SAP’s new Engagement Index research finds a widening gap between what UK consumers expect and what enterprises can deliver across channels.
The study points to three root causes: weak real-time data access, uneven cross-team coordination, and AI that stays stuck in 'strategy' instead of daily execution.
The headline tension is simple. Brands believe they are creating strong relationships, seamless journeys, and meaningful personalization. Consumers mostly do not agree. That mismatch matters because it drives churn risk, rising cost-to-serve, and weaker brand differentiation in categories where products look increasingly similar.
The Engagement Divide Is Now a CX Problem
The report frames an engagement divide between modern customer expectations and enterprise capability. Consumers compare experiences instantly and switch quickly. Many also rely on AI assistants to filter information and recommendations. That reduces the power of traditional messaging and increases the importance of being contextually useful in the moment.
It also explains why better campaigns rarely fix the issue. If the organization cannot recognize a customer, share context across teams, and act on signals in real time, then personalization becomes cosmetic. Customers feel that, especially when they get bounced between departments or repeat themselves.
From a service and CX lens, the report’s most practical insight is that engagement maturity is less about having more channels. It is about whether those channels behave like one connected experience, with consistent context and next-best actions.
Customers Feel the Cost of Silos
A major consumer frustration in the report is operational disorganization. Customers describe brands as slow, inconsistent, and impersonal when teams cannot share context.
In an assessment, Balaji Balasubramanian, Chief Product Officer at SAP warned:
"Winning brands treat engagement as an enterprise capability, not a marketing layer. AI only drives growth when it is connected to real operational systems and customer context."
That framing lands for CX teams because it shifts the conversation away from surface-level touchpoints and toward the back-end conditions that shape them. If marketing, sales, and service hold different “truths” about the customer, the experience cannot feel coordinated. It will feel procedural.
The report’s cross-functional alignment data reinforces that. Coordination levels between departments are not where enterprises think they are. If fully coordinated, is only a minority view across key pairings, customers will keep experiencing handoffs as friction, not help.
Real-Time Data Is the Bottleneck Nobody Wants to Admit
The research highlights what many CX leaders already suspect. A large share of enterprises struggle to access and use real-time data. Many also sit on 'dark data' and unstructured information that cannot easily power journeys, routing, or personalization.
For contact centers, this shows up in predictable ways. Agents cannot see what a customer did online five minutes ago. Self-service cannot adapt based on intent. Proactive service triggers come too late. And customers get generic interactions that feel disconnected from their history.
The report also undercuts a popular assumption. The problem is not that enterprises do not collect data. It is that they cannot reliably operationalize it across systems, teams, and moments that matter.
AI Investment Is Rising, but Execution Is the Real Gap
Most enterprises plan to increase AI investment. Yet many still cannot operationalize AI in day-to-day engagement work. That matters because the customer benchmark is no longer “better than our competitors.” The benchmark is the best experience a customer had last week, in any category.