Episode 87 - Welcome to CRM 3.0. It's agentic.

Welcome to episode 87 of The Retention Blueprint.

Having worked on several AI-first retention projects recently, I am starting to form a strong opinion on the direction of travel for CRM Marketing. 

Before I dive into that lets get clear on definitions. 

By CRM marketing, I mean the function that orchestrates lifecycle messaging, email, push, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app messaging and sometimes in-app and onsite content from tools like Optimove, Braze, Airship, Insider, Salesforce Marketing Cloud etc.  

It’s a strategic, creative, technical, and data-driven function, and is often critical in recurring-revenue businesses where usage drives retention, such as gambling, streaming, sports apps, subscription apps, and publishing. 

CRM 1.0 consisted of list-based activity. You pull a list of customers you want to send a message to, you build your message, and then you send it. Manual. One off.

There will always be a need for this capability to a degree, but if this is all you do, you do not have a CRM strategy. 

CRM 2.0 is the lifecycle era. This is automated messaging tied to behavioural actions, enabled by data triggers, personalised by user preferences, mapped to moments of truth and supercharged with behavioural science.

This is journey canvases. Automated, relevant and sometimes even hyper-personalised in terms of content and triggers. But it is still rules-based and restricted to the specific journeys you build or can imagine. 

CRM 2.0 is where I have spent much of my career, both on the client side and on the agency side, building end-to-end lifecycle strategies for huge brands in streaming, gambling, sports, subscription apps and more.

I have developed so many of these strategies that I built two courses around my approach. Both courses have been taken by almost 2000 students, and the feedback has been brilliant. Version 2 of the latest course closes at the end of April, so this is your last month to get access before it goes off sale for good. 

👉 Find out more about CRM Marketing 2.0 course 

Recently, I have helped several brands develop end-to-end lifecycle strategies and then rapidly accelerate execution using AI tooling.

👉 I have written about one of these cases here.

CRM 3.0 is where we are headed, and most of what CRM teams do today will be completely disrupted. 

We're moving into a world where fixed journeys won't be the architecture, agentic systems that take customer context in real time (real-time actions like website, app events, service contacts, plus history & profile) and execute dynamically will replace them. 

So rather than fixed journeys, AI Agents with specific roles (e.g., first-success-event agent, onboarding agent, usage-momentum agent, recognition & loyalty agent, drift-prevention agent) will have predefined sets of actions to choose from and execute.

All trackable, all auditable and all within pre-defined guardrails. Always learning within predefined guardrails in order to maximise customer and business outcomes.  

This is not a pipe dream. This is not the future. This is happening now. 

I have worked on several projects recently where this is in motion. I am in active conversations with seven clients across high-usage, recurring-revenue sectors, building the execution plan for agentic CRM right now. 

Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now. 

Fundamentally, this brings change. But it should not bring a change to fear.

Agentic CRM will transform the lives of many people working in the discipline. But in a good way. Many teams will move away from continuous internal, political debates about priorities, frequency, or rules to becoming behavioural state architects, focused on maximising customer and business outcomes through contextual understanding and clear action-space definitions.

Want to go deeper?

If you want to learn more about this and you are a C-Suite leader responsible for the retention number or a Lifecycle / CRM Director in a recurring revenue business, reach out to me. I have several resources available, including a recording of my recent private briefing on retention agents. 

Also, if you work in igaming,  I'm running a short agentic AI for igaming retention session in late May. I'll walk through how agentic AI can help igaming teams:

1. Detect player behavioural drift before defection signals appear, reducing bonus dependency and increasing customer value.

2. Collapse the gap between full end-to-end lifecycle strategy development and execution, moving execution from months to days or weeks, without sacrificing quality.

If you’d like to join, reply to this email, and I will reserve you a spot.

One last thing: If you want to keep seeing this in your inbox, just click a link or hit reply, with a hi or a question. I read and reply to every message. This simple action helps signal to your email provider that it’s useful. If it’s not for you, feel free to unsubscribe. I won’t be offended. I only want to show up where it helps.

Until next time, 

Tom