In 2021, we launched the first-ever Global Customer Engagement Review (CER) to provide marketers all over the world and across industries with a comprehensive analysis of the state of customer engagement. Now every year we release an updated, in-depth overview of what’s happening and a forward-looking view of what’s yet to come in the customer engagement space. We do this by conducting an annual survey of professionals in the field and by analyzing aggregated Braze data from billions of users across 50+ countries, then leveraging that information to identify key trends and impactful tools and tactics that can help uplevel customer relationships and business outcomes.

Today, this annual report serves as a resource for insights, trends, and predictions about the customer engagement landscape. We’ve wrapped up our latest survey and analysis, crunched the numbers, uncovered critical learnings, and distilled the most important findings. It’s official—the 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review is now available.

Here we’ll share the top takeaways you need to know about from this year’s CER and offer a preview of what else you can expect to learn from the full report.

Top 3 Takeaways from the 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review

1. Creativity and strategy work better together with AI

If you feel like your campaigns and efforts could be both more creative and more strategic, it’s not just you. Nearly every marketer we surveyed (98%) told us they’re facing issues that are getting in the way of innovating in these areas. So what’s the problem, exactly? According to our findings, there’s actually not one dominant roadblock, but a handful of challenges. Roughly four in 10 marketers say they’re struggling with:

• Having to focus on KPIs, which inherently inhibits a focus on creativity

• Spending too much time on business-as-usual execution and tasks

• A lack of technology to execute creative ideas

• Demonstrating the ROI impact of creativity

The good news? Artificial intelligence (AI) can help. In fact, 79% of our research participants say AI can “help automate routine tasks and free up more time for creative thinking.” While most professionals say their organizations are already using AI (99%), there’s room for growth when it comes to making use of it to bolster strategic, creative customer engagement. Just about half of respondents say they’re using (or planning to use) AI to enhance customer engagement—including to:

• Generate creative ideas (48%)

• Automate repetitive tasks (47%)

• Optimize strategies in real time (47%)

• Enhance data analysis (47%)

• Power predictive analytics (45%)

• Personalize campaigns (44%)

2. The full potential of data is more promising than ever

Customer behavior and sentiment are crucial to understanding—and meeting—consumers’ wants and needs, but less than a quarter of the leaders we surveyed (24%) say they’re mapping customer behavior and sentiment. Another area of improvement for professionals is applying customer insights to drive product and brand strategy. Only 6% of our survey takers say they’re doing this, which is a critical step for optimizing the brand and product experience.

These missed opportunities extend to the way that brands approach teamwork in connection with customer engagement. Only 3% say they continuously collaborate across teams on customer engagement programs and, similarly, only 1% say cross-functional teams own customer engagement at their company. So while embracing ongoing collaboration across teams is a common goal, few brands today actually achieve it.

There are also some wins we’re seeing: More than half of our participants say they’re prioritizing both upstream engagement (e.g. opens, clicks) and downstream metrics like retention and monetization, compared with only 22% that are focused only on optimizing upstream KPIs, suggesting that the majority of brands are taking a more mature, strategic approach to how they think about the goals of their customer engagement program.

On the teamwork front, while few brands have cracked ongoing collaboration, that doesn’t mean that everyone is operating in impenetrable silos. Our survey found that 52% say they sync on customer engagement initiatives with other teams at least every two weeks, creating openings of alignment across teams at a somewhat regular clip.

If you want to uplevel your brand’s customer engagement strategy, the prescription is clear: More consistent collaboration across teams and harnessing customer behavior data to shape your brand and product offerings are necessary.

3. Cross-channel messaging is rapidly evolving—so should your brand

With digital platforms and channels expanding continuously, it’s becoming more and more complicated for brands to deliver a consistent cross-channel experience. Still, most customer engagement professionals say they’ve managed to achieve “sufficient consistency” with their efforts.

At the same time, however, being consistent isn’t a top priority for most (only 37% of participants say it is). In addition, most in the field (70%) lack access to a single customer engagement platform capable of creating personalized, seamless experiences across channels, making delivering consistency at scale challenging—and very difficult to sustain over time.

For those in the minority, prioritizing consistency and investing in cross-channel efforts, there’s an advantage: Different combinations of channels can drive stronger engagement across critical metrics. For instance, brands using email, in-app messages, mobile push, and web push in concert can see 126X higher average sessions per user (compared to those who received only in-app messages), significantly boosting the number of active users engaging with their marketing and product experiences.

Discover the Complete State of Customer Engagement in 2024

The three takeaways we’ve shared here are just the beginning. Check out the full 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review to find out what top brands like Wealthsimple, Sonder, Second Dinner, Joe and the Juice, and e.l.f. Cosmetics are doing to build stronger customer relationships and hit their business goals.

Survey Methodology

The Braze Customer Engagement Review survey was conducted by Wakefield Research among 1,900 marketing executives with a minimum title of VP, working at B2C companies with an annual revenue of $10M across three global regions: The Americas (Brazil, Mexico, and the US), APAC (Australia, Indonesia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Korea), and EMEA (France, Germany, Spain, the UAE, and the UK). The survey was conducted December 5–15, 2023, using an email invitation and an online survey. Global quotas of at least 100 respondents were set for each of the following industries: CPG, financial services/FinTech, health and wellness, media and entertainment, retail and eCommerce, and QSR and on-demand food/beverage delivery.