See how leaders bridge the engagement divide by attending ‘Engage with SAP Online’ by SAP Engagement Cloud

Here’s a question every marketing leader should be asking right now: How healthy are your customer relationships? Not your campaigns, not your channels but the actual relationships. 

It’s a harder question than it sounds. Most organizations have spent the last two decades building around channels.  

Email had a team. Social had a team. In-store, ecommerce, service, each with their own stack, their own metrics, their own version of success. And from the inside, it looked like progress. Every team was hitting their numbers. 

But from the customer’s perspective it felt like dealing with multiple companies wearing the same logo. Marketing sends a “We miss you!” email the day after a frustrating support call. Sales doesn’t know the customer has already watched a demo. In-store purchase history is invisible to the ecommerce team. No continuity. No memory. No relationship. 

On March 11, 2026, some of the sharpest minds in marketing, CX, and customer engagement are coming together to tackle exactly that. Engage with SAP Online is a free, half-day virtual event built for leaders who are done optimizing channels in isolation and ready to rethink how their organizations build and sustain customer relationships. 

Who’s speaking and why it matters 

The event opens with Sara Richter, CMO of SAP Engagement Cloud, sharing new findings from the SAP Engagement Index, a global study of 10,000 consumers and 4,800 senior decision-makers. But the real draw is the lineup that follows. 

Mark Ritson, professor, founder of MiniMBA, and arguably the most no-nonsense voice in marketing today, delivers the keynote: “Trends Shaping Customer Experience: What’s Real, What’s Not, and What Matters Most Now.” 

If you’ve followed Ritson’s work, you know what to expect: zero hype, sharp diagnosis and a clear-eyed take on how customer behavior is shifting faster than most brands realize. He’ll unpack why loyalty can no longer live in marketing alone and what leaders need to do about it. 

From there, two more sessions bring the theory to life: 

• Jutta Richter (head of 1:1 campaign management, BMW Group) tackles the question of influence in modern customer journeys, and how brands can show up with relevance when customers are already halfway to a decision. 

• Daniele Tedesco (ecommerce global process owner, Essity) and Venky Naravulu (director of partner solutions, Sinch) join Ritson to share real-world lessons on modernizing engagement through AI and connected systems. 

Across all sessions, the focus is on what’s working, what isn’t, and what to do about it. 

As Ritson himself put it in contributing to the Engagement Index: “Engagement isn’t something one department can fix. Every team shapes the brand, and the real progress comes when they work from the same understanding of the customer.” 

The backdrop: Why this conversation is urgent 

This event isn’t happening in a vacuum. Preview findings from the SAP Engagement Index, which will be unveiled in full at the event, point to a growing disconnect between what customers expect and what most organizations can deliver. 

Among the headlines: 

• 75% of consumers say they’re put off by disorganized brands that pass them between multiple people or teams to resolve a single issue.
• Yet 77% of brands claim their engagement strategies already deliver seamless experiences. 

SAP calls this the Engagement Divide: the distance between what customers need in the moments that matter and what most organizations can actually deliver. And based on the research, for most businesses, it’s growing. 

The channel mismatch alone tells a story. Customers have moved, but too many brands haven’t followed: 

• 41% of consumers prefer to shop via mobile apps, yet only 28% of brands engage there. 
• 43% of consumers prefer online shopping, yet only 26% of brands engage via web and e-commerce. 

And when SAP assessed how well organizations align people, processes and technology around engagement, just 21% scored at a high maturity level. The vast majority, 63%, sit in the middle: able to deliver basic personalization, but struggling with the coordination across marketing, sales, service, and commerce that consistent experiences demand. 

It’s a crowded middle tier, and breaking out of it requires more than better campaigns. It requires a fundamentally different operating model. 

From channels to relationships 

The conditions driving this divide have been building for years. Customer acquisition costs have climbed steeply across sectors. Third-party tracking is eroding. When it costs that much to win a customer, you can’t afford to lose them at a weak handoff between marketing and fulfillment, or between purchase and support. 

And consumers themselves have changed. With AI at their fingertips, they compare, switch and decide in seconds. They form opinions long before a brand’s message lands in their inbox. The micro-moments that used to belong to marketers now belong to customers, and those moments increasingly determine whether a brand wins or loses a relationship. 

At the same time, the technology to fix this has finally matured. Customer data platforms work. AI has moved from experiment to operational tool. Real-time processing is no longer enterprise-only. The capability exists. The question is whether organizations can reorganize to use it. 

At SAP, they’re calling this shift the Engagement Era: a move from organizing around channels and departments to organizing around the customer relationship as a whole. A world where engagement isn’t episodic but continuous, where loyalty is an outcome of connected experiences, and where every function that touches the customer journey is visible and coordinated. 

The research shows that intent is already there: 

• 77% of businesses plan to invest in AI-powered engagement this year 
• 76% are investing in omnichannel technologies 

The challenge is execution: moving from channel-centric optimization to relationship-centric orchestration. That means unified customer profiles visible across every department. It means journey-level visibility, not just campaign-level reporting. It means measuring success at the relationship level, lifetime value, retention, advocacy, not just opens and clicks. 

The speakers and practitioners at Engage with SAP Online on March 11 are the ones building the playbook. If you’re ready to see what that looks like in practice, this is a half-day well spent. 

Engage with SAP Online 

Date: March 11, 2026 

Time: 9:00 AM ET | 1:00 PM GMT | 2:00 PM CET 

Format: Free, virtual, half-day event Register now!

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