The new rules of engagement

On paper, customer engagement is simple. It’s the full range of marketing activities businesses use to build and maintain direct, meaningful, two-way relationships with their customers. The competitive benefits are clear, too. Research by Braze found that 85% of brands that successfully embraced ‘the craft of customer engagement’ exceeded their revenue goals in 2023.

But in 2025, customer engagement is complex. Consumers interact with brands across a growing number of channels and expect a personalised experience on each one. Businesses must now find their customers in the context that matters to them and deliver value there by listening to their digital body language and crafting meaningful experiences.

To do so, customer engagement strategies must evolve. But with so many customer journeys and channels to keep track of, marketers and leaders need help. Many are turning to AI and digital technologies to create intelligent strategies that attract customers, build deep, long-lasting relationships and automate time-consuming tasks on their to-do lists.

AI-powered customer engagement

Toma Sabaliauskiene is one of those leaders. She’s the chief marketing officer at Nord Security and the brains behind a global customer engagement strategy. Her first step was to allow customers to shape her strategy. “We’ve evolved from being channel-led to customer-led,” she says. “We follow a hybrid model: strategic direction is set globally to ensure consistency, while local teams shape execution to deliver cultural relevance and engage customers.”

Her strategy is underpinned by AI. “At one point, we were experimenting with 80 different tools,” she says. “We inserted AI into everything – from campaign management to SEO to creative production.” Video prep and editing tools have saved her team 30 hours per month. AI-powered A/B testing analysis of creative assets and messaging across user interfaces has also accelerated processes that once required the bandwidth of entire teams.

But AI isn’t just driving internal efficiencies. It’s helping brands to optimise engagement from the very first touch point. Online travel agency eSky has invested heavily in the technology. “As a digital-first business, AI plays a critical role in the way we engage with our customers,” says Inga Wawrzyniak-Gacek, the company’s group marketing communication director. “Our multi-lingual chatbot assists holidaymakers with everything from general booking enquiries to insurance and has massively reduced response times.”

The firm has also used AI to replace 60,000 photos on its website, increasing conversion rates by 60%. Their latest marketing campaign also had AI at its core. The entirety of the video content was created using Google Veo 3, delivering 70% of all clicks, achieving a result three times greater than that of traditional, human creative approaches.

The era of predictive personalisation

But once brands acquire a new customer, how do they keep them engaged? It’s a question Livia Bernardini, the CEO of Future Platforms, helps brands to answer. “Brands used to compete with their industry competitors, but now they’re competing with Netflix,” she says. “They have to consider how they can be relevant to their customers. They could choose to be entertaining or educational, but they need to be useful beyond the initial transaction.”

In 2021, Virgin Active faced this dilemma. They wanted to find a way to boost member engagement and loyalty, reduce subscription churn and drive revenue growth using digital technology. Future Platforms was tasked with building the Virgin Active App. It helped its members on their individual fitness journeys by providing personalised workouts and trainer recommendations, as well as rewards for booking classes via the app. The result was 370,000 regular app users, a 70% increase in gym usage and a 60% decrease in churn.

AI is helping brands to take personalised customer engagement one step further. Many are using the technology to anticipate the wants and needs of individual customers. RiseUp is an AI-driven financial insights platform. It connects with users’ bank accounts and credit cards to understand their shopping and spending habits and create a unique financial profile. It then uses AI to provide predictive insights, advice on investing or saving, and consumer offers from banks and other financial providers.

Yuval Samet, RiseUp’s CEO and co-founder, and former head of product at Klarna, says the intelligence of its predictive algorithms enables the platform to engage in ongoing conversations with its customers. “We’re able to meet them where they are and deliver the right message at the right time,” says Samet. “If a customer is shopping in Tesco, we can

use the right channel – for example, WhatsApp, email, chatbot, push notifications or in-app messages – to offer the user a better deal, such as a discount coupon.”

From churn to community

Churn is the enemy of customer engagement strategies. But the smartest marketers and leaders are using AI to predict churn ahead of time and re-engage customers. RiseUp has developed a churn prediction model that estimates the probability of a customer leaving. Based on this, it proactively intervenes with personalised messages, special offers or human support to retain customers before they churn, effectively minimising drop-offs.

But even fringe customers provide an opportunity for innovation and growth. “Fringe users aren’t always disengaged,” says Bernardini. “Sometimes they’re using your product in a different or specific way. You could use AI to find new data points around how they’re using your product, which could spark the development of a new feature or sub-product. In turn, this could turn fringe users into sub-communities and advocates of your product or service.”

A growing number of leaders are using AI-centred engagement strategies to drive in-person communities. RiseUp’s app has fostered a 100,000-strong community of members with a shared passion for financial wellbeing. As AI continues to reshape the future of customer engagement, the brands that use the tech to create relevant, personal and meaningful interactions and experiences will turn engagement into long-term loyalty and growth.

Intelligent customer engagement strategies are a team sport. They require humans and technology to work together to deliver value for customers. But all too often, misalignment between culture, people and technology sees strategies fail to achieve their potential.

According to the Braze 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review, many brands are struggling to make cross-collaboration work – 69% of surveyed enterprise brands have siloed customer engagement in the marketing team v 63% on average.

The new politics of data

Data is a critical issue. Livia Bernardini, CEO of Future Platforms, says internal politics is a by-product of the new streams of data generated by AI. “Leaders are getting political about who owns which part of the data,” she says. This internal problem can damage engagement. “Customers can see they’re being spoken to one way at the top of the funnel, but the website or digital product behaves in a different way and the email also has a different tone,” she adds.

To cure this problem, leaders must be on the same page from day one. “Leaders should start with a synchronicity plan,” Bernardini explains. “Align your senior leaders and decide who owns which data, and why and how that must be communicated. This should be clearly defined: either multiple owners or one specific person should be given complete ownership.”

Leaders also need to have uncomfortable conversations. Integrating the technology into engagement strategies fundamentally changes how businesses create solutions and solve problems for customers. But for many, it also creates fear. A fear that at some point, the tech will become so effective that it will take the jobs of both leaders and their employees.

“You need to have a clear vision and a clear plan from day one,” says Bernardini. “There is often a ‘what’s in it for me’ syndrome among different departments. You need to rally the troops around a common goal to show what’s in it for them, but also the value of AI for the business and customers. Training is key, too. You need to demystify AI and be honest about how it will change the way people do their jobs.”

The language of engagement

As businesses expand their engagement strategies across new channels, platforms and territories, the tentacles of engagement touch every department. This means that leaders must establish a culture in which humans and tech work side by side. Like all cultures, this should begin by establishing a common language.

That’s the view of Mickey Wilson, the founder and CEO of branding agency Firestarter. “Customer engagement means different things to different people,” she says. “You need to get crystal clear on your language. What exactly do you mean by engagement? If it means different things to different teams, then collaboration will break down before it begins.” 

Once businesses are fluent in this new, tech-driven language of engagement, they’re well-positioned to find and implement the right digital tools for the job. But learning and experimenting with new technologies also creates a fear of failure, which can result in risk avoidance and the stifling of creativity. To avoid that, Wilson says leaders should incentivise risk-taking.

“Create a meaningful reward system,” she says. “If you reward your team for risk-avoidance and toeing the corporate line, then you are likely to kill creativity. But if you celebrate listening, authenticity, speed, flexibility and original thinking, then you encourage the same traits your audience admires in brands.”

Experimentation and governance

Risk-taking and experimentation are at the heart of Toma Sabaliauskiene’s global engagement strategy. She is chief marketing officer at Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN. The decision to experiment with many different AI tools at the company created cultural change. “It shifted mindsets,” she says. “AI is no longer seen as a competitor to creativity, but a partner that empowers it.”

But implementing guardrails and clear measurements around engagement tools is critical. “My biggest piece of advice is to experiment a lot, but be ruthless about what you keep,” she adds. “It’s easy to get excited by shiny new tools, but if they don’t make your work faster, better, or more creative, they’ll just add complexity. A simple before-and-after comparison – how long did this task take without AI versus with it – can already tell you a lot.”

As leaders seek to scale their engagement strategies, governance is also key. Nord Security was quick to monitor AI usage and set guardrails to avoid leaking sensitive company data. “Start with a short internal AI policy, train teams on safe use and update as real-world cases emerge,” she adds.

Leaders who design unified engagement strategies built on shared goals and a desire to test and learn will create cultures that enable creativity and innovation to flourish. The result will be happy customers, measurable marketing outcomes and ROI that impacts the bottom line.

Leading businesses are investing heavily in customer engagement strategies. They recognise that building healthy, long-term relationships with consumers and using technology to do so is critical to seizing a competitive advantage in their industries.

Every brand’s tech stack looks different, with a unique mix of tools and data sources – which is why flexibility and easy integration are essential.

To achieve this, businesses need a flexible customer engagement platform. This enables them to unify their data, integrate and scale new solutions easily and harness AI to make intelligent, real-time decisions to optimise engagement at speed.

But many are still using rigid, outdated legacy platforms. As their tech stacks grow in size and complexity, this is making it difficult to integrate new solutions, test new use cases, unlock the potential of AI and glean insights to deliver engaging customer experiences.

An intelligent customer engagement platform

In 2025, customer engagement depends on real-time, cross-channel personalisation. This is only possible when data is unified, secure, accurate and easily accessible for marketers. Global brands are using the Braze Customer Engagement Platform to centralise and optimise the performance of their engagement strategies. Sahiz Kaur, senior product marketing manager at Braze, says brands are using the platform to access and action customer data at speed.

“We live in a world of volume and velocity,” she says. “If you need to request access to data from different teams, wait for a response and then use that data to build experiences, it introduces a lot of unnecessary latency. Brands need to ensure they have all the relevant data they need in one place so they can take quick actions in the moments that matter to build memorable experiences, because customers expect instant gratification. If you don’t deliver, you miss that opportunity.”

Building a fluid flow of data gives brands a single, unified view of each customer in an individual profile that updates in real time. This means that brands can create unique experiences for each customer by instantly responding to customer behaviour and delivering real-time personalisation. Something as simple as a reminder about an abandoned cart can either prompt a customer to complete a transaction when sent in real-time, or can leave a sour after taste if sent days after the transaction.

When data is harnessed effectively, brands can create memorable campaigns that speak to individual customers. KFC Spain used the Braze platform to do just that. After years of negative feedback about their fries, they reformulated them and used historical purchase data to identify customers who had previously ordered the old version. Through Braze, they launched the ‘Fries Compensation’ programme, sending personalised messages to these customers and compensating them with the exact amount of fries they had previously purchased, free of charge. The campaign resulted in a 95% email open rate, 679% increase in app downloads, 233% increase in daily active users and a 20 times increase in daily orders on launch day.

Flexibility and scalability

But some brands are still lagging behind. As technology landscapes have become bigger, broader and more complex, many marketers find themselves trapped in legacy solutions that limit their ability to meet customer expectations. Especially those that are still using outdated customer engagement platforms. “Legacy platforms have a very rigid structure,” says Kaur. “This means that it’s difficult for brands to integrate new solutions quickly, test new use cases or even effectively unlock the full potential of AI. Moreover, the siloed architecture becomes a resource drain and creates dormant data siloes across departments, which means marketers often miss out on important insights to create memorable experiences.”

In contrast, Braze uses a composable approach – building modular, interoperable solutions that support flexibility and empower marketers to keep up-levelling their technology to deliver better outcomes. “This means we can plug into brands’ existing tech stacks and start delivering results from day one,” adds Kaur. “Our aim is to give brands the tools to bring their data into the platform from wherever they need it and in whichever manner makes sense to them, whether that’s through APIs, SDKs, direct access to data warehouses or cloud storage solutions including zero-copy access for added security and flexibility, or using 160 prebuilt partner integrations.”

This flexibility and speed gives brands the power to adapt to customer demands by  leveraging the customer signal and using unified data to power personalised experiences across whichever channels customers prefer.

AI-powered 1-on-1 personalisation

With the right flow of data, personalisation can go one step further. The dream for every brand and marketer is to deliver real-time 1-on-1 personalisation, so every customer is served an individual experience based on their browsing behaviours and preferences. While existing marketing techniques, such as segmentation, A/B testing or fixed rules deliver incredible value, they don’t offer the granular level of insights and speed needed to achieve this marketing utopia.

The BrazeAI Decisioning Studio is designed to do just that. “Our marketers are now able to move beyond segments and build 1-on-1 experiences for each customer,” says Kaur. “Two customers in the same segment can have opposite preferences, so brands now have the ability to use AI to be really nuanced. These can be based on a specific tone of voice, the kind of offers they engage with the most and when they prefer to hear from the brand.”

The technology empowers both customers and marketers by using AI agents to continuously learn about each individual in real time and automatically make the micro-decisions about the choice of channel, message, offer, timing, creative, frequency and more. The result is that brands are able to boost retention and prevent churn, win back customers who have disengaged from campaigns and cross-sell and upsell with precision.

Braze client Kayo Sports – an Australian sports subscription service – used BrazeAI to deliver a hyper-personalised experience for sports fans and boost customer retention. Key components of their strategy included real-time personalisation based on individual user behaviour, multiple channel orchestration across in-app messages, push notifications, email, and SMS and AI decisioning for message content, timing and channel selection.

Over the past two years, they’ve seen a 14% increase in customers reactivating within 12 months of churning, an 8% increase in average annual subscription length and a 105% increase in cross-selling to another platform in their portfolio. They achieved this despite increasing their subscription price by 20% over that same period.

In the future, brands that use an intelligent and flexible customer engagement platform to unify their data and harness the potential of AI will succeed in unlocking powerful new insights. In turn, they’ll have the tools to deliver memorable experiences that build lasting relationships with their customers.