Lisa Loftis of SAS considers the evolution of the customer experience and the role data and analytics play in customer strategy
Eighteen years ago, Lisa Loftis cowrote Building the Customer-Centric Enterprise. If she were to update the book today, she would add quite a few chapters on how a digital focus has changed the game. Loftis is a thought leader on software company SAS’s Best Practices team, where she focuses on customer intelligence, customer experience management and digital marketing. Data and analytics are at the center of all three, which Loftis discussed with Marketing News.
Q: Can you tell me a little bit about your background and how you became interested in data and analytics?
A: I have to admit it was kind of serendipitous luck that got me into this field. I had a job where I had to do a lot of public speaking but really didn’t have anything to do with computers or analytics or anything like that. Twenty-five years ago or so I thought that computers were really starting to become something that you needed to understand, so I went back and got a little education in that field and ended up working for a software company out of Pittsburgh. They were really the first organization that started doing name and address matching software, data-cleansing software really designed around helping companies to develop a single view of the customer. They developed software that was built into a lot of the banks and the insurance companies that, back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, were really the first companies starting to look at the customer holistically, versus siloed product-oriented processes. Today just about every industry looks much more comprehensively at a customer view.
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Sarah Steimer is a writer, editor, podcast producer, and yoga teacher living in Chicago. She has written for Marketing News, Chicago magazine, Culture magazine, the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, and other outlets.