thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Go Digital or Die – CRM Evolution 2016

Go Digital or Die – CRM Evolution 2016

CRM Evolution 2016 – Conference at a Glance CRM Evolution 2016 revolved around two main topics customer experience, customer engagement digital transformation As part of these three main topics many speakers were about how to get there, which includes thinking and talking about machine learning, predictive analytics, and, of course, the Internet of Things. The CRM Evolution 2016 conference, organised by David Myron and chaired by CRM guru Paul Greenberg once more had an impressive lineup of speakers, starting with two highly impressive keynotes, held by Dennis Snow, formerly of Disney on Monday, and Brian Solis from Altimeter Group on Tuesday. As before it was co-located with SpeechTek and Customer Service experience, the latter chaired by Esteban Kolski. This combination guarantees a lot of high caliber attendance and a lot of networking opportunity, something that Paul Greenberg very strongly and actively supports. It is virtually impossible to not network … According to colleague Scott Rogers, although the conference appeared to be bigger than the years before it all seemed more intimate, but not crowded, which probably can get attributed to a good choice of venue. The event being vendor independent is only the icing on the cake. In my eyes this is the one CRM related conference that one must not miss. In contrast to last year I attended CRM Evolution only, which in retrospective was a mistake. But let’s have a look at the conference themes. There is no CRM without Customer Engagement and good Customer Experiences In the opening key note Dennis Snow told us about the Disney way of creating great customer experiences, which basically follows three...

CRM Evolution – Some not so random Thoughts

CRM Evolution 2015 was a very vibrant conference with lots of discussion that included a number of high profile industry influencers. For me as a first time attendee it was amazing how approachable many of these people are. But then this might come with the territory. To understand these takeaways it is important to know that my reason for attending was getting into closer touch with what is going on in the CRM world outside SAP – and New Zealand. So, these are purely notes and thoughts that result from sessions, discussions with influencers, speakers and other conference attendees, and not learnings from vendor briefings. Also, this event was split into three separate conferences: CRM Evolution Customer Service Experience Speechtek I nearly exclusively concentrated on CRMEvolution and one session from the Customer Service Experience. First things first: Was it worthwhile coming all the way from NZ? This is very clearly a yes. Paul Greenberg and the team did an amazing job in lining up interesting speakers. What now are the topics that currently seem to move the industry in random order? Customer engagement (CEM), customer experience (CEX), customer journey (CJ) and how these topics relate to CRM Big Data, with a view on the Internet of Things IoT, and related to it: Predictive analytics How to do things CRM right Not surprisingly: The Future of CRM (technology as well as industry) Also not surprisingly these are all interrelated. CEM, CEX, CJ and CRM The intersection of these three topics is extremely interesting. These are also controversially discussed topics. Paul Greenberg recently, in another “stake in the ground” article, gave...