Sage VP Hal Bloom to Share Customer Intelligence Expertise at 9th Annual Symposium for Customer Operations & Relationship Exposition Event

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - Apr 28, 2011) - Sage North America today announced that Hal Bloom, vice president (VP) of market research, will participate in an education session on using customer intelligence information as part of customer experience management (CEM) at this week's 9^th Annual SCORE (Symposium for Customer Operations & Relationships Exposition) event, being held through April 29 at the Seaport Hotel in Boston, Mass. SCORE is a comprehensive conference dedicated to driving your organization's revenue and profits by implementing the right CEM strategy.

"We're proud to have Hal representing us at this event, because customer experience management is so important to us," said Dennis Frahmann, executive vice president for corporate marketing at Sage. "Across the organization -- from our executive leadership team and customer-facing employees, to our back-office support teams -- we're committed to staying on top of customer needs and opportunities to help them maximize their productivity and achieve success. Collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer data is an important component of that."

Bloom will serve as a panelist for the SCORE session, "Gaining Competitive Advantage through Customer Intelligence," this afternoon. Bob E. Hayes, PhD, president of Business Over Broadway, will serve as moderator for the session, while Bloom; Rob McCabe, VP for CA Global Support at CA Technologies; and Patrick O'Hara, senior vice president (SVP) for CEM at APAC Customer Services, Inc., will serve as panelists.

The panelists will discuss constantly evolving customer intelligence best practices and why they are a fundamental component of customer relationship management (CRM). They will also discuss how knowing core characteristics of different kinds of customers can help companies more easily and accurately predict purchase decisions, as well as make choices about product improvements, new product/service offerings, and more. Attendees will learn about the tools to use, and how to use them to get ahead of the competition, while strengthening their customer relationships.

As head of the Sage North America market research team, Bloom is responsible for providing strategic direction to the corporation by designing, conducting, and analyzing all market research. He has more than 35 years of domestic and international expertise in all aspects of marketing research, long-range strategic planning, new business development, and customer loyalty in Fortune 500 companies, including Coca-Cola, Pillsbury, Tupperware, and Grey Advertising. Bloom has also been a consultant for major advertising agencies, service industries, and small businesses, and has contributed to such media outlets as CustomerThink, Journal of Advertising Research, and KMWorld.

SCORE 2011 is a comprehensive conference dedicated to driving an organization's revenue and profits by implementing the right CEM strategy that will leverage their CRM investment. Attendees will learn, from CRM industry pioneers, how to develop a CEM strategy that will leverage their CRM investment. Best-in-class industry leaders will present stimulating new concepts for customer satisfaction, employee motivation, employee rewards, incentive-based compensation, and customer retention and loyalty -- and how all are linked to increasing revenues and profits. Skill-building sessions will promote excellence in developing world-class CEM strategies that will drive a company's bottom-line. For more information, visit http://www.omegascoreboard.com/score_2011.shtml.

About Sage North America
Sage North America is part of The Sage Group plc, a leading global supplier of business management software and services. Sage North America employs 4,000 people and supports 3.2 million small and midsized business customers. The Sage Group plc, formed in 1981, was floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1989 and now employs 13,400 people and supports 6.3 million customers worldwide. For more information, please visit the website at www.sagenorthamerica.com. Follow Sage North America on Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/SageNorthAmerica, and Twitter, http://twitter.com/#!/sagenamerica.