Salesforce has today released its tenth edition of the State of Marketing Report, revealing a widening gap between customer expectations and marketing execution.
Despite this, AI agents are reportedly contributing to measurable improvements in marketing performance and customer experience, driving $262 billion in sales during the holidays alone.
However, uneven AI integrations and weak data foundations may be preventing marketers from fully closing this gap.
Rising Customer Expectations are Straining Customer Onboarding
The report reveals that 85% of marketers believe customer expectations are higher than ever, with 69% saying that acquiring new customers is getting harder.
With customers now expecting more relevant content, faster responses, and seamless interactions across channels, marketers can no longer rely on generic, inconsistent campaigns.
Furthermore, customers are now also expecting meaningful engagement rather than one-way broadcasts, with 83% of marketers seeing a growing customer demand for two-way dialogue.
From this, customer dissatisfaction can rise from marketers' inability to meet these demands, as 51% of respondents agree that campaigns sometimes feel generic, with many customers still receiving broad communications rather than experiences tailored to their needs.
With responsiveness being another customer expectation, 69% of marketers admit that they struggle to promptly respond to customer and prospect inquiries, with many customer replies still being manual to this day.
If a customer is required to reach out repeatedly or wait excessively for a reply, this can cause friction in the customer journey and prompt many to look elsewhere, hindering customer onboarding.
With onboarding being the first stage of the customer journey, relevancy and responsiveness are critical here, causing misunderstood or poorly engaged customers to experience friction or drop out early.
Rising expectations strain the onboarding experience because of gaps in data and execution.
Data Unification Gaps
Despite customers expecting seamless experiences across marketing, sales, and services, many organizations lack a unified view of the customer.
Marketing teams aren’t always as involved in the customer journey as expected, with only 58% having full access to service data, 56% to full sales data, and 51% to full commerce data.
Without integrated data across touchpoints, customer onboarding can feel disjointed if marketing teams don’t have full access to the necessary data that makes up the customer journey.
If marketers lack a complete profile, this can lead to less personalized campaigns, resulting in irrelevant or repeated communications.
Personalization Gaps
With personalization being another rising customer expectation, targeted content is important at every stage of the customer journey, including onboarding.
Despite this, many marketing teams struggle to execute enough personalization, with 78% agreeing they need more personalized content than they can currently produce.
With many marketing teams far behind customer expectations, this reflects the widening gap between what customers expect and what organizations can currently deliver.
Furthermore, 46% say they are lacking data on customer preferences, meaning many marketing teams do not have enough reliable, detailed information about what individual customers want, prefer, or intend to do next.
This reveals that customer expectations for relevance are rising faster than organizations’ ability to produce and deliver personalized content at the required volume and speed.
Without strong preference data, even advanced AI tools cannot deliver highly relevant experiences.
