--- title: Retention teams blamed for uncontrollable KPIs - Tom Burrell description: Most retention teams are held accountable for outcomes they can't directly influence. Product and acquisition determine retention before CRM even starts. --- [![Data Agents](https://data-agents.co.uk/hubfs/raw_assets/public/data-agents-theme/images/data-agents-logo-white.png)](https://data-agents.co.uk/) [Our approach](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/retention-teams-blamed-uncontrollable-kpis#pillars) [Our work](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/retention-teams-blamed-uncontrollable-kpis#cases) [Our thinking](https://data-agents.co.uk/thinking) [DiagnosticAI](https://data-agents.co.uk/diagnosticai) [Contact](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/retention-teams-blamed-uncontrollable-kpis#contact) [Start with DiagnosticAI](https://meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/simon-spyer/discovery-call) marketing · Jun 12, 2026, 4:17:34 AM # Retention teams are held accountable for metrics they can't control Most retention teams are measured on outcomes they can't influence. Product quality, acquisition strategy and the customer experience set retention rates long before the CRM team sends a single email. When churn climbs, the retention manager gets the blame. [Tom Burrell](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomburrell1) has spent 26 years in retention and CRM, most of it untangling exactly this. His framing of where the accountability breaks is blunt. > "A lot of people just assume retention equals CRM. That's challenging for CRM directors, because they can be made responsible for a KPI but don't control all the levers that drive it." His answer is a retention hierarchy of needs: three layers in order. Get the order wrong and the communications layer carries the blame for failures built underneath it. ## Product and proposition come first The foundation is the product and who it's for. No lifecycle campaign rescues a product that doesn't fit the customer who bought it. > "The foundation is your product and proposition. What are you offering and to who? This is all about customer-product fit, not product-market fit. There'll be different cohorts with different levels of fit for your product." When a retention team looks ineffective despite clean execution, this is usually why. They're solving a product problem with a marketing tool. ## Acquisition quality decides retention before CRM starts The second layer is who you acquire. Tom's recurring observation is that acquisition and retention sit in the same building and never speak. > "Both CRM marketing and acquisition often sit under the CMO but they're incredibly siloed. They might sit in meetings together,but they don't have joined-up strategies around how acquisition feeds retention." Most acquisition teams optimise for cost per acquisition. That quietly fills the base with customers who were never going to stay. > "In any given market there are always many more low-value customers than high-value ones. If you optimise for CAC, you'll acquire a lot more of the low-value ones." Take a lifetime-value lens instead and you acquire fewer customers for the same budget. That feels uncomfortable. It also lets you outspend competitors on the customers worth keeping. ## Moments of truth make or break the relationship The top layer is the moments that decide whether a customer stays. Some are product friction. > "I had a client last year where a chunk of their customers couldn't log in to the app. Even with the password reset, you're not going to retain those customers." Others are how you treat your most valuable customers. Tom's example is a US telco that ran a Super Bowl ad for an offer marked "not available to existing customers", alienating its most valuable customers on the biggest stage of the year. ## Most brands calculate lifetime value backwards Lifetime value should drive the whole hierarchy. Most companies get the sum wrong before they start. > "Most organisations don't calculate customer lifetime value correctly. Quite often they calculate it by summing historic spend. But customer lifetime value is the future value of your existing customers. The money you've already banked is irrelevant. It's the future value that matters." Build it forward-looking and it drives the rest of the business: who to acquire more of, where to differentiate service, which product friction to fix first. ## AI finally makes one-to-one marketing real The promise that justified two decades of CRM investment was one-to-one marketing. It mostly stayed theoretical. > "The promise of CRM for the last 20 years has been one-to-one marketing. It's never been delivered. Never." What's changed is context. Tom built a knowledge base from his courses, newsletter and frameworks, then maps a client's specific strategy onto it to produce execution fast. The result on a recent project: a Middle East streaming brand went from a single image-based email sent weekly to everyone, lapsed or not, to 1,200 hyper-personalised communications in two languages, built from nothing in six weeks. The content was generated with AI given the right behavioural-science context, then ingested into the client's engagement platform using Claude and its template API. That replaced the manual build a 20-person CRM operations team used to handle. The speed shows up in analysis too. Data mining that once took analysts months now takes hours. The strategy stays human. AI executes it at a scale and speed that weren't possible before. One-to-one is now literal. Tom monitors each customer's "time to next meaningful action" and intervenes at the individual level, by interest and by whether someone is drifting away from the brand or towards more value. ## Who owns retention If retention spans product, acquisition, service and CRM, the open question is who owns it. Tom's answer is clear. > "Retention is an outcome of a leadership decision." It rarely belongs to the CEO day to day. It needs one accountable owner on the executive team: a CCO, a strategy director or sometimes the CMO, backed by the CEO to make changes across functions they don't directly control. Watch the full conversation on [The Precision Brief](https://www.youtube.com/@DataAgents) to hear how the retention hierarchy reshapes accountability and why AI finally makes true personalisation commercially viable. [Subscribe](https://data-agents.co.uk/precision) for weekly thinking on what actually moves the needle in data-driven marketing. ![Simon Spyer, Founder of Data Agents](https://data-agents.co.uk/hubfs/raw_assets/public/data-agents-theme/images/simon-spyer.jpg) Author ## Simon Spyer Founder, Data Agents Simon has 20 years of CRM, performance, and data-led marketing behind him — working with brands including Sainsbury's, IKEA, Barclays, Samsung, KFC, and News UK. He founded Data Agents to solve the problem he watched repeat itself across every organisation he worked with: great data, no time to use it. [Start with DiagnosticAI](https://meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/simon-spyer/discovery-call) [Connect on LinkedIn →](https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonspyer/) More from Thinking ai ### [Most marketing compensates for weak strategy with high frequency](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/weak-strategy-high-frequency-abba-newbery) May 29, 2026, 9:29:31 AM Most marketing needs 4-7 exposures to work. But exceptional creative messaging can convert in just one exposure. The industry's obsession with programmatic volume is destroying ... [Read →](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/weak-strategy-high-frequency-abba-newbery) ai ### [Stop Evaluating AI Tools. Start Auditing Your Data.](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/stop-evaluating-ai-tools.-start-auditing-your-data) Apr 10, 2026, 10:28:36 AM The ROI of your next AI investment has already been decided. Determined by the state of your data architecture, long before the first vendor reached out. [Read →](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/stop-evaluating-ai-tools.-start-auditing-your-data) ai ### [AI-Accelerated Marketing: Why Strategy Still Determines the Outcome](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/ai-accelerated-marketing-why-strategy-still-determines-the-outcome) Apr 10, 2026, 9:11:49 AM The phrase "AI-accelerated marketing" has become shorthand for faster production: more content, more ads, more campaigns, turned around in less time. Speed is a genuine benefit ... [Read →](https://data-agents.co.uk/blog/ai-accelerated-marketing-why-strategy-still-determines-the-outcome) ## For marketers who are done waiting for answers. [Let's talk](https://meetings-eu1.hubspot.com/simon-spyer/discovery-call) ![Data Agents](https://data-agents.co.uk/hubfs/raw_assets/public/data-agents-theme/images/data-agents-logo-white.png) From Data to Decisions. In Weeks. 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