Michelle Hurney, Head of CRM at Wonderskin, shares her career journey from generalist marketing roles to becoming a retention-first leader. In this interview, she reflects on lessons learned, her approach to customer engagement, and how AI is reshaping CRM and email marketing.

Let's rewind to your early days in marketing. What first sparked your interest in CRM and retention marketing, and what kept you on that path?

My journey into CRM began organically through diverse generalist marketing roles, from luxury swimwear to luxury skiwear, then BrandAlley. Across every brand, I noticed the customer was invariably the beating heart of success. If you genuinely care about your brand and excel in your role, caring deeply about your customers' experience and transforming them into passionate brand advocates becomes second nature.

This curiosity naturally evolved as I spent several years in performance marketing, where I became well-versed in customer acquisition. However, I found myself increasingly fascinated by the retention side, especially as acquisition costs continued to skyrocket. Focusing on keeping customers returning felt like a more sustainable and rewarding endeavour.

What truly captivated me was understanding the psychology behind customer behaviour: what makes someone stay, leave, or act in certain ways. It's also a brilliantly transferable skillset: show me a business that doesn't want someone with deep customer data knowledge and a retention-first mindset. It's absolutely essential for sustainable growth, and that realization has kept me passionate about this path ever since.

Now that you've built such a strong foundation, what advice would you give your younger self just stepping into the world of customer engagement?

Let your curiosity drive you more fearlessly. Early in my career, I felt pressure to have all the answers and was sometimes hesitant to ask questions. I'd try to figure everything out myself first. Over time, I've learned that asking even 'silly' questions is actually the best strategy for getting ahead. It allows you to get answers more quickly, giving you more time to test your own theories and hypotheses.

I'd also tell my younger self to embrace the data from day one. Don't be intimidated by numbers or analytics platforms. Customer behaviour tells incredible stories if you know how to listen. Additionally, always remember that behind every data point is a real person with real motivations. The most successful CRM strategies balance analytical rigor with genuine human empathy.

Finally, don't underestimate the power of cross-functional relationships. The best customer experiences are built when marketing, customer service, product, and tech teams work seamlessly together. Invest in those relationships early as they'll become invaluable as you grow in your career.

In your early roles, what skills or lessons did you pick up that still influence how you approach CRM strategy today?

Working with luxury brands taught me the art of identifying and nurturing high-value customers, understanding that premium experiences aren't just about price points, but about making each customer feel uniquely valued. I learned to recognize the subtle signals that indicate someone's lifetime value potential and how to craft experiences that feel bespoke to each vertical.

But here's the crucial lesson that transformed my approach: customer expectations don't live in silos. If a customer has a seamless, intuitive banking app experience for example, they expect that same level of sophistication when using the chat feature on your luxury swimwear site. If a high-value customer can have bikini styles made in bespoke colours, she'll naturally expect exclusive access to limited designs when she's a top 1% customer on a flash sales platform.

This cross-pollination of expectations across industries is what makes modern CRM so fascinating and challenging. Customers don't compartmentalize their experiences-they bring their highest benchmark from any interaction into every brand relationship. Understanding this universal truth allows you to anticipate needs and create truly iconic customer experiences that exceed expectations before they're even articulated.

Personalised & Powerful: Driving Retention Through Smart CRM

You've worked on CRM strategies in highly competitive markets. In your view, what elements make a customer experience truly stand out, and how can CRM support that throughout the journey?

Predictive personalisation is absolutely a core pillar of successful CRM strategy when it comes to exceptional customer experience. But what truly sets brands apart is emotional intelligence: using data in a way that feels authentically human rather than algorithmically driven.

For customers to become genuine advocates, they need to resonate with a brand and actively seek that connection. The moment they feel like they're simply a transaction or a way for brands to profit, that relationship breaks down. The magic happens when you can anticipate their needs and respond with genuine care, whether that's suggesting a reorder before they run out or reaching out with support during a challenging moment in their journey.

This requires impeccably clean data that's properly understood, not just collected. CRM becomes the orchestrator of these human moments, ensuring every touchpoint feels connected and contextually relevant. But perhaps most importantly, it demands robust feedback loops and a genuine desire to constantly evolve the customer experience. The brands that stand out aren't just using their CRM to automate, they're using it to genuinely understand and serve their customers better every single day.

Personalisation is evolving fast. Which approaches or innovations are you finding most exciting when it comes to delivering personalised experiences at scale?

There are so many options available now, but for me, it's about figuring out what's right for your specific customer and their unique journey with your brand. At Wonderskin, we're seeing tremendous results from personalized quizzes. They're a brilliant way to harness customer data in a fun, engaging format that customers actually enjoy participating in.

But what really moves the needle is how we use that data and deliver it back to the customer. We noticed a significant education gap around elements of our product, especially among demographics who were less active on social media. By combining quizzes with education and delivering personalised, dynamic content based on the data customers shared with us, our CRM strategy evolved into something genuinely beneficial for our customers, not just our business.

This approach has transformed how we engage and communicate. Instead of pushing generic content, we're providing tailored education that helps customers get the most out of our products. It's personalisation with purpose, using their own insights to enhance their experience and build genuine expertise around our brand. That's where the real innovation lies: making personalisation feel valuable and educational rather than just commercially driven.

Data plays such a big role in CRM. From your perspective, what's the best way to use customer data in a way that builds trust and long-term loyalty?

I've always believed that capturing and using data should be seen by your customer as a service, not surveillance. We're in a world where we have endless data and customer information at our fingertips. It can be a fantastic tool for delivering a unique and seamless experience, or done without the right emotional intelligence, it can feel creepy and overbearing.

Customers are willing to share whatever data you want from them, as long as it's on their terms and there's complete transparency around what's being collected and how it's being used. Customers will trust you when you show them their data is secure and only being used to better their experience. To build loyalty, you must start and maintain from a place of trust and transparency.

This doesn't mean you have to offer the perfect service every single time, but you do need to be human, be honest, and be great in ways that surprise and delight customers. If something goes wrong with their order, how are you proactively fixing the issue?

Long-term loyalty comes from proving that their data makes their life easier, not your marketing more intrusive.

With so many touchpoints, how do you decide which channels to prioritise and where to focus your CRM efforts?

Email remains absolutely central, it's a proven revenue driver but also an incredible way to educate and communicate with customers on their own terms. Despite what people say, email isn't dead. It's evolved tremendously, and yes, there's more channel noise now, but email still reigns supreme in many ways. It's the channel customers actively choose to engage with, it's owned media you control, it delivers the highest ROI across most industries, and it allows for rich, educational content that builds genuine relationships rather than just driving transactions.

That said, SMS and push notifications are crucial for time-sensitive moments, and there's no single channel doing it all. People use multiple channels, so you need to prioritize based on what performs for your specific customers at the right time. You might have someone who reads every email but never converts through email, or someone who responds beautifully to abandoned cart recovery via SMS.

The key is using data to segment customers and build communication flows that work with their natural behaviors. A perfect example: new mums up feeding in the middle of the night are prime email readers and social browsers, that's when you want to reach them with helpful, interesting and relevant content, not at 2pm when they're juggling everything else.

You're speaking at Technology for Marketing about how AI is shaping email and customer retention. What excites you most about the role of AI in CRM right now?

What genuinely excites me is that we're finally cracking the code on true 1:1 marketing at a massive scale. For years, we've talked about personalisation, but it was often just "Hi [First Name]" with basic demographic segmentation. Now AI is enabling genuine individual experiences where every customer receives content, timing, and offers that feel uniquely crafted for them, even when you're communicating with millions.

But the real game-changer is the shift from reactive to predictive. Instead of waiting for a customer to abandon their cart or show signs of churn, AI is identifying these moments well in advance. We can now intervene with the right message at the right time to prevent issues rather than scramble to fix them. It's like having a crystal ball for customer behaviour.

Perhaps most revolutionary is the speed of optimization. What used to take months of manual A/B testing, analysing results, forming hypotheses, and implementing changes, now happens in real-time. AI is continuously learning and adapting, making thousands of micro-optimisations while we sleep. It's not just faster; it's fundamentally changing how we think about campaign optimisation from a static process to a living, breathing system.

As AI becomes more embedded in CRM, where do you see it creating the biggest opportunities, and where should marketers be cautious?

The opportunities are genuinely thrilling, we can now scale hyper-personalised customer journeys at unprecedented speed. AI excels at content generation and gives us the flexibility to make real-time optimisations that would have been impossible manually. We're finally able to deliver truly individualised experiences without sacrificing efficiency or scale.

But with great power comes significant responsibility, particularly around data privacy and protection. Safeguarding customer data isn't just a compliance issue, it's crucial for long-term customer loyalty and maintaining integrity as a brand. There's also the black box problem: the uncertainty around why AI makes certain choices can make it difficult to explain decisions or course-correct when things go wrong.

What I believe will really separate great marketers moving forward are those who become experts in their field while being highly AI-literate, but also possess outstanding emotional intelligence. The real skill lies in knowing when to pull back-when the relentless drive for growth and scaling needs to yield to human judgment and intuition.

The marketers who thrive will be those who can harness AI's power while maintaining that essential human touch that builds genuine customer relationships. Technology amplifies capability, but wisdom determines when and how to use it.

Michelle will be speaking at eCommerce Expo and Technology for Marketing on the 24-25 September at the Excel London.

Register here

Quick-fire questions

Favourite CRM platform or tool? Right now it's Klaviyo.

Email, SMS, or push --- what's your current go-to? Email.

Brand you think is nailing customer engagement right now (outside of your own)? REFY.

Most memorable piece of customer feedback? "I finally understand how to apply this properly thanks to your personalised tutorial."

Best marketing advice you've ever received? "Data tells you what happened, but intuition tells you what's next."

A marketing trend you think is overhyped right now? The obsession with consolidating everything! Bring back best-in-class tools over jack-of-all-trades platforms.

One AI-powered feature you wish every CRM platform had? AI-powered multi-region dashboard intelligence that seamlessly syncs campaigns and flows across different geographic backends.