CRM teams have spent years building the case for a bigger role in the business, and in many organisations that work is paying off. But influence brings its own problem. As trust grows, so does the workload, and the business expects value to show up faster than ever. For many CRM leaders, the challenge is no longer getting noticed. It is turning that standing into commercial impact without exhausting the team.
That was the backdrop to The CRM Reality Check, a breakfast briefing hosted by Plinc on 23 September at St Bride Foundation, Fleet Street.
The morning opened with a first look at new Plinc research exploring how CRM and customer marketing leaders feel about their roles, and how Finance leaders view the function. Stuart Russell, Plinc’s Chief Strategy Officer, shared early UK findings.
They suggest Finance rates CRM highly against other marketing functions, and describes its commercial accountabilities in much the same terms CRM teams use. They also point to the strain recognition brings: CRM teams feel they are operating close to their current potential, while Finance wants clearer proof before committing further investment.
The full findings will be published in the forthcoming CRM Reality Check report.
A panel discussion followed with three different vantage points on those findings:
- Loretta Avanzi, Head of Engagement & Lifecycle at The Times and The Sunday Times, speaking from inside a brand.
- Zoe Nicolay, Founder of loyalty and CRM consultancy Customer Connected and a qualified accountant, whose previous roles include Halfords and Asda, and who now advises brands.
- Maggie Shepheard, Chief Customer Officer at Plinc, bringing the view from Plinc’s work across its clients.
This debrief draws out the points that resonated most.
1. CRM’s growing influence, and the workload that comes with it
When Loretta joined The Times three years ago, CRM was still primarily associated with email in some parts of the business, while external agencies supported several areas of delivery. It took around 18 months of consistent work to demonstrate the team’s broader contribution and strengthen trust across the organisation. The team was later renamed Engagement & Lifecycle, reflecting a remit that had grown from email into multiple channels and into product. It now presents monthly to senior stakeholders, covering what worked, what didn’t and what is next on the roadmap.
Zoe argued that many CRM teams still undersell themselves internally, despite being experts at communicating with customers. The term itself causes confusion, with colleagues picturing sales systems or contact centres. Her preferred explanation is closer to finding a perfect match: identifying your most valuable customers, learning what they need and building a relationship over time, rather than talking endlessly about yourself.
Recognition, though, has a cost. Loretta’s remit has continued to expand as responsibilities shift across the business. More work now comes to the team because stakeholders trust it to deliver, leaving it responsible for a wider range of priorities. Her team manages the load through a mix of AI-driven efficiency, strong ways of working and regular conversations with stakeholders about what will genuinely move the dial.
2. Faster time-to-value for CRM investment
Across the organisations she works with, Maggie has seen expectations for value compress sharply. Returns that might once have been judged annually are increasingly expected within a quarter, and sometimes sooner. She has seen investment lose momentum when programmes could not demonstrate early results.
Technology programmes have changed as a result. Success used to be measured through delivery milestones: launching new capability, adding sophistication. Now programmes carry value milestones too, with use cases built in parallel so that returns begin before the platform is fully live. Preparation for day one can start months in advance.
“Go-live is now more like an honorary title,” she said.
3. Building a CRM business case with Finance, not for it
Zoe, drawing on her training as an accountant, shared how a single customer view was funded at a previous retailer. Rather than asking for the full investment upfront, the team took one use case, next-purchase recommendations, and built an interim version using the data already available. Measured against a control group, the incremental sales it generated helped fund the wider build.
She also explained how these requests look from the other side of the table. Finance teams spend much of their time reporting on the past and forecasting the future. “Predicting the future is a really thankless task,” she said. Bringing them in at the start of a business case gives them a stake in its success. She cautioned against top-down cases claiming that a 1% uplift in frequency will deliver millions, and favoured bottom-up models built on realistic volumes that Finance can help sense-check. Benchmarks from comparable work add credibility.
Loretta’s experience at The Times follows a similar pattern. Every initiative must map to a small set of company-wide metrics: engagement, churn reduction and adoption of new products. If a test can show impact on one of those, agreement with Finance comes far more easily. New approaches run as a proof of concept, or at minimum with a control group, before wider rollout. Asked whether that discipline had strengthened trust with Finance, she said it had, helped by weekly performance round-ups and whole-business presentations of major campaigns.
4. Customer data access before sophistication
If Loretta’s team faces a constraint, it isn’t a shortage of ideas. Describing the sheer volume of options facing CRM teams, she said: “I’m just overwhelmed by the technology, by what is out there.” The challenge is separating genuinely useful tools from the growing noise.
Much of what has opened up for her team comes down to access. Until around a year ago, the team had limited direct access to customer data. Audience requests had to go through a shared data science team, where competing priorities could add time to the process. A CDP changed that. The team now builds its own audiences, has moved into AI decisioning, and can query customer information directly and get directional answers in minutes. Loretta was candid that outputs are only as good as the data behind them, and that gaps remain. But the team no longer has to stop and wait.
Zoe showed how much a single piece of analysis can shift a conversation. One client ran a loyalty programme offering members free coffee each month, which some saw purely as a cost. The data showed that members who redeemed more coffees also tended to spend more in store. That association was enough to change how the team talked about the programme, and its emails shifted focus from the coffee itself to what was happening in store.
Maggie added a note of realism from Plinc’s client work. Many brands believe their data is largely unified, but in her experience every business has disconnected pockets somewhere. For her, data foundations remain the least glamorous and most important priority, because activation, measurement and AI all depend on them.
5. AI in CRM: tackling process friction
Loretta’s team works with an explicit business mandate to adopt AI, within strict rules on which platforms can be used, and with additional budget to test new technology. She described that as fortunate. It also brings its own pressure, because the business wants to see whether it is making a difference.
Zoe pointed to a less discussed opportunity. Much of the delay in CRM comes from internal process rather than customer-facing activity: long approval chains and dependencies on other departments that make it hard to react to anything in real time. She suggested that could be where some of CRM’s AI effort is best spent.
Taken together with Maggie’s point about compressed time-to-value, their comments suggest that the biggest constraints on speed may sometimes sit in processes and ways of working, rather than in the technology itself.
6. Measuring customer experience in commercial terms
As CRM’s influence grows, so does the expectation that softer customer outcomes can be expressed in commercial terms. An audience question put that challenge to the panel: how to show the value of customer experience when so much of it seems hard to quantify.
Zoe described how, at a previous retailer, linking NPS scores to purchase data made it possible to put a £ value on a one-point improvement in satisfaction within a single product category. Loretta explained how The Times’s customer experience team now uses AI to analyse call centre contacts at scale, surfacing issues that would once have meant trawling through thousands of reports. Her team also treats engagement across several parts of a subscription, from puzzles to commenting and sharing with family, as a signal of high-value behaviour.
Strategic takeaways
The London conversation described a function gaining the influence it has worked to establish, and learning to manage what comes with it. Greater trust has brought more work, a wider remit and less time to show results. Against that backdrop, the most practical ideas were about sequencing:
- Start with one use case.
- Bring Finance in early.
- Give teams direct access to their data.
- Aim new technology at the friction that slows them down.
The CRM Reality Check briefing comes to Manchester on 30 September, and the full report will be published shortly after.
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