Senior Consultant – CRM & Next-Best-Action Decisioning

The Role

We’re looking for a Senior 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

• Define and shape customer engagement and NBA strategies that align with business objectives and customer lifecycle priorities.
• Advise clients on maturity progression, from campaign-based to always-on, real-time engagement.
• Identify opportunities to leverage AI, adaptive models, and real-time context to drive customer and business value.
• Translate business objectives into NBA use cases, journey moments, and measurable outcomes.
• Collaborate with data and martech teams to ensure data readiness and channel integration for NBA.
• Define success metrics and measurement frameworks for NBA programmes.
• Lead experimentation to measure uplift and incremental value from NBA.
• Communicate complex concepts – NBA logic, AI models, arbitration - in a clear, business-friendly way.
• Support development of operating models, governance frameworks, and change plans for ongoing NBA management.
• Coach junior consultants and client teams to build NBA literacy and adoption.
• Contribute to Optima’s thought leadership, methodologies, and accelerators that evolve our capability in NBA decisioning.

Skills & Experience

Essential

• 4+ years’ experience delivering data-driven marketing, CRM, or NBA initiatives at a consultancy, agency or relevant industry role.
• Understanding of customer lifecycle strategies and how NBA supports acquisition, growth, retention, and service.
• Strong understanding of the core components, principles and best-practices of NBA methodologies and deep technical knowledge of end-to-end decisioning operations.
• Proven ability to translate business objectives into NBA use cases and measurable outcomes.
• Experience running workshops or playback sessions to align NBA logic and priorities.
• Clear, confident communicator able to simplify technical logic for business audiences.
• Highly proficient in Microsoft PowerPoint and Excel.

Desirable

• Exposure to NBA decisioning platforms, e.g. Pega CDH, Adobe Experience Platform.
• Experience with technical configuration or integration of NBA/CRM platforms, including understanding of data pipelines, APIs, and workflow automation.
• Experience working with data science or AI teams to optimise propensities and model use.
• 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.