4 months to Migrate: UGC's bet on leaving its legacy CRM for Batch

When Isabel Esteves de Carvalho, Head of Customer Marketing at UGC, looked at the group's CRM setup in late 2025, she didn't see a customer engagement platform. She saw segmentation too coarse to target the 4 to 4.5 million monthly visitors across UGC's site and app, a marketing team stuck waiting on developers for every use case, and support that ran mostly in English for a team that works in French. One question kept coming back: how do you run 584 screens and 20 million-plus admissions a year on a tool that slows down every campaign?

UGC has been a major force in French-language cinema since 1946, running 584 screens and producing over 1,000 films a year, with more than 20 million admissions in 2025. Its email CRM ran on Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), a platform the team found clunky day-to-day, with segmentation too blunt and too much Tech involved in every change.

The trigger: trust already earned on mobile

This wasn't a cold RFP. UGC had already been running Batch for push and in-app since 2023: over 70 million push notifications sent, 650,000 in-app opt-ins collected, 70 in-app campaigns launched. Those numbers gave the team enough confidence to hand over email too, and retire SFMC for good.

Before kicking off the migration, UGC's marketing, CRM and IT teams locked in six non-negotiables: a real-time unified customer model, one unified CRM platform across every channel, full autonomy for marketing teams, data sovereignty, expert support, and AI features that actually help.

The result, baked into the timeline itself

The migration kicked off in October 2025 on a tight four-month clock: use-case workshops in November, the first email sends in December, project close in January 2026. Hitting that deadline was never guaranteed: UGC had limited technical bandwidth in-house, and Batch pulled in partner resources to keep pace. The project closed on time, with no schedule slip.

Two governance layers kept it on track: a weekly project committee tracking technical progress and change management, and a monthly steering committee handling contract and risk with leadership. On Batch's side, an Implementation Manager ran the integration, an Onboarding Manager trained UGC's teams on the first campaigns, and a Customer Success Manager stayed on for the long-term strategy.

The payoff: UGC now runs email, push, in-app and SMS from one unified customer model, with a 43% open rate on lifecycle automations and over 875,000 visits generated every year.

What's actually running: three use cases

The loyalty program

A moviegoer watches a film. Batch catches the event and fires off a dedicated journey. Already a loyalty member? They get a push, then, if it goes unopened, an email nudging them to rate the film for points. Not a member yet? A different journey pushes them to sign up. Automation Builder orchestrates all of it based on channel preference and status. The payoff: +32% in ratings volume and +6.5% loyalty program sign-ups.

The weekly newsletter

UGC's newsletter content shifts by cinema and by what's showing, historically a slow, painful thing to test. By feeding Catalogs into Batch (content data decoupled from user profiles), the team personalizes the email dynamically without looping in Tech for every change. It's omnichannel orchestration that actually gives marketing its independence back.

AI-powered A/B testing

Every A/B test used to mean manually building content: slow work. With Batch AI Assist, the team spins up variants in a few clicks and automatically rolls out the best-performing one to the rest of the base, following a method Batch documents for its CRM clients. The result: twice as many A/B tests every month.

What's next: a roadmap, not a finish line

For UGC, Batch isn't a migration project anymore. It's the 2026 roadmap. Three goals drive what's next: personalizing film recommendations by email, squeezing more performance out of AI, and boosting conversion and visit frequency in theaters.

For UGC, consolidating its CRM was never just a tooling decision. It was about control: over the data, the expertise, and every call made at theater level.