Customer systems
Technology starts with the customer
How a CRM job turned into a technology job, one system at a time.
08 Feb 2026 · 1 min read
My job title changed from CRM to technology somewhere in 2025, but nothing about the work changed direction. It just went deeper.
The chain
Customer behaviour produces data. Data needs a system to become useful. That system needs automation to act at scale. Automation needs personalisation to be worth acting on. Personalisation needs real changes to the storefront and the tools behind it. And the whole point of all of it is a better experience for the person at the top of the chain.
Follow that chain from the top and you end up owning technology decisions. Not because you set out to, but because every layer needs the one beneath it.
The evidence
The paid membership at Mokobara is a retention idea that runs itself: a customer joins, the perks switch on, and members buy roughly three times as much as non-members.
The first-party data work with Epsilon is a retention idea implemented as recognising the same customer across devices, and measuring what the campaign caused: over 4:1 incremental return on ad spend against a 1.6:1 target.
Neither of those is a marketing campaign. They are systems.
Why the order matters
If you start from the technology, you build things nobody needed. If you start from the customer, the technology is obvious, and usually smaller than you feared.
By Nikhilendra Pratap Singh Deo. Facts here come from public sources or my own posts.