What does a Customer Intelligence FTE own?
A Customer Intelligence FTE on ftes.ai owns the customer record and the numbers derived from it, in the Customer department of the e-commerce org chart. It is judged on identity match rate and repeat purchase rate, and accountable for one customer record across channels with a repeat rate the owner can trust. It exists because a store's customers arrive through the website, a marketplace, a till and a help desk, each holding a fragment, and the fragments disagree about who the best customers are.
It does not own the messaging, which the Lifecycle Officer and Retention FTEs do on approval, or the loyalty program, which the Loyalty Officer FTE measures. It owns the record and the segments they read.
How does identity matching work, and what about consent?
Identity matching means recognising that an order on the store, a purchase at a till, a ticket in the help desk and a subscriber in the email platform are the same person, from the identifiers each system holds, an email, a phone number, a loyalty number, a shipping address, matched with rules the owner can inspect. Each match records which identifiers it rests on, so a person reviewing it sees why two records were joined.
Consent is checked before a merge, not after. A till record collected without a marketing basis is not joined to a marketing profile; it is joined to the order history only, and the excluded records are counted and named in the match report.
How are cohorts and repeat rate counted?
Cohorts are sets of first-time customers whose first order fell in a given month. Repeat rate for a cohort is the share who placed a second order within a fixed horizon the owner set, counted from orders, wherever the second order came from. Subscribers are separated into their own cohort, because contractual reorders are not evidence of retention. The horizon, the cohort definition and the subscriber rule are printed on every report, so months are comparable.
This is the same repeat-purchase framework the Retention FTE is reviewed on; the Customer Intelligence FTE is where the number is computed, so two roles never report two versions of it.
Why lifetime value on contribution, not revenue?
Lifetime value on revenue flatters the wrong customers: the one who buys often at deep discount and the one who returns half of everything both look valuable. The Customer Intelligence FTE computes value on contribution, using the Controller FTE's fully-loaded margin per order, net of the discounts given and the returns made, so the customer who buys less often at full price and keeps it is ranked where they belong.
Segments built on contribution, high-contribution low-order-count customers for example, are proposed with their definition and size for the owner's approval before any role uses them.
What does the Customer Intelligence FTE never do?
It never messages a customer, never merges records without the consent basis to do so, and never shares a record outside the organization; memory on ftes.ai never crosses between customers. It never presents a segment as live until the owner has approved its definition. It never counts a subscription reorder as retention, and it never reports a repeat rate without printing the horizon it was counted at.
It also never infers sensitive attributes about a person. Segments are built from orders, contribution and engagement, not from anything the store did not collect for that purpose.
What does it report, and how honestly?
The Customer Intelligence FTE reports identity match rate, the records excluded for consent and why, repeat rate by cohort at the fixed horizon with subscribers separated, contribution-based value by segment, and the segments live with their definitions and sizes. Match rate is reported as matched identifiers over total, not as a confidence the FTE assigned itself.
Where the Controller FTE's cost coverage is partial, contribution-based value carries its confidence band, and the report says which segments would change if coverage rose.
How does it work with the other roles, and in which tools?
The Customer Intelligence FTE feeds segments to the Lifecycle Officer, Retention, Loyalty Officer and Pricing Officer FTEs, cohorts to the Acquisition Officer FTE's fully-loaded acquisition cost, and till matches to the Store Officer FTE. It reads Shopify, WooCommerce or BigCommerce, Shopify POS, Klaviyo, Gorgias and Amazon Seller Central, with read access granted per system and revocable.
It is usually hired with, or just before, the first customer-facing messaging role, because a lifecycle program built on an unmatched list messages the same person three times and never learns it.