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.
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.
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Key Takeaways:
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“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 at Constellation Research
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:07) - Liz’s background
*(06:32) - How The Gap made Liz a better marketer
*(11:42) - Trends in marketing and customer engagement
*(19:06) - Liz explains the difference between CDP and CRM
*(33:23) - How Liz defines good data
*(35:40) - An example of another company doing it right with customer engagement (hint: it’s Nespresso)
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Links:
Connect with Kailey on LinkedIn
Learn more about Caspian Studios
Liz Miller: 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.
Producer: Hello, and welcome to good data. Better marketing the ultimate guide to driving customer engagement. Today's episode features an interview with Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.
But first a word from our sponsors.
This podcast is brought to you by Twilio segment in today's digital first economy. Being data driven is no longer aspirational it's necessary. Find out why over 20,000 businesses trust segment to enable personalized, consistent, real time customer experiences. By visiting segment.com.
Kailey Raymond: If you've worked in retail, you know, the value of an open-ended question. The more you get your prospect to talk. The more you're likely to learn this tactic of asking open ended questions is a lesson that retailers, researchers and SAS companies all have in common. And it makes sense analysis from gong shows that sales reps that talk less than 50% of the time have higher conversion rates than peers.
Why open ended questions lead to rich data and enable you to create a person. Variance where your customer feels valued and heard. In this episode, I sit down with Liz Miller, VP and principal analyst at Constellation Research, from training as a retail sales associate to using data, to create profiles.
Liz opens up her playbook for building meaningful and connected relationships with customers. Liz. Thank you so much for being here today. We're so excited to have you on the show today. I always like to start off to learn a little bit more about who you are and how you got to where you are today. So tell me a little bit more about your career journey, Liz.
Liz Miller: Oh, wow. This is, this might go into the bucket on the show of strangest. Marketing background in humanity as one does, when one is in college and they dream of what their future is gonna look like, mine included politics. And so I was okay. I was a politics major and took all of my additional coursework and constitutional law because in this twisted brain, that's where I was headed.
Wow. And it wasn't until quite literally the morning of the LSAT, I was like, nah, I'm not gonna go do that. I'm gonna go into this crazy thing called marketing. Cuz I took a class in it and ergo. I was ready to go. So I flushed all three years of my college, you know, prep work into weird. Unusable knowledge about the constitution.
And then just parlayed that into marketing and decided not only was I gonna go into marketing, I was gonna go into sports marketing, cuz that's super easy to get into. Yeah. Especially in a teeny tiny market, like the city of Los Angeles. So I, but, but I did it and I spent the first 10 years of my marketing career working in professional.
Sports. I worked for a professional soccer league way before soccer was cool. It was the continental indoor soccer league. Wow. Yeah, we, you know, it was great. We had, we had a blast and then I worked for the great Western forum in the Los Angeles Lakers organization for their boxing division. Dr. Jerry bus was a big boxing fan.
And so I ran some communications and marketing there and, and had an absolute blast doing. Then all of a sudden, right around that 19, you know, 99, 2000 mark, there was this little thing that was rumored to get really big someday. And it was called the internet. You
Kailey Raymond: heard
of it?
Liz Miller: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It was like one of those things and like people were getting jobs in it.
And so I moved from Los Angeles up to the Silicon valley just in time to watch the first internet bubble explode. Spent a year of my life in the least sexy least glamorous role ever in humanity, that being transitioning people from traditional databases into the new world then, which was called CRM. So I would help no way organizations move.
From SFA solutions and, and I'm talking things like goldmine and act like you had a Rolodex how did you wanna get into CRM? Wow. So I did all of the, the marketing automation back then, which was like, Three drip campaigns and a stop sign. Like it's like all of that in those stories. That's amazing though, but it was a year of my life.
I don't get back. Right. Like it's like a year of my career. That's gone. And so then, you know, as one does from professional sports into SFA to CRM consulting, you then naturally transition into running marketing and communications for a luxury professional skincare company. That was what
Kailey Raymond: I was gonna say was next.
I,
Liz Miller: it totally makes sense. Yeah. To just kinda jump right into it. And so I, I think the theme of my career is I keep toggling between B2B and B2C. Yeah. Like it's like every other one. And after skincare, I then worked and ran an organization called the chief marketing officer council. So they're the CMO council and had a blast doing it.
And I got to spend 15 years kind of really deeply understanding. The role of the CMO while also being one . So it kind of like I got to do, like, I was a, this functional marketer who was also developing thought leadership and really kind of developing research from the minds and directly from CMOs at a time when CMOs were simply not ubiquitous, right there wasn't a CMO on every corner.
It was really this kind of branding centric role. And so I've really gotten to see, kind of had that front row seat to the evolution of that path and the evolution of marketing. And that is what brought me to being an analyst here at Constellation Research.
Kailey Raymond: Wow. That is so fascinating. I have a million questions, but the first one is, do you ever use any of the things you've learned in law school?
I do. Practical background always
Liz Miller: helps out it is, you know, practical background absolutely helps out. I think research you definitely get a very, very different. Sense of research. Yep. You also get a very different definition of what articulating your point means. right. So, you know how you articulate an argument, how you listen before you articulate an argument was probably one of the first things I learned, but I'll tell ya, and this will come outta left field as a marketer.
I can honestly look back. Gosh, it's now almost been 30 years. The best training I ever got to actually be a market. sales training at the gap.
Kailey Raymond: Tell me more about that. What did you learn? Open
Liz Miller: ended questions. It's like you learn how to talk to a customer to listen. You learn how to listen to a customer and immediately pull together what that customer wants to buy.
Right? And so gap sales training, literally your very first day, you get stuck by the door. it's called the greeter. Anyone who's worked in retail, you know, this loads, some position you are that person that stands there in the front of the store and your function is two things. You wanna welcome your customer and you wanna make sure no one's shoplifting.
like, those are the two things that you're there. Dual purpose, dual purpose. Like that's your purpose, but at the gap they teach you, you don't just say hi. Hey, you know, what are you looking for? Hey, are you looking for something? If you ask a question where the only answer is yes or no. You're going to get a customer that walks by you and is like, Nope, can I help you find something today is the one question people usually ask as a greeter?
Well, the customer's gonna be like, no, and then walk right by you. Totally. But if you start to ask questions, like you're a person and you start to ask questions like, Hey, what are you looking for today? They have to answer something other than yes or no. Or like, what can I help you find? What are you looking for?
What outfit can I help get for you? Did you hear about our special. Right. So it, it forced me from a kind of a very, very early start to think of questions differently. And to think about that very first question that you ask a customer very differently, and then how you build that relationship and how you build that rapport.
And it's, it's been interesting, even with the rise of digital, I find almost daily. I have to step back and think to myself, if I was at the very front of the store, the gap did someone just walk by me, right? Or was I at the fitting room saying like, you know, those pants are gonna look great with a belt. I got you.
One, try it. as opposed to, did you wanna belt to totally different dynamics, but yeah,
Kailey Raymond: so I was famously a hostess. My boss used to like to call me an ambassador of first impressions, which I really think is like, you know, an upgrade from the title hostess. He should be in marketing for sure. But from like, just labeling that, but at the end of the day, it's exactly that is.
Customer service roles and being on the floor of retail will teach you so, so much. But the most is you're exactly right to actually listen. But I love the idea of that open-ended question. And I think that, like the fact that you took that away and still think about it today is more than, I think probably a lot of
Liz Miller: people can say it haunts me.
I'm not gonna lie. It, it haunts me because you know, the look in that. And you've made that face. Totally. I've made that face. Yep. When there is that poor person with like the perfume bottle, I know. Yeah. Yeah. Have you tried obsession and they're like running after you and you're like, oh my God. It's not like, ah, I always think of that person.
And then I think of what we're doing in marketing. A vast amount of what we do on a daily basis in that old school vision of spray and pray, I'm gonna send as many emails as I possibly can because numbers matter. Like if I knock on enough doors, one's bound to open. That theory of marketing is essentially.
That lady standing in front of the department store with her bottle of obsession, trying to spray everybody. Right? Like, can I spray you with this awful smelling thing that you do not want to have on your body? Totally. And you're like, no, I don't. Didn't ask that didn't to right. As opposed to that, like beautiful, you know, Joe Malone, where do you wanna ex.
Explore. What do you like? Do you like lemons? Do you like beachy waves where you are asking the customer to come in and co-create an experience and, oh my gosh, I do love the beach. I would love to smell like my beach house. When do you ever think of you wanna smell like a beach house? You only smell you, like, you never think of that until there's like this.
Kailey Raymond: Until you're there and then you're like, oh wow. Yes, you're transported.
Liz Miller: Exactly. So like as a marketer, I do tend to think of those two things a lot. I tend to think about like, am I asking an open ended question that starts a conversation? Or am I spraying obsession on this poor person? That is
Kailey Raymond: perfect. I mean, I think it's really interesting too, because we often talk about this.
A couple people in this show have really talked about the importance of in-person relationships and. Better quality information. You can really gain from somebody, you know, in a branch of a bank or in a store or something. But you're just exactly right. If you're not asking those questions to that person, and you're saying like, yes and no questions, you're also not getting good data.
Right. That's really fascinating.
I guess what I wanna know about your career as well is that you kind of like started in a lot of ways, like the modern CRM, like you saw a lot of shifts coming over. Right. So, so interesting. Wanna learn a little bit more about some of the other trends that you're seeing you've, you know, been in the industry really long time.
You've kind of seen things come and go started. Of course, you know, a little bit on the brand side, moving into data, a couple of different industries, B to B, B TOC. And you speak to CMOs and marketers every single day. So what are some of those trends that you're seeing as it relates to marketing as a whole and maybe even customer
Liz Miller: engagement?
There are two big things that I kind of consistently see. One is, I mean, and this is great news for CMOs. We've kind of been on this weird apology tour for like the last 15 years or so. And, and CMOs know what I'm talking about when I'm like, you know, Hey, how's your apology tour going? And, and it goes a little something like you get called to the CEO, get called to the board.
You called the all hands C-suite meeting. And the presentation is like, We've done all this great work. We've done all this great engagement. Our CSAT scores are up. Our engagement scores are up. Like we are doing great. We are engaging with our customer, like never before. And then I'm so sorry that I spent all this money and I'm so sorry that I went and did all the, and then I, we had to hire all these people and like, we just kind of make this pivot and it's this really weird kind of posture that marketing has been put into.
And it's largely a self-inflicted wound because as the wild west of digital grew up, we were creating these metrics and measures for viability and success as we were learning. And as we were going and the easiest place to start were vanity metrics. We were literally inventing the reason why you should care about alike, but now we look back on it and we're like, let's be more strategic.
Right? How do likes lead to growth? We've gotten more sophisticated with how digital can empower us to measure our impact on the business and really tied back. What marketing's true role is for the business. And if we break it down, I mean, marketing as a function, it's pretty easy to define what we do. We are the group.
We are the team. Empowers and drives growth because we are the team that takes the needs once and voice of the customer and translates that into the business, not vice versa, right? So we know what our business is. We know what our products are. Marketing's role. As opposed to product, who's like, no, we've built this great product.
Let us tell you about it. Yep. 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. And we do that through a lot of different tools through brand, through engagement, through direct, through digital, through in person, the toolkit is growing. Exponentially, but fundamentally our job is still to be that person to be that team.
That's like, I know what the customer wants before they want it and need it and love. And now I'm gonna translate their mindset, their goals, their intentions, their actions into how we draw these durable, profitable relationships with our customers. I love
Kailey Raymond: this definition. I'm really curious to hear your take on this.
I would say it's like newer, but like you filming in on what you're thinking is chief customer officers kind of being this new part of the Csuite. A lot of folks are obviously like. Where customer obsessed is certainly a phrase. Yeah. That I hear all the time. I feel like the product teams obviously, always wanna speak to the customers to make, make sure they are building the right products.
Where does marketing begin and end? What's your take on this chief customer officer? Tell me
Liz Miller: a little bit more about that. Listen. I like every marketer out there. I love a good rebrand. So , you know, I, I do. I think that the role of the chief customer officer is a great one. I absolutely do. I think that a lot of successful chief customer officers that I have seen are really those that are striving to resolve.
I would call them almost owner issues, as opposed to, you know, they're looking at the ownership experience as opposed to say a customer experience. And that's where I see that really seasoned chief customer officer come in. These are likely people who have spent time in marketing. These are likely people who have spent deep time in customer service.
This amazing world we call customer experience is really driven by the three horse women of the apocalypse, right? It's sales, marketing, and service. And we are riding big horses like we are going for it, getting it. And I think where the Dawn of the chief customer officer has come from has been those people who have served in some part in all three of those facets of customer experience and they understand.
It's not about owning the delivery of customer experience because quite frankly, that's an enterprise wide team sport, right? Everyone participates. It's like the ultimate asso goal. Everyone gets a medal because everyone has to be part of that strategy. And moving that forward where the chief customer officer comes into play is really taking that responsibility for.
and of the customer. So does customer service do, does the contact center have the tools? Are we empowering our employees to actually proactively address issues that an owner, a customer, a prospect might see an experience. This is a very proactive and reactive role, right? You have to be able to react to customer issues.
You have to be able to be proactive to customer issues, but it is all. Servicing the need of that individual customer. So they can have these personalized, robust, wonderful experiences. The CMO is really gonna be locked step with that chief customer officer. There should not be any competition and that's up to the CEO, right?
The CEO needs to sit down and be like, okay, chief customer, officer, chief marketing, officer, your driving growth. You're sustaining. How do we make sure that these things are all coming together? And that's where I really see that kind of start stop. That handoff happening is the chief marketing officer is really driving that growth strategy.
How are we not only driving growth with existing customers? How are we keeping that up? So the capacity for upsell and cross sell across the enterprise working that means, Hey, chief customer officer, do you have the data? Do your teams have the data they need so they can make those intelligent choices for what comes.
But it's also about identifying new markets, understanding where new business opportunities might lie. It also involves new business models, right? Chief marketing officers can spot where those new business models. We should have a subscription 10 years ago. No one would've been like, everyone wants a subscription to toilet paper, and now
Kailey Raymond: you're like, obviously we need to SAS model for
Liz Miller: that.
Right. Clearly the toilet paper should just come to my door. Right? You're like, duh, but the CMO can spot that and then work with the chief customer officer, the chief digital officer, the chief security officer, bring everybody into that mix to make sure that the identification of growth can then be partnered with those responsible, for the sustainability of growth.
I think that's where that handoff comes in. That's
Kailey Raymond: really interesting. And I, I love lot, a lot about what you're saying in terms of like it's operational, right? There's all these different teams that are coming together. There's a lot of data across all these different teams. There's a lot of maybe competing priorities perhaps sometimes, especially across an enterprise.
And so all of these things can be challenges to really getting it right on the customer engagement journey. There's acronym soup kind of being thrown around these days between like CRM, cepp, like CDP, like all these different, right. Like
Liz Miller: terms C CDP, CRM. Yeah. We love a good soup.
Kailey Raymond: Totally. And, and I love for you to help me untangle that right now.
Like, can you help me understand a little bit more about how you might define a CP, what teams are using these? Like, what's the difference between that and a CRM perhaps help me get.
Liz Miller: I love this question. I just feel like you've just been invited my Ted talk. Everyone. Hold on. Sorry. Just gonna buckle up people now.
Here we go. I know. Here we go, because, okay. So CDP fundamentally, by the words that are included in its name, a customer data platform. 0.1, nowhere. Does it say that it's a marketing customer data platform? Right. So CDPs grew out of marketing out of a marketing need to really be able to wrangle all of the complexity and all of the complex disparate data.
that is related to our customer. We used to call it dark data. Ah, yes. We used to even really get, we used to get really scary with it and be like marketing needs to harness dirty data. That one was my favorite. It, that was my absolute favorite. We, we branded data in a way that it was scary. It was dark and it was dirty and no one should touch it.
The, the interesting thing about data has always been part of the problem is data is not inherently neat. It doesn't necessarily fit to norms as it gets more complex. When you start to consider things like voice as data, how do you take someone's? What the actual words they are saying in an audio recording and consider that data.
Well, people had to figure that out. We had to figure out how you fundamentally turned that into zeros and ones that manifest as the customer within your organization. Right? So when marketing was really struggling, what we were struggling with was the structure of CRM. And we were trying to make CRM, do the job we wanted it to do, as opposed to the job that it's supposed to do, which is serve as that transactional record that starts to institutionalize and starts to bring visibility into a customers or an accounts transactional relationship with the organization.
It is really meant to be. Sales effectiveness performance tool that looks at the relationship that a customer has across the enterprise. How many times do we touch this person? How many times we've been pelting this person with phone calls, what is impacting the transactional path for that customer that's CRM and it's, it's, it's highly effective.
It's great for sellers. It's great for marketers. Customers want you to know what they bought last, right? They want you to have that information. It's not always a great marketing tool because marketing data from social really hard to fit into that form field. That's like tab number seven, where like, like 19 rows down.
So that's kind of where CDP came from. Thankfully it's not where CDP has stayed. CDP has really evolved. And I can't say this enough, CDP cannot be and should not be a marketing toy for marketing. It should be a repository for customer data that can then be sliced, parse, analyzed, segmented, available for any part of the front line that delivers customer experience.
They're not gonna all get the same data. They're not even gonna get all the same result. They're not even gonna get all the same segment, but if customer service needs to do an engagement campaign, they should be pulling from that CDP cuz it's the customer's data. And we have to have that centralized.
It's the ultimate picture of the customer and not just the transaction. So I think that as we've evolved, that where I'm really seeing organizations win are when. the CDP can sit as that beating heart of personalized engagement. And how do we actually connect with engage with communicate with the customer and the marketplace CRM then gets to regain that really powerful posture of transactional view.
We can really start to bring. CRM data in it gets really refined and focused on that dynamic between, between the seller and the buyer and that buyer's organization. And we stop trying to make that the Swiss army knife of engagement. And we put the two things side by side is one more important than the other, arguably, no.
Right. But do we need to have a clear definition of what CRM is going to accomplish for our organization and what CDP is going to accomplish? Absolutely do those two things need to be connected 100%. Right. But I think that people are kind of looking at acronym soup. Right. And they're looking at this and saying, I think I need one of those three letter thingies, sometimes even four letters.
If you're talking about things like Siam and customer identity, because I fundamentally know that the machine I'm trying to. That machine that's going to help my customer receive the experiences and engagements that I intend for them to have access to. It's not working, something's broken, there's a gap and everyone wants to fit CDP in to fit that and fill that gap.
And sometimes it is sometimes it's not.
Kailey Raymond: That's interesting. I, I really like that breakdown, especially because it seems like there's a couple of different teams that are benefiting probably a little bit more than others from these different tools. And fundamentally, one of the things you're mentioning is CRM sales, like all day, every day, of course, marketers use that.
CDP is really. A lot of teams, frankly, data, product analytics, marketing. Absolutely. But it's it, it's not necessarily the activation layer. There are portions of it that can be the activation layer and you can connect apps that are the activation layer, which is really interesting. And when you keep really bringing this down to, and you've said this a couple of times, is.
Real time and personal. And so I wanna dig in a little bit here is where, what are some new customer behaviors that you might be seeing in the past couple of years? Like how have you seen some of these things transform? I keep hearing personalization. We talk about it all the time here at segment, but, you know, as an analyst, what are you hearing from your customers as it relates to, you know, what's
Liz Miller: new for them?
You know, it's interesting because I think that the big trend that we're seeing now is. in the early days, let's call it like CX in beta, right? like, let's, let's call it customer experience. The beta edition. We marketers, we engagement professionals. We within the enterprise, we defined what personalization was and what real time was.
And if we're being honest, real time, Translated into the time it took for our systems to align for our data to align and for us to be able to get real time from here to here. Right. I, I remember speaking to a CMO of a snack brand one time, like, gosh, it was probably about two years ago and, and. I said real time, like don't you wanna engage with your customers in real time?
He's like what's real time. Like real time is for us can be three months cuz that's how long it takes for me to get the data from the stores and from our retailers. Right. To get all of the insights from our digital team to get our CIO and our data scientists in line to understand what they're gonna ingest, crunch it, get the deck on it.
We present it at our quarterly meeting and then we're like, okay, activations. That's a three month timeline that defines real time because that's how long it takes someone to actually clean the Excel spreadsheet. That's the reality for some organizations. But I think that, that the trend that's really interesting that's happening now is that the customer is defining what real time means for.
and they're defining what personalization means for them. And it's different for every person in every segment and every different group and every different situation. Cause the difference is now context through the vision of the customer, as opposed to all of the CX delivery personalization real time, you name it through the lens of our.
And that's how we used to define it. We used to define it through our systems and now our customers are defining it through their context. So it's shifting that contextual lens to what our customer wants. Our customer might think that real time is being able to walk up to an ATM or being able to just pay with their phone.
That's that's real time for them. They don't need to have 19 different things that follow up with that and then are then saying, oh, so I see you just bought something. You were just at our bank, you just walked to be up to the ATM. Hey, did you like the ATM? What do you think about our at it's creepy? It's obnoxious.
Yeah, that was great. And it's not what they've defined is real time or personalized. What they define as personalized is that email at the end of the day, that says, Hey, thanks for stopping by a branch. Anything we could have done D. and if they then choose to respond to that, if they then choose to pick up that conversation, they.
There are systems. There are solutions now that have AI that can highlight points of friction that can give that next best answer. That can start to analyze data. That's even within our CDPs that say, listen, this customer segment typically enjoys a follow up email. In fact, they open it 80% of the time when that email is sent within 24.
You should probably listen to it and send an email within the next 24 hours. there are tools and there are solutions out there that are giving us this really rich insight to how our customers want to be engaged with and give us the capacity to actually automate that and automate some of that delivery.
So I think it's about really. Changing how we ask questions and fundamentally changing how we interrogate our data so that we aren't asking things like, what time should I send my email? Or when's everyone's birthday.
Kailey Raymond: I love that your dentist sends you a birthday gift and you're like,
Liz Miller: do you care? How did anybody need that?
Do you like, I'm just gonna say this right now. My Twitter handle is at Liz K Miller y'all can send me all of the, but I love the E birthday email, hate tweets, DMS, all that you want, but I'm gonna say it anyway. The birthday email is the least personalized campaign you could ever send. Everyone has a birthday.
We get it. How many of you get a great deal to spend more of your hard earned money, or even some of that money you got from grandma on your birthday at a brand you haven't shopped at in three years, but the email says, it's your birthday. And we can't wait to celebrate with you. Your gift is 10% off and they send it to you on January 1st, every year.
How many people have a January 1st? How many people are listed as a January 1st birthday on a database, because that's the default. When you didn't put in your date of birth, I love it. And you got to get a J like you're a new year's baby, and now I'm gonna give you the present of checking out. Of my shop.
It's like the most self-serving least personal email anyone can send yet. It's like the number one thing that comes out of the box and it drives me crazy. You know what I'd rather get, I'd rather get a half birthday email, like, oh my God, we're gonna celebrate your half birthday. It's so
Kailey Raymond: specific. And you've never
Liz Miller: thought that anybody would it's so specific.
If someone sends me a half birthday email and then doesn't send me 10%. Sends me 10 bucks send me $10 to spend. Don't send me a percent off. Don't send me yeah. Real dollars. Right. Send me real dollars. Yeah. Right. And send me that. And then I'm gonna be like, Oh, my God. I do deserve a new pair of shoes on my half birthday.
Cause I'm fabulous. Cause that's just funny.
Kailey Raymond: Like that's that's good. Yeah. Right. Like
Liz Miller: do that, like really get personal, like send someone an anniversary of when they bought their last pair of red shoes. Like don't, you know, say be like red looking a little less red cuz it's your two year anniversary of owning those shoes.
Get new ones, right? Like come up with creative. Come up with ways that you are treating every single customer as a fan, treat every single customer as an advocate, treat every single customer. Like you actually care about the fact that they're a human being and could live next door to you. We tend to look at our systems.
We tend to look at our data. We tend to look at automation and we think, wow, what can this system do? Oh my God. Look at all these cool emails and journeys we can do. This is awesome. We have to stop and go. Okay. But does this journey matter to our customer? Is our customer gonna sit back and think of this as more digital exhaust?
Did we just unintentionally create a fog of war where we could then blast more things at our customers? Or do we actually create that next step where our customer got to respond back to us? It's the next step in the convers?
Kailey Raymond: This is so interesting. I love this. We we've recently done a bunch of reports, state of customer engagement, state of personalization.
Yeah. There's a lot of data points that are kind of coming through my head right now. And, and remembering one of them is maybe like 50% of customers were telling us that if they did have a personalized experience, they're more likely to become a repeat customer. And of course, personalization and ROI are going hand in hand.
And then you said something about fatigue. Gen Z and millennials are two times more likely than baby boomers to say that they are being digitally fatigued right now. So like you're right. There's something about the fact that. Every individual is a little bit different. Every generation's a little bit different.
Yeah. Personalization in different industries means different things. And so I wanna see if, if there is like a clean definition of this is how would you define good data to be able to build these segmentations, to be able to build these campaigns and unique activations? What does that look like for.
Liz Miller: Quite frankly, good data is just a step. Right? Good, good data is one meaningful thing about the customer and starting from there. I think the challenge we have and we've had it for a really long time. We've had it before digital. We had it the first time we realized we could personalize print, would that mail merge field with those carrots?
We got it in our head. Somehow that we needed to have all the data before we could have good engagement. . But if you remember back to that example of someone walking into the gap, what dated do I have about you? Kaylee, if you walk into the gap and I've never seen you before I have what I see, she likes black t-shirts okay.
She likes graphic. T-shirts I'm gonna strike up a conversation with you and I'm gonna say, oh my gosh, please tell me you're in the market to get some new graphic t-shirts cuz we've got some awesome ones. Can I show you our latest ones that came in right. But do it in an open-ended question. Don't do it, how I did it, but good data for me is that one piece of data that becomes the foundation on which you can start to build and you can start to keep growing and you can start to build these profiles, whether it is a profile of an individual, whether it's a profile of a segment or of a market, what's that first piece of data that's really important to your business.
Don't have it just be a piece of data. That's cool. because cool is in the eye of the beholder. Right. But. You work for a business, right? Every marketer, anyone listening to here, you likely work for a business, whether it is your own business, whether it is someone else's business and it's okay to want your goal to be good at business, that you want your business to be successful, that you want your business to be profitable.
It's okay to believe that. So how do you find that one piece of data? That you can find universally for all of your customers. That can be the foundation of building that durable, profitable relationship.
Kailey Raymond: So, this is what I wanna learn too is do you think anybody's doing it right? Do you have any examples of folks that you can point to that you think is doing it right? As it relates to customer engagement? There
Liz Miller: are so many brands that are doing cool things on different levels. I mean, I'll give you the example of just the other day and espresso is a brand, I think does it great.
They truly know me. They know what coffee I do and do not like they've even gotten it down to the fact that they understand there are two coffee drinkers in my household, cuz we drink very different flavor profiles. So when we went into the store, They have data. They have engagements and experiences that are focused on their employees.
So their employees are empowered to serve me a different experience or a different engagement, which I think is always a great example, organizations that are empowering their employees. To ask different questions, to ask different questions of different parts of the team where we're looking to intentionally break down our own silos.
Before we start going and pointing the finger of like, you're digital, you're the problem like reeling, oh my God, your social team and your email team don't even know who they are cute. Like. Come on. So I, I think that when we start to talk about that silo busting, what we're really talking about is the inflexibility of systems.
And when you talk about trends, I mean, on the technology side, I think the biggest trend that we're seeing today is this demand for flexibility. In fact, in a study that I'm feeling right now with CMOs, when I ask them about what technologies they're looking at and ask them why they're looking at those technologies, the number one answer is coming back is it has to, I.
With things. I already have the age of rip and replace because we can rip and replace because something's new and it's in the cloud. Those days are gone. We need to be able to look at the totality of how we run our business and understand that the composable enterprise that has that composable architecture on which.
Everything can sit your data, your applications, your business applications, your systems and tools that composable architecture is foundational to the ability and the capacity to have headless applications that can deploy and sit on top of that. It's about being able to give your development team the keys to translate.
That need that burning need marketing has simultaneously to the burning need. Customer service has and not have to develop 19 tools to satisfy both of those things. Can that developer develop one tool and then institutionalize that and operationalize it across the enterprise. And then can they share it with their friends at other organizations that were, that that might also help, right?
It's about those building blocks and that composability, and that ability to be decoupled from our data, from our presentation layers, from where we're then executing all of those things. Because I think that if there's a trend that is not going to go away is that this level of flexibility, this level of independence, it's about the freedom to be able to get our jobs done and be success.
right. It fundamentally boils down to that because when we get our jobs done and we're successful, our customers are reaching in the goals that they want. They're having the experiences and engagements that they want. They are co-creating real time in the definition of it with us. And that is going to be foundational for whatever comes next, whether it is a new product launch or whether it's the metaverse right.
Like whatever it's gonna be, we need to be able. To flex and weave and have that flexibility and that agility in ways that we couldn't have imagined two years ago.
Kailey Raymond: I think that what's also really interesting here is being able to rip things out, test and try, make sure you're always adding the most modern and the best tool for your current like situation super important, but then being able to replay all that data.
Did exist in other systems and be able to actually leverage that without losing any steps, the agility and flexibility you're right. Like of the modern enterprise. Most of them have really old CRMs. Most of them have really old systems that they're trying to like piecemeal and integrate things in together, huge project for folks to undertake.
And I love that it was kind of one of the big ones, especially like, I think that's even forward looking. That's gonna be here for the next six, 12 months, but I do have one last question. If there are any steps or recommendations that you might have for somebody looking to up level their customer engagement strategies, what would those
Liz Miller: be?
First and foremost, I would say don't think about the channels. Don't think about the, where or the how, think about the who first it's about the customer. It's about that customer that you've never talked to, that you've never met before. That is going to come across your website or come across your mobile app or come across a comment that their friend makes about you.
Right? It's about the, who then layer on the. Then layer on the where and the how marketing for a really long time and customer engagement for a really long time has focused on the channels through which we can engage. And then we build the journeys and then we take the segment from the CDP and then we push it into that journey.
We're looking at it backwards, right? We're looking at the, how can I throw all this stuff at you as opposed to. What do you wanna receive? Who are you, what do we need to send you? So I would say, start with the who, and then ask yourselves this. And it's a question that no technology can answer for you.
What does your customer buy from you that they can't buy from anywhere else? And it's never your product. They can always buy your product someplace else. And I know everyone wants to argue with me on it and it's it. Everyone. what are they buying from you that they can't buy anywhere else. And can you then ask and interrogate your data differently to then understand how that what is meaningful or changes or is more immediate is a rapid need, is a distant need.
How that, what translates across those segments? Can you build your segments differently? So that you are truly matching the needs of that segment, the understanding of that segment with your deeper understanding of what that segment buys from you, that they can't buy anywhere else, then go out and map your engagement, then go out and map the channels.
But it's about having those tools and systems that help you answer those two core fundamental questions of the. And then the who, and being able to bridge those together. A lot of times you are gonna be able to find that insight and that intelligence from not only from the output of an AI powered, truly intelligent, easy to use intuitive CDP, but you're also gonna be learning that through the act of mapping, what data's coming into your CDP.
Right? Cuz you're gonna be able to understand what builds that profile, who your customer is, where it's coming. It's coming from customer service. It's coming from sales. It's coming from in store. It's coming from retail. It's coming from. right. Like, believe it or not like it's coming from all over the place.
Lot
Kailey Raymond: of good data coming from
Liz Miller: a lot of good data comes from ER, P folks, like do not discount it. Right. So I think that being able to translate those two things and have the modern tools of systems that get you there. And help you map. That's really where I'd start.
Kailey Raymond: I really love that answer. I think that value drivers and making sure you're remembering that you are always delivering those values back to the customer that you're putting them at the center of everything you do.
Liz, thank you so much for all of your insights today. This has been really fun. I had a
Liz Miller: blast. Thanks so much for having me.
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