If it's taking that long, there's probably a problem.
A couple of times in the past, when it was taking a long time, I contacted CT support and they were able to manually reload the zone (I think that's the expression).
Another possibility that happened to me once was when I was changing an MX record. You're supposed to put the @ sign in one of the three fields. I put in "MX" instead. The control center took it and the DNS servers probably got updated with that value, but it's an invalid value. After a few hours of waiting for the changes to take effect, I contacted CT support and found out about the invalid value. Once I changed it to the correct @, the DNS changes took effect almost immediately. It would be much better if the control center would warn you or not allow you to enter in a value that doesn't work.
You probably entered the CNAME record correctly, but if you didn't, that could be a reason for it not taking effect.