Liz Miller
VP & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research
Liz Miller
What has been your business/work highlight of 2024 so far?
Who is your business hero and why?
I don’t necessarily have one if I am being honest. I admire a ton of people out there in business…I tend to think of authors as being heroes…I once took a “stealth” undercover pic of Salman Rushdie when he was sitting next to me on a plane…it was neither graceful nor too undercover.
But I’m always in awe of women leaders…one who comes to mind is Muriel Seibert, who was the first woman to hold a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Oddly, I don’t admire her because of that business truth…more because of her generosity of spirit. One night one of my best friends and I were eating dinner in New York City. We were laughing over stupid things and remembering times in the past when we noticed an older lady eating by herself near us. We asked if she wanted to join us, and she did. We ended up telling her about how we had met and how long we had known each other. She asked to us tell her what the other did for a living which was an unintentionally hysterical exercise. She told us about all of her colleagues and friends and bits and pieces about her life. She was absolutely marvellous. We insisted on letting her pick up her dinner as a thank you for all of her stories. When she left, our server asked if we knew WHO she was…”That’s the FIRST WOMAN OF FINANCE” he exclaimed. And here we thought she was just this wonderful woman who told us she missed having dinners like we were having with her oldest friends and thanked us for giving her the opportunity to relive some of those memories.
When I think of that fleeting dinner, I try to remember to channel her fire AND her humility…but most of all her willingness to share her thinking with younger generations. She was a MONSTER of Wall Street…and she was happy to take us under her wing and share her life and her laughs. She paid it forward to another table of women…and in business, that is something we need more of.
What’s the biggest business mistake you’ve made and what did you learn from it?
Many moons ago, PR reported to me, and I was rushing to get a release out the door. Rushing led to cutting corners and assuming…so I didn’t nitpick over the “usual stuff” like the phone number the release encouraged customers to call with questions. Well…there was an error in the number, and it led customers to call a GRAPHIC pornography talk line (to the younger ones reading this…yes…people used to call 800- numbers for pornographic chat lines!) that specialised in “niche” desires and very specific very graphic conversations. Needless to say, people calling in with questions about their sunscreen were really shocked.
What I learned: You are NEVER…EVER…like seriously NEVER…too rushed to proofread and take that extra moment to check before hitting send. Ever.
What’s the most inspirational book you’ve ever read and why?
Personally, The Color of Water by James McBride. The will and perseverance of Ruth is incredible and the juxtaposition of James and Ruth’s stories is truly gorgeous writing. I reminds me that not all stories are the same…and that empathy and compassion that leads to action is where I really want to live my life…and that faith isn’t something you have…it is something you live, remind yourself about in as many ways as possible and perhaps most important is intensely personal and personalised…faith is never one size fits all.
Professionally, Left of Bang by Patrick Van Horne and Jason Riley. Odd, I know…but this book impacted how I thought about cybersecurity while also giving me plenty of food for thought in my career in customer experience, especially as a CMO. It reframed the idea of situational awareness and how to apply this understanding in business.
What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role in 2024?
AI. To be clear, I do not think AI is gunning for my job as an analyst. HOWEVER, AI without questions complicates my job. It is both an astounding innovation with new twists and turns (yeah, generativeAI I’m looking right at you) every day AND a distraction full of bloated promises and daydreams masquerading as reality. A good part of my role these days feels like sifting through the daydreams about a toy called AI to find real applications and best practices. The other issue that will chase us across 2024 is the fatigue that is already set specific to AI. It is real…and there will be real points of impact when leaders start to cool on supporting AI projects that are powered on those aforementioned day dreams instead of best practices. So it feels like there is added pressure on analysts to get it right, to call the straight shots, and to give people a path through the nonsense.
What technology will have the greatest impact on your business this year and why?
Have you guys heard about this thing called AI?
In all seriousness, while AI will absolutely have a massive impact as it continues to advance and evolve, it will be DATA that will really have the greatest impact. Without the data, AI has a very limited span of usefulness. This is why these games over “who owns CX” or the attempts to boil customer experience down to a function, a team or a technology get me so concerned. If we boil CX down to a single department like the contact centre or marketing, we run the risk of having the functional fiefdoms of data limit the training AI demands to deliver. This blockade of data is one of the MANY reasons teams like Marketing have been chasing and never fully catching the strategy known as “Personalisation”. When your data starts and stops with what you CAN collect or access that’s all you get in return: limited outputs with limited impact.
So while data surely is NOT a technology, the systems and the strategies that aggregate, curate, align, harmonise and normalise it are…and those will have a MASSIVE impact on business as the facilitator or limiting factor of AI’s impact on growth.
