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Episode 05

Building a Bridge Between Customer Needs and Customer Experience

In this episode, Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research discusses best practices for engaging with customers, what ‘good data’ means, and current trends in marketing and customer engagement.

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Guest speaker: Liz Miller

Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering all core pillars of CX, Miller spends time zeroing in on the business demands of today's Chief Marketing Officer, the evolution of customer engagement and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust. A 28-year marketing veteran, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations on transforming everything from business models to messaging in order to stay competitive in the shifting digital landscape. She will examine the key trends modern CMOs face, ranging from the realities of engagement in the trust economy to how marketing has become enterprise security’s greatest threat and critical champion.

Prior to joining Constellation, Liz oversaw research, programs and content for the Chief Marketing Officer Council, developing thought leadership agendas for CMOs around the globe. Liz also counseled numerous organizations on core messaging and competitive advantage, working with marketing, advertising and security solutions. Liz is a skilled moderator, facilitator and speaker, engaging C-suite executives in hundreds of industry webcasts and roundtables, keynote presentations and panels around the globe.

Episode summary

This episode features an interview with Liz Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is an industry veteran with nearly 30 years of experience instructing global marketing organizations on how to deliver the best customer experience. Previously, Liz worked for GlobalFluency, CMO Council, and Jan Marini Skin Research.

In this episode, Liz discusses the evolution of the CDP, what real-time actually means to customers, and how sales training at The Gap made her a better marketer.

Key takeaways

  • Asking your customer open-ended questions is key when collecting valuable and personalized data

  • We no longer look at customer experience through the lens of our systems, but through the eyes of our customers. They are in charge of what real-time data means to them

  • Composable architecture is fundamental to have headless applications, allowing developers to use one tool and institutionalize it across the enterprise

Speaker quotes

“Marketing's role is to so deeply understand the market and the customer that we act like this translational bridge between what our customer needs, wants, and expects, or just wants to dream about, aspire to.And we translate their language so that they can discover and understand our products and how great it is and all of those wonderful profitable things. We're here to fundamentally drive durable, profitable relationships with our customers, full stop.” – Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst, Constellation Research

Episode timestamps

‍*(02:04) - Liz’s background  

‍*(06:29) - How The Gap made Liz a better marketer 

‍*(11:39) - Trends in marketing and customer engagement

‍*(19:03) - Liz explains the difference between CDP and CRM

‍*(33:29) - How Liz defines good data 

‍*(35:48) - An example of another company doing it right with customer engagement (hint: it’s Nespresso)

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