One on One Interviews

While there were a slew of announcements that came out over the four days of the event, it was a statement Hubspot CTO and cofounder Dharmesh Shah’s made during his keynote speech that caught (and kept) my attention – that he felt chatbots are the most important technology to come out in decades.

I was able to grab some time with Shah to hear more about why bots have such potential to such a game-changing technology, and to hear about HubSpot’s own Growthbot efforts.

Rick Jackson, CMO of a visual analytics platform Qlik, shares why analytics is quickly becoming a “need to have” tool for SMBs sooner rather than later because of the potential impact it can have on various parts of the business.

Guy Yehiav, CEO of profit amplification software make Profitect, shares with us why prescriptive analytics goes beyond identifying the insight but also provides recommendations for the actions you take next to optimize conversion opportunities.

Sameer Patel, CEO of Kahuna, makers of a mobile marketing/communications platform, shares how modern mobile marketing platforms can ingest signals coming from consumer devices and turn them into opportunities to engage them in a more personalized way in order optimize conversion opportunities – and extend customer relationships. He also shares how turning perishable inventories (goods, services, time, distance, etc) into timely offers can maximize profit margins, and why cross-channel communication goes beyond multichannel to increase the likelihood of meaningful engagement with today’s more sophisticated consumers.

Tien Tzuo, cofounder and CEO of Zuora, introduced us to what the SE was back then. And last week, I had the opportunity to catch up to Tien at the Zuora headquarters to see where we’re at today with subscription business models. He talks about how far the business model has come in those five plus years, how latest technologies like IoT and machine learning is changing the subscription business, and why he feels that five years from now we may not be buying anything the traditional way.

Amy Downs, Chief Customer Success and Happiness Officer Lifesize, shares with us how the key to the company’s transformation to a subscription business model was changing the corporate culture to be customer-first. And how that change raised their net promoter score from negative four to over seventy, increased customer retention rates, and created a customer support team that finally understood their value to the business.

Jody Glidden, CEO and co-founder of Introhive, a SaaS-based platform which brings relationship intelligence into CRM with data automation and sales acceleration, shares how machine learning and automation now makes CRM more appealing to sales professionals. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation. To hear the full conversation please click the embedded player below.

More and more terms like customer engagement and customer experience are being used in today’s business lexicon. And more and more you see them being used interchangeably. On top of that customer service and customer experience are used the same way. And if that weren’t confusing enough, in many conversations all these phrases are sometimes being used interchangeably with customer relationship management (CRM).

At this year’s ExCom 2016 event, Paul Greenberg, author of seminal CRM at the Speed of Light series and known in the industry as “The Godfather of CRM”, broke down these terms and how they differ, and how they are related and work together to implement modern customer engagement strategy.

Last week’s conversation featuring Esteban Kolsky’s ExCom 2016 presentation on why customer service won’t exist in ten years sparked some very interesting conversations. Another presentation from the conference also captured people’s attention. So below is an edited transcript from Constellation Research founder Ray Wang’s presentation on how Internet of Things (IoT) will shape the way customer’s engage with companies.

At this year’s ExCom 2016 event, one of the most intriguing and thought-provoking sessions came from Esteban Kolsky, former Gartner analyst and one of the most respected thought leaders focusing on customer service. Kolsky, who also is the founder of ThinkJar Research, presented on why he feels the customer service fucntion, as we know it today, will be gone in ten years. Below is an edited transcript taken from his presentation. To see the entire presentation, click on the YouTube video below.