What does a Retention FTE own?
A Retention FTE on ftes.ai owns the lifecycle messaging of an online store: the flows that run from a first visit to a repeat purchase and back from a lapse. That means the welcome series, browse and cart recovery, the post-purchase sequence, replenishment reminders, win-back for lapsed customers, and VIP treatment for the best ones. It is accountable for one outcome, repeat revenue that compounds with every send approved, and it is reviewed on targets such as repeat-purchase rate at ninety days.
It does not own the offer strategy, the brand, or the decision to discount. The owner sets those. The Retention FTE proposes the flows, the timing, the segments and the copy, inside the rules the owner wrote, and reports what happened in numbers it measured.
Where does the timing come from?
The timing of every flow the Retention FTE proposes comes from the store's own order data rather than from a template. A replenishment reminder for a consumable is placed near the median gap between first and second orders of that SKU, read from the orders themselves. A win-back flow starts when a customer's silence exceeds the point at which, in this store's history, most customers who were going to return already had. A post-purchase sequence spaces itself around the delivery window the store's shipping data shows.
This is the mechanism that makes the flows specific to the store. Two stores selling the same category get different timings because their customers reorder differently, and the timing is revised as the data moves.
How are segments built?
Segments are built by the Retention FTE from order history and engagement, and each segment is shown with its size and its definition before any flow targets it. First-time buyers, second-order customers, lapsed after a defined gap, subscribers who should not receive replenishment prompts, high-value customers by order count and value: each is a definition the owner can read and change. The suppression list, customers who must never be messaged for any reason, is applied before every send.
Segment definitions are proposals too. A new VIP tier or a changed lapse threshold waits in Approvals with the count of customers it would move and the reasoning.
What waits for approval, and what are the hard limits?
The Retention FTE starts at Level 0 on the autonomy ladder: every new flow, every change to a live flow, every campaign and every segment change is a proposal in Approvals. The message is shown exactly as the customer will see it on the device it targets, with the segment size beside it and the frequency cap already applied. The owner approves, edits or sends back with a note.
Two limits sit above the ladder and cannot be crossed at any level: the frequency cap, the maximum messages a customer may receive in a period, and the suppression list. A campaign that would breach the cap for part of a segment is held back for that part and the brief says so. Once a flow has run for weeks with approvals and no send-backs, the owner can promote that flow to run its scheduled sends without a gate, and take that back at any time.
How does it report results honestly?
The Retention FTE reports four numbers it can measure: repeat-purchase rate at the horizon the owner chose, revenue per recipient per flow, sends against the frequency cap, and flows live. Revenue is attributed using the window the owner set in Setup, and the window is printed on every report, because an attribution window chosen to flatter a flow is the most common way lifecycle numbers become fiction.
It does not claim incremental revenue unless the store runs a holdout, a portion of the segment that receives nothing, and it proposes holdouts on the flows worth testing. A flow that underperformed is named as underperforming, with the hypothesis and the proposed change beside it.
What does it write, and in whose voice?
The Retention FTE writes every message in the voice the owner defined in the remit, from product data the catalog holds and copy the owner approved. It does not invent offers: a discount appears in a message only when the owner's rules allow it for that segment. It does not invent claims about products; the same fact-gate that governs the Product Catalog FTE governs product statements in an email.
Replies from customers to a lifecycle message are not the Retention FTE's to answer; they route to the help desk, where an Order Support FTE or a person handles them. The Retention FTE reads them only as signal, for example a spike of unsubscribes after a change.
Which tools does it work in?
The Retention FTE works inside the store's email and SMS platform, currently Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Omnisend, Attentive and Postscript, with read access to orders from Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce or a subscription platform such as Recharge. Its work is reviewed in the ftes.ai workspace, credentials are encrypted at rest and revocable, and it draws tokens from the organization wallet, which hard-stops at zero.
It does not require a migration to a new sending platform. The flows it proposes are created in the platform the store already runs, so the store keeps its deliverability history and its list.