Principal Consultant – CRM & Next-Best-Action Decisioning

The Role

We’re looking for a Principal Consultant specialising in CRM & Next-Best-Action Decisioning (NBA) to join our growing Customer Strategy & Engagement team. This is an exciting opportunity for somebody with 4+ years’ consulting or relevant in-house experience, who is eager to make an impact at the intersection of marketing, technology and customer experience.

As part of our project teams, you will help leading organisations modernise how they plan, deliver and measure customer engagement, collaborating with clients to design future-fit customer engagement strategies, martech roadmaps, and marketing ops models, that drive real business outcomes and deliver more personalised and effective customer experiences.

This a role that offers variety, challenge and the chance to learn from senior experts, while shaping the future of customer-centric marketing with some of the UK’s most ambitious and well-known brands.

Key Responsibilities

• Shape and own enterprise-level customer engagement and NBA strategies that connect marketing, data, and technology to deliver business growth and customer value.
• Set the strategic direction for client maturity progression - architecting the roadmap from campaign-based engagement to fully autonomous, real-time decisioning ecosystems.
• Define the vision and guardrails for the use of AI, adaptive models, and contextual data - ensuring responsible, value-driven application of advanced NBA capabilities.
• Oversee translation of business strategy into decisioning blueprints, prioritised use cases, and measurable success outcomes across multiple channels and lifecycle stages.
• Influence data and martech strategies to ensure readiness, integration, and scalability of NBA capability within the client’s ecosystem.
• Establish enterprise measurement frameworks that quantify customer and commercial impact, embedding experimentation and continuous optimisation as business-as-usual.
• Govern experimentation and value measurement across programmes, ensuring rigour, comparability, and clear executive storytelling of performance and ROI.
• Articulate and simplify complex decisioning concepts for senior stakeholders, influencing investment and operating model decisions.
• Design and embed governance and operating models that enable sustainable NBA management, continuous learning, and cross-functional alignment.
• Lead and mentor multi-disciplinary teams, developing consultants and client practitioners to build enduring NBA capability.
• Develop and evolve Optima’s intellectual property, accelerators, and methodologies that enhance market differentiation and delivery excellence in NBA decisioning.
• Act as a senior client partner, trusted advisor, and thought leader across accounts and industry forums, shaping the future direction of data-driven engagement.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• 8+ years’ experience delivering data-driven marketing, CRM, or decisioning initiatives at a consultancy, agency or relevant industry role.
• Experience with technical configuration or integration of NBA/CRM platforms, including understanding of data pipelines, APIs, and workflow automation.
• Proven ability to shape and lead large-scale decisioning transformation programmes from strategy to deployment.
• Demonstrated experience defining NBA operating models, governance, and measurement frameworks.
• Skilled at advising senior stakeholders on how to scale NBA and AI-driven engagement.
• Leads teams of consultants and client personnel to design and implement NBA frameworks.
• Expertise in arbitration design, decision strategies, and business prioritisation.
• Shapes roadmaps and maturity progression — guiding clients from campaigns to always-on NBA decisioning.
• Strong client relationship and delivery management experience across complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
• Coaches and mentors teams to build client capability and adoption.
• Highly proficient in Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel.

Desirable

• Deep expertise in decisioning platforms, e.g. Pega CDH, Adobe Experience Platform.
• Hands-on experience architecting multi-channel, real-time engagement ecosystems.
• Thought leadership contributions, e.g. white papers, conference talks, capability development.
• Proven experience leading cross-market or global deployments.
• Deep understanding of adaptive analytics, model governance, and responsible AI.
• Experience integrating NBA with CRM, DMP, CDP, and channel orchestration tools.
• Experience embedding test-and-learn frameworks and ROI measurement in decisioning programmes.
• Acts as practice or capability lead, defining standards and accelerators for reuse.
• Experience in regulated industries with complex governance needs, e.g. banking, insurance, telecoms.

The Team

You’ll be part of Optima’s Customer Strategy & Engagement service line; a dynamic group of strategists who help clients unlock customer value and deliver transformation and bring bold ideas and practical solutions to every engagement.

You’ll collaborate closely with colleagues across other services lines, including Growth, Delivery Office, Data Science and Data Engineering, contributing your marketing expertise to shape integrated, future-ready solutions.

Our team is based all over the UK, but every individual is aligned to one of our offices in either Edinburgh, London or Bristol.

The Company

Optima Partners brings together expertise in design, transformation, data, marketing and technology to help organisations grow and thrive. We are the go-to challenger consultancy for AI-driven transformation in the financial services, energy and telecoms industries, helping clients move from strategy to outcomes fast. Our clients include Lloyds Banking Group, Barclays, Virgin Money, Royal London, Aviva, Ovo Energy, The AA, and more.

Our approach is hands-on: we stay embedded through delivery, simplify complexity, and always focus on lasting results. We believe in forming deep partnerships with clients, so our work doesn’t just advise but delivers impact in practice.

For those joining us now, it’s an especially exciting time - we’re scaling fast and building the next chapter of our growth story.

Ready to lead the next wave of marketing transformation? We’d love to hear from you.