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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This session provides a visionary look into the future of work and a practical guide for getting there with five case studies highlighting how big data, analytics, processes, collaboration, and culture have to align. Learn what differentiates companies that succeed in transforming customer and employee engagement and how leaders are using digital workplace tools to accelerate toward a people-centric design. Key Takeaway: Use design thinking to deliver more innovative experiences.

This session is taking the form of a self-assessment on complaint management processes with a benchmark approach to best practices. Is your complaint management system up-to-date? A shared checklist reviews current approaches and, if needed, the presenter can offer suggestions to improve customer satisfaction. Participants can share best practices and new ideas. Key Takeaways: A process checklist for improvements, best practices from clients and participants, and recommendations for including AI in complaint management.

In this session, hear the challenges Texas Disposal encountered in creating a customer experience that requires sharing information across sales, marketing, and customer care; how it overcame some of those challenges; and the challenges ahead. It covers moving from spreadsheets and paper to a unified digital database; integrating systems to reduce time, improve data quality, and produce more meaningful insights; being flexible to management disruption of the process; real-world scenarios for sharing data across customer care, sales, and marketing; and going from “heroic effort” to simplicity in producing reports. Key Takeaway: Learn how Texas Disposal integrated sales, marketing, and customer care to create a better customer experience.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer service 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 #SmartCS on Twitter for updates.

As a champion of customer service excellence, you see CX problems clearly and envision a future where these problems are solved. Make your vision a reality by gaining the tools necessary to sell your idea and get buy-in from key stakeholders, including those on the front lines. In this session, learn how to build a compelling business case for urgent change initiatives; gain consensus from key stakeholders; inspire people to work with your leadership and not against it; and use the Voice of Influence A2 Model of Engagement to diagnose and influence buy-in. Key Takeaway: CX leaders often know which changes their teams need to make, but they need to get buy-in from executives and their teams. This session gives insights and practical tips for how to get buy-in.

The advancement of the Internet over the past two decades has taught us that we must run our organizations differently for our businesses to serve the insatiable appetite customers have for improved experiences and greater innovation. In this talk, we’ll talk about cross-functional dysfunction and how you can overcome it to better serve your customers. You will learn how to adjust your culture for success and how to accelerate change to fuel the growth of your firm and propel your personal leadership.

For your business to survive in our technology-heavy world, you must understand how to get a five-star review on every transaction. Customer service is broken into three parts: the greeting, the conversation, and the recap. By understanding each critical point of the transaction, you can capture the five-star review and see growth in your employees, your business, and your bottom line. Key Takeaway: Join us in this session and learn how to perfect your transactions to ensure a five-star review.

Taking the long view would put all the chips on making customer journeys the best they can be. The practical view would be to leverage intelligent automation to deliver short-term results. The most rational approach is to combine both in a way that will reach customer excellence one pragmatic step at a time, leveraging the customer journey as the blueprint for the future. KEY TAKEAWAY Learn how strike the perfect balance between customer satisfaction and intelligent automation.

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

Many attempts to design services around customer needs fail due to the flawed assumption that customers are aware of the factors that make customer services satisfying. Because of this false view, the teams designing customer service processes often are given too much power despite the fact that modern sociology offers a slew of precise metrics to understand and anticipate behavior in a customer service environment. Researchers use them all the time; most customer experience practitioners don’t. This session discusses why peer-reviewed sociological metrics are well worth the learning curve. It provides an overview of metrics relevant to service design, shows how to generate reliable numbers and incorporate them into the design and operation of customer service processes, and demonstrates how they impact customer satisfaction and purchasing behavior at a large European chemical corporation. Key Takeaway: Customer service design can be improved significantly through sociological metrics.

Too often, we think about the “look and feel” of experience designs more than we do about the story we are trying to communicate. Learn how digital storytelling for digital experiences exists at the intersection of editorial, design, and development. This session is designed for customer experience and digital marketing leaders to help them understand cross-communication and learn about technologies for effective online storytelling. Attendees learn how to better construct narratives around their products and services that not only inform but more deeply engage their audiences. Key Takeaway: How to tell compelling stories to keep customers on your side.

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This session focuses on a real-life case study detailing how a data-driven strategy can transform your team’s culture and result in a customer experience that people absolutely love. Learn how Brennan, as senior director of IT at Verizon Media (formerly Yahoo!), transformed “internal customer” experience for employees at the company, resulting in a best-in-industry Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 85 in 2019. This 4-year journey to worldclass customer experience started with a polarizing and transformational decision that the global team’s performance would be judged by one metric only: user experience, as rated by the employees (internal customers) they supported. Key Takeaway: Attendees leave knowing how to quantify, define, and measure customer experience in their industry.

Great organizations don’t just brand their marketing materials. They brand the experience for their customers. Based upon Bator’s YouTube show of the same title, this program teaches how to create a unique experience and brand strategy for employees and customers alike. Attendees will learn why every position in the org-chart is part of the branding department; how to drive more of the right business to your organization; and examples of organizations that do a great job of branding the experience. KEY TAKEAWAY Learn how to create an A+ customer experience.

Join us in this session to discover how to apply intelligent online knowledgebase processes to understand where machine learning and natural language processing align in the overall framework of your systems—and to gain a competitive edge. We discuss the impact of inefficient customer relationship management processes that stifle the growth of an organization and result in poor service experiences. Learn how AI can help ensure customer satisfaction and improve the customer experience. We also discuss how to use your organizational knowledgebase for better decision-making. Key Takeaway: How organizations can utilize their data and knowledgebase to improve the customer experience.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer service 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 #SmartCS on Twitter for updates.

Large companies are investing billions of dollars on data infrastructure while data-driven startups are innovating faster than many established businesses. How can you compete in this data-driven world? Today’s thriving businesses are implementing integrated operations that freely exchange critical data in real time across the entire organization. Leaders can no longer rely solely on reporting tools, analytics platforms, and a few skilled experts to determine the fate of the business. Transformation requires the adoption of a data-driven, companywide culture. This presentation addresses the exponential impact of building a data-driven organization for business survival with data analytics at the forefront. Key Takeaway: Learn how to cultivate and lead a companywide, data-driven culture that will transform your organization into a data-driven powerhouse.

Customer care team members can be true ambassadors of your brand, but if they aren’t given the resources to take a personal approach, they’ll never sound like “you.” It may seem counterintuitive, but providing team members with a clear outline of how your brand “talks” can enable them to be creative and guide them to better connect with customers through their messaging. To help everyone get on the same page, we cover what to provide to clearly define your brand narrative so that team members can better serve customers. This session also covers why it’s important to have a defined brand narrative, what to provide your team to help them use your brand’s voice, and how guidelines can enable better connection with customers. Key Takeaway: Create a defined brand narrative to empower your team to take a personal approach in their messaging and be an extension of your brand.

Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation are all the rage, but when does AI mean "full speed ahead" and when does it run out of steam? We will examine three case studies of different AI initiatives - one successful, one semi-successful, and one not successful - you'll learn key lessons for identifying when, where, and how to apply AI for your customer service needs. Key Takeaway Learn the principles of AI application.

This session helps you define customer personas, develop journey maps, identify opportunities to improve the experience, and fuel innovative thinking for tying together your sales, marketing, and customer care processes. It also covers how to define and segment customer personas to create better experiences, using templates and worksheets for creating personas and journey maps, and how to prioritize improvements to radically drive up adoption and engagement. Attendees take home a free worksheet for empathy mapping and persona profiles along with a journey-mapping framework. Key Takeaway: Attendees gain a better idea of how to map their customer journeys.

Learn more about the latest technological developments in customer service 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 #SmartCS on Twitter for updates.

Customers often have bad experiences with companies because the customer-facing processes are created from the company’s perspective and not customers’ perspectives. The central struggle is understanding your customers’ needs and challenges across touchpoints so you can optimize their experiences. In this session, learn how to create a customer journey map to define the experience you are delivering to your customers and gain insight to move forward more effectively toward delivering customer success. Key Takeaway: Part of any company’s success must include delivering a breakthrough customer experience and learning to be purposeful in delivering that experience.

Business failures are terrible. Service recoveries do not always work. What can you do to help make your company (or even just your department) shine? Experience some true letdowns followed by inspiring stories to motivate you to activate change, ask questions, and, more importantly, help your organization to simply do better. Learn how to recover better than your competition. Understand what to do in adverse situations (when you would rather just hide). Finally, bring home great takeaways to impress your team. Key Takeaway: Become a better customer service advocate for your organization.

Customer service is not limited to serving your end customers. In B2B and B2B2C businesses, every channel layer is an extension and representation of your brand. The front lines are only as good as the information, offerings, tools, and experiences you provide. Every constituent is vital in the customer experience food chain. This case study focuses on the external-facing layers of customer experience, including areas where you have limited control. It demonstrates strategies and tools being used today and offers a variety of ways to motivate and maximize how you and your channel partners provide stellar customer service, helping you grow your business, enhance the experience of your customers, and ultimately multiply ambassadors for your brand. Key Takeaway: Learn what you should anticipate in the next generation of customer service experiences.

Join us and learn how to generate excitement, engagement, adoption, and ROI from your CRM projects. Such initiatives can deliver better customer experiences, higher loyalty, accelerated sales, and more effective marketing—but those results can be elusive. If you’re starting a new CRM project, struggling with an existing one, or searching for ways to improve your CRM, this is the session you need to attend. Come find out how to deliver a CRM solution that not only boosts performance but also wins over your entire team. Key Takeaways: Learn the seven CRM rules that separate successful projects from struggling ones. Balance leadership under-engagement and over-engagement. Identify additional resources to help you along the way. Understand the seven deadly sins of CRM—and how to avoid them.

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.