Abby Atkinson
Senior Director, Marketing Field Services
Infor
There’s nothing like getting together in person to network with peers, exchange ideas and build a rapport that will evolve into impromptu calls and emails – and continue the knowledge-sharing experience far beyond the Forum itself. Those personal relationships can be a great source of information and camaraderie throughout the year.
We also used the Forum as a rare opportunity for our reference team, which is virtual, to get together face to face. It gave us an opportunity to debrief after the Forum and immediately identify new concepts that could be applied to our reference program. We capitalized on the momentum and motivation from the Forum, and it was amazing how much we got done in a concentrated period of time.
Since then – with the travel restrictions – we’ve tried to achieve the same thing remotely, by web conferencing, and it’s just not the same. The energy isn’t there. Dialog isn’t spontaneous with most of the team on mute. Someone’s cell phone would die. The crick-in-the-neck syndrome would happen (from trying to balance the phone while taking notes). While there certainly was a level of productivity in the virtual meeting, the creative brainstorming and exchanging of ideas was not maximized.
Putting Ideas From the Forum into Action
After attending the 2008 Customer Reference Forum, the reference managers at Infor came back invigorated and excited to incorporate into our program some of the concepts we learned at the conference. We were particularly interested in ideas that would help streamline processes and gain efficiencies for our team and our customers.
One idea that had the most impact was a ‘one-to-many’ forum which utilizes a single customer reference in a pre-scheduled call with multiple qualified prospects. We initially targeted areas where we had a high volume of requests in order to ease the burden and burn-out rate of our customers. Since the program was launched, we have seen a 1:15 utilization rate with the customers involved in these events – a great way to minimize customer usage while still offering viable reference information to our prospects. A win-win for everyone!
The bottom line: Attending the Customer Reference Forum has been well worthwhile for the Infor Ambassador Reference Program team!