You’re invited to join us for CRM Connections at Inforum

Lucy Bickford VP Americas, CRM, Infor

Get excited about Inforum 2008.

Great sessions and networking opportunities await you, our Infor CRM Epiphany customer.

Inforum 2008 is truly all about you.

As a part of Inforum 2008, CRM Connections is a dedicated track designed to make it easier for you to get the most out of Inforum, with focused CRM content and activities. Based on last year's success, we've created a terrific agenda for you by featuring more than 30 CRM-specific presentations from our customers, partners and Infor CRM experts. 

While at Inforum, you'll have the opportunity to participate in Birds-of-a-Feather sessions planned for smaller group discussions on CRM-related topics such as budgeting and finance, change management, recruiting, and staffing.

I look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas!

P.S. Send your CRM team to Inforum and take advantage of great registration discounts!
Click here to register!

Who should attend?

• Infor CRM Epiphany users and customers
• Marketing, sales, IT, operations, finance and senior management professionals
• CRM Technology and Business Partners
  

CRM Connections—general session

Revolutionary Customer Experience Management:
Best Practices for Designing and Implementing Innovative CRM

You realize that the future of marketing and selling is all about leveraging customer preferences, relationships, and behaviors. Your competitors and the current economic climate have created puzzling combinations of business conditions in which you're facing the prospects of increased customer education and defections, out-of-control pricing pressures, and the unprecedented challenges in product differentiation.

The demand for answers is now!

During this interactive session, you will learn, step-by-step, how to:

• Understand the powerful connection between transaction-based marketing and customer experience management
• Calculate the economics of customer experience management and learn why it's not about cost savings, it's about contributing to company growth
• Exploit the challenging economic environment by focusing on timely, customer-centric marketing which will differentiate your company in specific niches and markets and uncover opportunity previously thought unattainable
• Design and implement forward-looking customer experience plans which map to your company's three-to-five year business horizon

CRM Connections—session highlights

Successfully combating consumer resistance and legal considerations to achieve growth
Marketing is going to war with a number of obstacles: increased consumer resistance to traditional marketing methods, the proliferation of communication channels, and ever-changing legal constraints. A recent study by Yankelovich Partners indicates that 65% of consumers feel constantly bombarded with too many marketing messages. As consumer resistance to traditional outbound marketing channels increases, marketing effectiveness and productivity decreases.

According to the DMA, response rates to traditional direct mail have fallen to as low as 1.6%. In addition to causing declining response rates, the consumer backlash against outbound marketing techniques has led to increasingly strict government regulation such as the Do Not Call list, CAN—SPAM and the European Commission's Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations. In response, leading consumer-oriented companies must dramatically adjust their marketing mix to take better advantage of less traditional—but ultimately more effective - consumer interaction channels.

Work with this session's proprietary checklist to give yourself a strategic battle plan to defeat the negative forces working against you and your marketing efforts.

Redesigning CRM processes to increase loyalty and reduce customer churn
For companies that rely heavily on recurring revenue streams, existing customers represent their highest value asset. High customer churn is devastating because it leads to lost profits and high customer acquisition costs. Additionally, as outbound customer acquisition becomes increasingly regulated, costly and less effective, customer retention is even more important. Competitive pricing and poor customer service are the leading drivers of customer defection. Over time, loyal customers tend to be more profitable because they spend more, cost less to serve, refer their friends, and are less price-sensitive.

Through this interactive discussion, you'll understand how to extend customer loyalty and tap into the profitability of lifetime relationships.

Designing performance measurements for marketing effectiveness
It can be hard to identify the impact marketing has on the organization. A marketer once said, "I know 50% of my advertising dollars is wasted, but I don't know which 50%." The ideal solution is having the ability to create a complete view of all marketing activities and to associate accurate costs and revenues with each activity. Once marketing knows what's working, the department can work to optimize its spending and demonstrate its precise value. Unfortunately, most corporations cannot achieve this goal because they do not have the systems and processes in place to make it happen.

Throughout this session, you'll discover how to compile and implement an expert set of marketing performance measurements which will smartly provide visibility, insight, and actionable intelligence.

Proven tactics to immediately improve IT service delivery
Your IT organization is facing a current series of tough challenges. You must balance the completion of scheduled requests such as Enhancements and Projects while responding to numerous unscheduled requests to solve problems and provide consultation services. The combination of scheduled and unscheduled service requests, changing business priorities, inadequate documentation, and the lack of IT service management processes and tools makes it difficult to manage commitments and deliver value to the business.
Attend this session while your industry colleagues detail their personal IT challenges. You'll quickly realize you're in good company as the group will work through future plans for strengthening the effectiveness of IT organizations by presenting solutions to address specific issues.

Establishing visibility into enterprise-wide marketing processes
At your company, marketing process and consistent visibility has long been the Achilles heel of the marketing organization. In recent years, campaigns—both outbound and inbound—have become more sophisticated and capable of fostering closer customer relationships and driving more revenue. But your marketing leaders and their teams often lack the Marketing Resource Management tools they need to get the most return from their newly enhanced marketing capabilities. Understanding the intricate status and scheduling details of multiple marketing projects can be a challenge; the more complex the marketing mix, the more challenging it is to keep tabs on everything you need to know.

In a business environment characterized by sudden changes, you have only one option-attend this session and find a way to gain better visibility into your company's ongoing marketing operations.

CRM Connections—other sessions of interest

Best practices for the call center channel
With several years of experience integrating to inbound customer touchpoints, Infor has amassed a wealth of information on the best way to integrate and leverage the call center.  This presentation reviews the channel-specific strategies that have made our customers successful.

Infor CRM Epiphany Sales and Service product roadmap and strategy
Join Infor product management to hear about the big picture vision, where Infor is taking Infor CRM Sales and Service products now and what the future holds for Sales and Service.

Infor CRM Epiphany Marketing product strategy
Learn where Infor CRM Marketing products are headed and how you can come along for the ride! This session will give you a sneak peek at new product features and products such as Marketing Resource Management and covers the latest updates on Infor CRM Epiphany 7.0 and 7.1.

See Agenda

Birds-of-a-Feather

The Birds-of-a-Feather networking sessions are intended to facilitate discussion for you and your colleagues with similar interests. These opportunities will enable attendees and Infor CRM experts to exchange ideas, solutions, and industry best practices with other organizations and industry representatives in a small group atmosphere. You can prearrange a Birds-of-a-Feather session ahead of the conference or set up additional sessions on-site. We also encourage you to submit your discussion topic ideas ahead of Inforum 2008.  Suggested topics include:
  1. Leading change management for marketers
  2. Managing CRM analytics initiatives
  3. Recruiting and staffing for the call center
  4. Budgeting and financial strategies for CRM programs

Click here to submit a Birds-of-a-Feather session.

Enterprising Square

This unique setting will provide you with an informal, central networking environment designed to bring pioneering people together between conference activities. Enterprising Square is structured around the same 14 primary tracks as the educational and technical sessions, generating an easily accessible setting for you to connect with others from your CRM product community.

Let's Do Lunch

Be sure to look for assigned CRM tables during lunchtime in the main food area. This setting allows for informal interaction for you and your colleagues to dig deeper into a session you just attended, exchange ideas, solutions, or other CRM hot topics.

 

Solutions Expo

Inforum 2008's Solutions Expo will present you with an exclusive chance to explore and educate yourself about advancements from Infor and Infor partners. This setting will provide the backdrop to meet and talk with our strategic development and implementation specialists about which Infor and partner products and services can best extend the value of your current investment in our solutions. Take advantage of this occasion and make the most of Inforum 2008 by learning from CRM experts.