Klaviyo commissioned Forrester Consulting to survey enterprise retail and ecommerce decision-makers across France on CRM execution. Ambition is high and investment is following, but most are still closing 2 structural gaps: disconnected data and AI readiness. This breakdown covers what they told us, and what it means for CRM in France today.

Personalisation is what matters most to French commerce leaders. When asked how important various CRM capabilities are for end-to-end engagement, it came out on top of everything else we tested. These aren't four separate priorities. They're four versions of the same goal: one customer, one view, one platform.

Most organisations haven't turned that ambition into a working strategy yet. Only 25% say they have a clearly defined, CRM-supported strategy in place. The rest are somewhere between planning and partial execution: 76% are still fixing execution, finishing a strategy, or starting from scratch.

Personalisation isn't just the top priority. It's also the biggest source of trouble in practice: the single most-cited CRM implementation challenge in our research, followed closely by data consistency and a unified customer view. These are infrastructure issues, not planning ones.

When asked about the biggest challenges facing their omnichannel strategy, organisations point to one thing above all else: disconnected or siloed data. More than a technical inconvenience, it's the upstream cause of most other challenges in this research. You can't personalise across channels if you can't see the customer across channels.

While 88% of organisations are using agentic AI for customer engagement, or at least planning to, most are still early-stage, with 72% stuck in planning, piloting, or in limited adoption. And the barriers present a familiar picture: 31% cite a lack of clean, unified data to effectively power agentic AI.

French retailers are responding to these challenges with investment, not hesitation. More than half (56%) plan to spend more on CRM modernisation in the next 12 months, and it's aimed squarely at the gaps this research has surfaced.

The expected return of this investment is specific too: 39% expect improved personalisation experiences from CRM modernisation, the highest-cited benefit of any single outcome, while 30% expect increased customer experience and 28% expect increased revenue. Infrastructure is now the deciding factor in whether that ambition and investment actually pay off.

Among the largest retailers in our research (€500 million or more in revenue), 67% already have a clearly defined, CRM-supported omnichannel strategy in place, well ahead of the market as a whole. Their investment plans tell the same story: these organisations are treating CRM modernisation as a growth priority, not a discretionary cost.