CRM Thought Leaders in Their Own Words

Constellation Research Group CEO and Principal Analyst Ray Wang shares the factors driving the business imperative for Customer Experience Management (CXM) along with the promises and pitfalls that may be afforded or avoided, and a framework to systemically adopt enabling technologies to support this customer management strategy.

Forrester analyst Kate Leggett discusses the characteristics of best in class contact centers, the factors causing an evolution from CRM to Customer Experience Management (CXM), and many of the disruptive technologies making their way into contact centers—including cloud systems, social CRM, voice of the customer programs, speech analytics and mobile.

Laurence Buchanan hones in on the critical success factors of effective CRM strategies. He shares how CRM strategies have evolved, why businesses fail in achieving their CRM objectives, how newer disruptive technologies can actually exacerbate CRM failures, and advises a 6 step approach to successfully implement a CRM strategy.

Phil Fernandez, CEO of Marketo, explains how a historical failure in sales and marketing alignment along with a disruptive change in the way buyers buy creates a revenue dysfunction that stiffles revenue growth. In his new book, Revenue Disruption, he also shows how to cure this ill using new thinking and Revenue Performance Management.

Rebecca Wettemann discusses her mobile CRM report that found adding mobile device access to CRM made sales people 14.6% more productive, adding social and mobile access together increased productivity by 26.4%, that 74% of organizations have enabled some form of mobile CRM access and that 67% of mobile CRM users use an iPhone.

Dr Jeff Tanner advises that in order to develop a successful CRM strategy begin with conceptual objectives, prove and refine your theory in an operational mode, permit the results to hone the objectives in a way that strategy evolves from real-world actions, and then carry on a journey of continuous process improvement.

Michael Krigsman, CEO of IT advisory firm Asuret and author of the ZDNet blog, IT Project Failures, puts the alarming CRM failure statistics into perspective, shares risk mitigation strategies, provides insight on the factors that lead to successful CRM deployments and offers advice on when and how to best leverage CRM consultants.

Martin Schneider shares why some business systems such as CRM have pioneered the enterprise software movement to the cloud, and why other applications such as ERP and HCM are following in very large numbers. He also discusses key cloud factors such as security, SLAs, portability, online marketplaces and vendor lock-in.

Esteban Kolsky discusses what makes CRM for contact centers different than CRM for other lines of business — and advises how new thinking and new technologies such as the cloud and social are influencing contact center strategy.

Michael Fauscette, Director of IDC's Software Business Solutions Group, shares research data, statistics and insight that demonstrate factors that most influence cloud adoption by market segment and business benefit.