developing simple but effective sales processes. Other topics include defining your first sales process or refining existing processes, developing a process that maps to your CRM solution, and getting your team to adopt and buy into the process. Attendees receive a workbook with an initial sales process design and a set of worksheet templates to go from simple to sophisticated. Key Takeaway: Rapidly design a process that drives sales results.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer relationship management from leading-industry companies in Expert Perspectives sessions. These sessions are open to all full-conference attendees and Networking Pass holders. Check back for session details or follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

Long-term business partnerships are created by consistently delivering on promises. When working with a new prospect, one of the best ways to showcase your ability to deliver a project’s operational and financial objectives is by developing a joint project business case—whether to build trust and credibility to earn the right to present a proposal based on your findings or to provide evidence of the value associated with your proposal and make a compelling operational and financial case to act now. In this session, we discuss how to solicit, construct, and deliver a business case, jointly developed and presented by you and your customer, to empirically persuade executive management to act favorably on your proposal. Key Takeaway: Business cases are a perfect way to assist your customer in due diligence while building trust.

Modern marketers are faced with an array of technical demands that challenge their right-brain tendencies. IT leaders who support marketing, customer experience, or any part of the MarTech stack—especially customer data—must embrace fuzzy data and marketers’ challenges. Without the right cross-functional collaboration and access to essential skills and tools, internal or external, it can get ugly. CRM success hinges on an ecosystem of both tools and talents that enable a competitive customer relationship. This session addresses the following questions: Which aspects of your sales and marketing infrastructure are both critical and often under-supported? What skills must be accessible to your teams to allow them to succeed? What new models are emerging for next-generation cooperation, including internal and external talent? Which five common IT/marketing scenarios are doomed to fail? Key Takeaway: Learn which new marketing and IT skills, roles, and technology must be prioritized to avoid failure.

While data is critical to the process of driving prospects on their journey to becoming customers, this process will also create more data. As prospects move from first contact and are nurtured through the sales funnel, their data can become separated into different silos. Losing data from earlier phases of the customer journey can cause customers to become frustrated with the process and actually make the job of selling more difficult. This session highlights some of the tools and strategies for eliminating data and process silos, easing the handoffs as customers traverse their journeys, and ultimately bringing the full value of data to salespeople as they convert those qualified leads into satisfied customers. Key Takeaway: Proper use of automation can remove data silos to make the sales process easier.

Marketers are increasingly being asked to prove the value of their personalization efforts, yet few companies focus on dedicated testing efforts to drive innovation and track results. In this presentation, we share a repeatable, proven method for setting up a personalization-testing war room and team that can rapidly execute and deliver ongoing value. We cover these steps: how to kick off the work; setting a code of engagement; common challenges and workarounds; and agile testing and best practices. Key Takeaway: How to start up a successful, agile CRM testing team.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer relationship management from leading-industry companies in Expert Perspectives sessions. These sessions are open to all full-conference attendees and Networking Pass holders. Check back for session details or follow #CRMevolution on Twitter for updates.

Wondering why your loyalty program keeps growing in membership, but activity is flagging? You’re not alone: According to a recent report from Mintel, more than half of loyalty program memberships are inactive. It’s time to start thinking beyond the hundreds of variations on a discount-by-another-name as the entirety of your brand’s loyalty offering. In this session, learn how to approach the loyalty program as part of a connected, multichannel experience that provides personalized value for your customers at every interaction point. We discuss how to create meaningful differentiation by leveraging the entire member journey to creating opportunities to reward our customers with what they really need: time, ease, and convenience. This case study highlights the journey of how Delta Airlines shifted from a transactional loyalty program to a true lifestyle program that drives loyalty. Key Takeaway: Learn how to approach the loyalty program as part of a connected, multi-channel experience that provides personalized value for your customers.

As new datapoints and technologies fill the modern marketer’s toolbox, we often find ourselves trying to be superhuman robots without flaws. The question becomes, “Have we tried too hard to hide imperfections that we have become fake to our consumers?” We explore how leading brands are becoming human again to build stronger and longer- lasting relationships with their consumers. We also look at key strategies of how to have flaws without damaging your brand’s reputation through your marketing efforts. Key Takeaway: Come learn what it means to be human with consumers today; gain an understanding of which brands are truly being human, and how you can apply these tactics to your company.

Blockchain technology has been the object of much hype—and many would say that it’s overhyped and will never deliver. But Jeremy Epstein, the world’s leading expert on the intersection of blockchain technology and the marketing function, is going to join us to offer some evidence that the first waves of disruption are already being felt on the shore. Come and judge for yourself: Is it believable or BS? Key Takeaway: A discussion on blockchain’s impact on marketing, and whether you can trust the hype.

November 2019 marked the 5-year anniversary of Leary’s first Amazon Echo device purchase and starting sentences by saying “Alexa.” And what began as not much more than a curiosity has become much more than that in just a relatively short amount of time. But how have smart speakers and voice assistants changed consumer behaviors and expectations since Alexa entered our houses, and what impact has that had on the rules of customer engagement? And what impact will these devices have over the next 5 years? This session focuses on how companies are adopting these technologies to create experiences that incorporate voice in the customer journey, as well as how voice interfaces aimed at improving the employee experience with enterprise applications will help shape journeys and experiences today and in the near future. Key Takeaway: How voice interfaces are shaping the present and future of both the customer and employee experience.

Whether you are in a globalizing startup or in a multinational organization, it is crucial to engage with local customers on their linguistic, cultural, and functional levels. This demonstrates customer centricity to beat your competitors across all markets. This means creating content and developing products that can be effectively localized at scale and at the speed of now. Reaching out and resonating in local markets poses a number of challenges that should be considered and addressed upfront to ensure that digital customer experiences are synchronized with internal supply chains and agile lifecycles at all times. This interactive and problem-solving workshop covers the following topics: creating a robust framework to drive continuous globalization and experience-driven localization; building a road map that is articulated around internationalization, translation, localization, testing, and certification processes; defining digital strategies powered by linguistic, cultural, and functional intelligence for end-to-end product leadership; leveraging globalization and localization enablers in digital innovation, transformation, and acceleration programs; benefiting and profiting from the latest and greatest AI-powered language technologies to implement intelligent automation; elevating and celebrating digital globalization as a profit driver and localization as a business partnership across teams, disciplines, and functions; and capturing and measuring performance with operational, financial, and experiential indicators.

New technologies such as robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) are highly relevant to digital experience, customer support and service, and customer relationship management (CRM) areas. RPA and AI encompass key three aspects—people, process, and technology—as they can empower employees and enable new use cases. This interactive workshop starts with the basics of RPA and AI and discusses how you can apply them in a variety of usage scenarios. The workshop covers the various practical aspects that help you lead your company’s initiatives for RPA and AI, including getting started, scaling up automation, key vendors, selecting technology, and risks and governance.

In this workshop, we cover a step-by-step game plan on how to successfully implement CRM strategies, technologies, and processes into your business. This is a non-technical session designed for both business and IT professionals. This session also covers the three pillars of CRM success—people, process, and technology; an overview of CRM applications for sales, marketing, customer service, and field service; and strategies for planning, deploying, and user adoption success. Key Takeaway: Put into action proven techniques to plan, implement, and support successful CRM initiatives.

Get your team to not only adopt CRM, but to view it as an invaluable tool for leaders and users. Most teams struggle to get full CRM adoption. Whether you’re just starting a CRM project, or you’re struggling with adoption, this workshop delivers more than 26 ideas to drive up adoption of your CRM solution. In this interactive seminar/round table format, attendees pick which ideas to learn more about, gain an overview of best practices, share their own experiences and ideas, and get access to additional tools and content to dive deeper after the session. Key Takeaway: Learn dozens of best practices for CRM adoption from speakers and your colleagues.