How Experience‑First Brands Win More Customers—and Keep Them Longer

Customer engagement has never been more competitive. 

Consumers move between brands faster, expect more from every interaction, and walk away from the ones that get it wrong. In this environment, the brands winning new customers and keeping them are the ones treating engagement as an operational discipline, not a campaign output.

The 2026 SAP Global Engagement Index calls the gap between those two groups the Engagement Divide. The brands on the right side of it convert better, retain longer, and waste less marketing spend. The brands on the wrong side of it are watching loyal consumers start buying from their competitors.

In a recent SAP webinar panel discussion, practitioners from Essity, Sinch, and SAP unpacked what that looks like in practice. Across the conversation, five clear habits emerged that show how the fastest-moving brands are winning new customers and keeping them. Let’s take a closer look. 

Most AI engagement programs stall because they’re scoped too broadly. Whole-customer-journey transformations are hard to measure, harder to debug, and tough to rally a team around. The brands who are moving fastest pick a single high-frequency engagement area, instrument it well, and ship it. From here, they measure results, and once the value has been proven, they expand upon it. 

In the webinar, Venky shared a useful example of a premium coffee machine manufacturer. The brand pasted QR codes onto each unit in the field:

1. Scan it, and the customer is instantly in a WhatsApp conversation with a trained agent. 
2. Send a video of the fault, get a fix. 
3. An AI agent handles the routine questions, and a human picks up the rest. 

Narrow scope, provable value, measurable result.

Essity’s brands touch one in eight people every day, often in sensitive categories like incontinence and femcare. Trust took decades to build, and Daniele’s team is cautious about putting Gen AI directly in front of consumers in those moments. But behind the scenes, AI is everywhere:

• Product teams use it to automate configurations and content generation. 
• Segmentation runs on it. 
• Customer service agents use it to answer complicated medical questions without escalating to a product manager. 

The customer never sees the seam, and the team spends less time on tasks and more time optimizing the experience.

In the Engagement Era, customers don’t want to feel like names on a send list. They expect brands to recognize what they’re trying to do, respond in the moment, and make the next step feel easy.

That means moving beyond one-way campaigns to conversations that give your customers a way to respond, ask questions, get support, and keep moving without starting again in another channel.

Venky shared the example of a customer who browses a favorite product, such as a dress or pair of running shoes, while it’s out of stock. Instead of sending a generic promotion later, the brand can trigger a personalized back-in-stock message on the customer’s preferred conversational messaging channel.

From there, the customer can then ask a question about the product, get a quick AI-powered answer, or move seamlessly to a human agent if the question needs more support. What could have been a simple notification becomes a guided path from interest to purchase.

A unified customer profile means integrating your cross-channel data so every team in the business sees the same customer. Loyalty, e-commerce, support, brand, and trade marketing all reference the same record, with the same attributes, updated in the same place.

Ferrara is a great example of why this is so important. 

Once the snack brand built a unified profile across its consumer touchpoints, the data surfaced something nobody had spotted: a substantial share of customers were eating Trolli and other Ferrara snacks while gaming. That insight became a new usage occasion, with sweepstakes and messaging built around it. 

The result was a 60% increase in contactable customers in the database and a 20% increase in open rates against industry benchmarks. Without the unified profile, no one inside Ferrara would have spotted a behavior that was already happening across millions of pack purchases.

An engagement layer is only as valuable as the operational layer beneath it. Without it, a campaign that drives a 20% lift in demand can torch its own ROI if it pushes inventory past available stock, and a loyalty program built on out-of-date margin data can recommend products that lose money on every conversion. The brands operating at scale connect their CX activity to inventory, profitability, and cost of goods sold in real time, so marketing decisions reflect what the rest of the business already knows.

Molton Brown is the proof point. The premium beauty brand integrated SAP Commerce Cloud and Engagement Cloud with its ERP, which meant marketing activity sat on the same data layer as commerce, finance, and supply chain. The result was a 20% uplift in repeat purchases and a 5x increase in revenue from email.