H · chapter

Lifecycle, CRM & Retention

What it is: everything after the first conversion — turning a contact into a retained, repeat, expanding, advocating customer — plus the customer-data substrate that drives it. Acquire → onboard → engage → retain → incentivize → mobilize, run as a loop, not a funnel.
The 2026 shift: lifecycle work is being handed to agents on both sides — the brand's own lifecycle agents now run the loop (shipped, supervised), and the buyer's agent is starting to retrieve loyalty and reorder on the customer's behalf (nascent). The model is finally cheap; the binding constraints are data, consent, and a demand-side trust ceiling.
The hard truth: the comfortable premise is wrong. Rising CAC has not triggered a universal retention pivot — the median CMO is defunding retention (loyalty/retention <15% of media spend, down ~29% since 2024 — Gartner, ledger §H). The pivot is real only for the most AI-mature orgs.
Don't: open with "retention is 5–25× cheaper than acquisition" (a never-validated heuristic), buy a churn score without an intervention pipeline, or quote any loyalty/personalization ROI number as fact — every one is a vendor claim until a holdout confirms it.

How this domain is organized internally — and the decision logic, runnable workflows, and agent angle — are in the full map.