Customer engagement has come a long way from the cursory “Can I help you?” greeting you usually receive at any retail store or an uninspiring “Thank you for shopping with us!” notification you get within seconds of placing an online order of groceries.
Today most customer-centric brands go out of their way to engage their customers in novel ways. Let me tell you about a customer engagement experience that I was personally part of recently, and one that honestly blew my mind. HDFC Bank had organized a day-long tennis tournament for its Regalia Gold and Diners Club credit card holders in Chennai. As a Regalia Gold cardholder I was one of the select few customers invited to this one-of-a-kind experience, which felt less like a corporate event and more like a weekend gathering of like-minded individuals who’d come together to learn a new skill and have a good time in the process.
The email received by the author for HDFC Bank’s invite-only tennis tournament.
Such curated events for loyal customers are becoming the norm around the globe. The idea is to connect with customers on a personal level, which brings us to the topic at hand: customer engagement and what it looks like in this era of hyper-personalisation. From a consumer perspective, effective engagement feels personal, effortless, and valuable, transforming a simple transaction into a life-long relationship. But what does it mean for your brand?
India’s customer engagement solutions market is on track to grow at a CAGR of 15.4% through 2034, which is among the fastest growth rates anywhere on the planet. This means that brands are competing fiercely for consumers’ attention by innovating on the customer engagement front. It, therefore, is important for your brand to also double down on it to stay relevant in a competitive business environment like ours.
What is Customer Engagement, and Who Owns It?
Customer engagement is everything your brand does to keep a customer involved with you after the first transaction — the opens, the reorders, the unprompted referrals, the renewal that closes itself before you’ve sent the email. The HDFC tennis tournament I attended? That’s engagement. So are the countless spammy SMSes you get (but ignore) every single day. The difference is whether the brand created a moment worth remembering or botched it.
Now the harder question: who owns it? In most organisations, all three functions — marketing, support, and sales — hold a different version of the same customer. Each one convinced their version is the complete picture. The truth: all of them complement each other.
Let’s see how.
Related Read: Chatbot Best Practices: How to Build Conversations That Convert
How customer engagement comes into play in support, sales, and marketing
Each business function deals with customer engagement in its own way to create a holistic experience for the end user.
- Support is where engagement either earns trust or loses it completely. When HDFC Bank shipped EVA across web, mobile app, WhatsApp, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa — in English and Hindi — the goal wasn’t deflection but to be available 24/7 to address its customers’ concerns. EVA reportedly handled over 2.7 million customer queries in its first six months at over 85% accuracy.
Suggested Read: A No-Code Guide on How to Integrate Chatbot in Website
- Sales is where engagement quietly does the grunt work for you. The probability of selling to an existing customer sits at 75% against just 5–20% for a new prospect. That gap is what good engagement closes long before the first reach-out.
- Marketing is where engagement either brings the prospect closer or chases them away. For instance, Zomato pairs your data with cultural context — meal times, monsoon weather, Friday paydays, your last three orders — and turns push notifications into something you actually open.
One of Zomato’s WhatsApp marketing messages.
What does this tell you? Every touchpoint in the customer journey is important in the context of customer engagement because each of them reveal whether your customer-facing functions are actually in sync with each other.
Customer Engagement Trends You Ought to be Aware of
Here are five customer engagement trends you need to be familiar with if your ultimate goal is delivering a customer experience worth remembering:
1. Agentic AI is out in the open. Last year, AI in engagement meant chatbots and recommendation widgets. This year, Adobe’s 2026 Digital Trends Report finds nearly a third of organisations are now prioritising agentic AI implementation over generative AI — autonomous systems that don’t just respond, but reason, decide, and act on the customer’s behalf. HDFC Bank is already there, layering GenAI on top of EVA to handle questions like “How do I finance my daughter’s MBA in the UK?” and personalising next best actions across channels.
2. The attention economy is at its most brutal. Adobe, in the aforementioned report, found 50% of customers say promotional content has just two to five seconds to capture their interest — and one-fifth decide in under two. Half will disengage from a brand if promotions feel irrelevant or mistimed; 45% will disengage from over-frequency regardless of relevance.
3. WhatsApp is essential to business success in a country like India. Tata CLiQ ran customised WhatsApp campaigns in October 2021 and reported a 10x return over email, push, and SMS — pulling in roughly $500,000 in sales in a single month.
4. Personalisation has moved from segments to moments. The brands staying ahead know what their customer is doing right now and what they were up to two hours back. Examples include cart abandonment, in-session browsing, location signals, past-purchase recency. MoEngage analysed 673 billion messages across industries and found financial services brands using behaviour-based emails delivered up to a 9.38x conversion rate over generic broadcasts.
5. Privacy-first is the new trust signal. With India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act in effect, consent and data handling aren’t just important from a compliance angle, they’ve become primary brand differentiators. Be sure to treat privacy as an extension of your product or offering to win your customer’s confidence.
How customer engagement differs from customer experience Customer experience is what your customer perceives across every touchpoint; the cumulative impression. Measured in feeling — NPS, CSAT, sentiment scores. Customer engagement is what your brand does to build and sustain that relationship; the active interactions. Measured in behaviour — opens, clicks, repeat orders, retention. To give you an analogy, think of customer experience as your dream destination and customer engagement as the different modes of transport you’ll have to rely on to reach that place. NPS dropped this quarter? Sending more emails won’t fix it. You’re mistaking an engagement lever for an experience problem, which means the fault lies somewhere in product, support, or branding. Conversely, your open rates are spectacular but retention is still low? You’re talking a lot but not delivering enough value to back up the noise. Mix these two up and you’ll throw budget at the wrong problem all year. |
Why Customer Engagement is Key to Your Business’ Success
A 5% lift in customer retention can boost profits by anywhere from 25% to 95%. That’s not a recent finding yet it’s the most ignored statistic in growth strategy. Why ignored? Because acquisition speaks louder and looks good on the company’s annual report.
Here’s the interesting part: Acquiring a new customer costs 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. For businesses with thin profit margins — quick commerce, food delivery, D2C, etc. — that ratio decides whether you scale profitably or burn investor money buying customers who churn before they pay back.
So what does engagement actually do for your brand?
- Accelerates closing speed — as stated earlier, existing customers convert at 60–70%, against 5–20% for new prospects.
- Buys you free advocacy; loyal customers are roughly four times more likely to refer your brand to their friends and family.
- Expands your data advantage — every interaction is a signal, and brands that engage well don’t just sell more, they learn about customer behaviour and preferences faster.
- Gives you an early warning system; 86% of customers will leave a brand after just two or three poor experiences. Engagement is what tells you they’re slipping while you can still do something about it.
What Customer Engagement Looks Like Across Touchpoints (with Real-World Examples)
There are six customer engagement examples below (one for each touchpoint) to help you better understand the impact of customer engagement across a customer’s journey:
The customer support touchpoint: HDFC Bank’s EVA chatbot
If you recall, the HDFC Regalia tennis tournament I mentioned earlier is one slice of a much larger engagement architecture the bank has been building for nearly a decade. The other slice — the one that scales to every customer, not just premium cardholders — is EVA.
HDFC Bank launched EVA in 2017, becoming one of the earliest banking AI chatbots in the country. The bot is trained on more than 7,500 FAQs and handles tickets across several channels — website, mobile app, WhatsApp, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. In its first six months alone, EVA reportedly handled over 2.7 million queries at over 85% accuracy. EVA also reaches rural India through Common Services Centres (CSCs), equipping Village Level Entrepreneurs (VLEs) with banking information for last-mile customers.
Key takeaway: Customer engagement is a layered system — premium experiences at the top, AI-powered availability at the base, and everything in between designed to make every customer feel seen no matter where they are in their journey.
Also Read: How to Create WhatsApp AI Chatbot: A No-Code Guide
The paid marketing touchpoint: Sohveda’s WhatsApp-first funnel
Sohveda — a D2C wellness brand — was running Meta ads that directed the visitors to a standard website funnel. Its CAC (customer acquisition cost) shot up while conversion rate remained stagnant at 1.8%. So the brand sent the Meta ad clicks to a WhatsApp chat powered by JoyzAI’s AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot. The bot greets every customer instantly, asks contextual questions to understand intent, recommends the right product variant, handles objections inside the chat, and closes the order — COD or prepaid — without the customer ever opening a browser. (Read the complete success story.)
Here are results after the switch:
- Cost per lead dropped from ₹170 to ₹5
- Conversion rates climbed from 1.8% to over 10%
- CAC fell 5x
Key takeaway: The WhatsApp engagement playbook isn’t reserved only for a select few. With the best WhatsApp chatbot — one that guides, qualifies, recommends, and closes inside a single chat — any brand can turn paid traffic into profitable traffic.
Recommended Read: How Smart Businesses Drive Growth Through Conversations
The push notification touchpoint: Zomato’s notifications
Zomato has built one of India’s most distinctive engagement playbooks: hyper-personalised push notifications timed around meal hours, monsoon weather, regional festivals, and your individual order history — wrapped in a brand voice that’s witty, conversational, and unmistakably Zomato. Zomato Gold attracted over 5 million subscribers by late 2024, and Zomato’s customer retention rate sat at 78% in fiscal year 2023.
Key takeaway: A strong, consistent brand voice paired with sharp targeting turns notifications into a reliable way to engage customers and drive them towards a specific action.
The cross-service membership touchpoint: Swiggy One
Swiggy launched Swiggy One in 2022, replacing Swiggy Super, that offered three services — food delivery, Instamart groceries, Genie pick-and-drop (which was discontinued in May of 2025) for the price of one. Live across 500+ cities, starting at ₹299 for a 3-month membership. The architecture is the strategy — engagement on any one service deepens the customer’s reason to use the others.
Key takeaway: When you have multiple products, your loyalty programme is a lever that makes each one more valuable to a customer who already uses another.
The retention touchpoint: Tata CLiQ Luxury and multi-channel personalisation
Tata CLiQ Luxury partnered with CleverTap to run cohort-based engagement across email, SMS, push, web pop-ups, and exit-intent campaigns. By personalising around custom events — like “product viewed” — and timing communications to context rather than discount, Tata CLiQ Luxury reported a 159% lift in revenue.
Key takeaway: In luxury, context and timing beat discounting every single time. A customer revisiting an abandoned ₹2 lakh handbag doesn’t need 10% off. They need the right nudge at the right moment.
The omnichannel-loyalty touchpoint: Tanishq’s Encircle and Tata NeuPass
Tanishq’s Encircle programme — now integrated with Tata NeuPass — lets you earn and redeem NeuCoins across the entire Tata ecosystem (Tanishq, Mia, Zoya, Titan, Croma, BigBasket, Air India, IHCL hotels, Tata 1mg, Westside, and more). Buy a Tanishq mangalsutra in Chennai, redeem the points on a BigBasket order in Bengaluru.
Key takeaway: In a multi-brand portfolio, a unified engagement layer will make your brand more credible, turning your customers into loyal advocates.
Top 5 Strategies to Strengthen Your Customer Engagement Practices
Here are the five customer engagement strategies worth investing in, especially, for businesses operating in India.
1. Build a unified customer data foundation before you build journeys. The single biggest reason engagement programmes underperform? Marketing has one view of the customer, support has another, product has a third, and the three never reconcile. Get your foundation right — a customer data platform, or at minimum a unified identity layer — and everything downstream gets easier. Skip it, and your “personalisation” is just guesswork in fancy packaging.
2. Personalise for the moment, not the segment. Cohorts are useful. They’re also a coarse approximation of intent. The brands pulling ahead in 2026 are triggering off behaviour — what your customer is doing right now. Cart abandonment. In-session browsing. Location. Last-purchase recency. Weather. Time of day. MoEngage’s benchmark study found retail brands using personalised engagement saw a 3.71x lift in email conversions and a 3.69x improvement in in-app CTR over generic campaigns.
3. Lead with channel-of-preference, not channel-of-convenience. It’s tempting to push everyone towards your owned channels because they’re cheap. But engagement only works when you meet customers where they already live. For most Indian B2C audiences, that ranking goes WhatsApp, then app, then email in that order. For B2B, it might be LinkedIn or Slack. Audit what your customers actually use, not what your team finds easiest to ship.
4. Integrate AI across the customer journey but design clear human escalation paths. AI is now a baseline expectation. Gartner predicted that 85% of customer service organisations would use generative AI to improve productivity and CX in 2025. But the same Gartner research found only 51% of customers are willing to use a GenAI assistant for service interactions — meaning nearly half want a human option waiting on the other side. Design for that gap.
Must Read: 10 Best AI Chatbots You Can’t Overlook in 2026
5. Tie engagement to revenue, not vanity metrics. Want to lose C-suite buy-in faster than anything else on this list? Report on opens, clicks, and impressions. Want to keep the budget? Tie every engagement initiative to a downstream business outcome — incremental revenue, retention rate, AOV (average order value), CLV (customer lifetime value). The brands reporting engagement in P&L language are the ones that get to keep investing in it next year.
How is customer engagement measured?
Measuring your customer engagement efforts may be time-consuming but definitely doable. Here are the metrics you need to keep an eye on:
- Behavioural metrics track what customers actually do — DAU/MAU and the stickiness ratio between them, session duration, feature adoption, click-through rates, repeat purchase rate, conversion rate.
- Sentiment metrics capture how they feel — Net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES). Gartner research suggests CES is roughly 40% more accurate than CSAT at predicting loyalty. If you’re tracking only one, track CES.
- Economic metrics translate engagement into business outcomes — customer retention rate, churn rate, CLV, and net revenue retention (NRR). The single most useful diagnostic? CLV-to-CAC ratio; a healthy ratio sits at 3:1 or higher.
Don’t fall into the trap of tracking everything. Pick five to seven metrics that map to your business model and review them weekly.
How to Future-Proof Your Customer Engagement
AI, agentic systems, and new channels will reshape customer engagement in the coming years. The question is whether your organisation absorbs the change or buckles under the weight of customer expectations. Below are five ways you can future-proof your engagement strategy:
Invest in a composable martech stack. The era of monolithic suites is fading. A modular approach — best-of-breed tools integrating via APIs around a unified data spine — gives you the flexibility to plug in a new AI model, a new channel, or a new analytics engine without ripping out your foundation every 18 months.
Build for vernacular India. With over 600 million internet users now arriving online in regional languages, English-only engagement is a competitive liability. EVA already supports Hindi alongside English. The brands that win Bharat will be the ones that engage in Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, and Kannada — increasingly powered by generative AI translation that holds your brand voice across languages.
Interesting Read: Multilingual Customer Support — Why It Matters in 2026
Treat privacy as a must-have feature. With the DPDP Act in effect, transparent consent, granular data controls, and clear opt-outs aren’t compliance overhead. They’re trust signals customers can feel. Customers increasingly choose brands that respect their data over brands that exploit it.
Plan for agentic commerce. McKinsey projects B2C retail could see up to $1 trillion in orchestrated revenues from agentic commerce by 2030 in the U.S. Indian timelines may or may not differ but the direction certainly won’t. Start asking now: when an AI agent is doing the shopping for your customer, can it find your product, compare it fairly, and complete the transaction without friction?
Develop hybrid AI–human teams. AI handles routine and volume. Humans handle empathy, ambiguity, and high-stakes moments. The orgs that thrive will retrain their teams for the second category because the first one will increasingly run itself.
The market is growing at 15.4% a year for the next decade. That growth will reward the brands that compound customer engagement quietly, consistently, intelligently — and punish the ones still mistaking a “thank you for shopping with us” notification for a genuine relationship.
Where does your brand stand when it comes to engagement?
Customer Engagement FAQs
1. How can a business improve customer engagement?
A business can improve customer engagement in the following ways:
- Unify your customer data so every team works off the same record.
- Audit your top five engagement channels and rank them by what your customers actually use, not what your team prefers.
- Move from broadcast communication to behaviour-triggered messaging
- Personalise at the moment level — time, location, prior action — not just demographic segment. And tie every initiative to a revenue or retention outcome you can defend in front of the CFO.
2. How does customer engagement impact customer experience?
Customer engagement is the active input while customer experience is the cumulative output. Done well — relevant, timely, respectful, valuable — engagement translates into frictionless experience. Done badly, it actively damages it. Adobe’s 2026 research found half of customers will disengage if promotions feel irrelevant or mistimed, and 45% will disengage from over-frequency regardless of relevance.
3. What are the benefits of customer engagement?
Customer engagement has several benefits:
- Higher retention rates — a 5% retention lift can boost profits 25–95%
- Lower customer acquisition costs — acquiring a new customer is 5–25x more expensive than retaining one
- Higher conversion on existing customers — 75% against 5–20% on new prospects
- Stronger word-of-mouth and referrals
- Richer first-party data that compounds
- And earlier warning of at-risk customers, while there’s still time to win them back
4. What are some examples of customer engagement?
Here are a few real-life examples of customer engagement:
- HDFC Bank’s EVA chatbot answering on WhatsApp, voice assistants, and the web
- Tata CLiQ’s WhatsApp campaigns delivering 10x ROI against traditional channels
- Zomato’s behaviourally-triggered, witty push notifications timed around meal times, monsoons, and festivals
- Swiggy One bundling food delivery, groceries, and pick-and-drop into one subscription that starts at ₹75 a month
- Tanishq’s Encircle integrated with Tata NeuPass for cross-brand loyalty
5. What are some common challenges with customer engagement?
Here are five common customer engagement challenges that can show up in your organisation if you don’t treat engagement as a cross-functional discipline:
- Fragmented data — marketing, sales, support, and product holding different versions of the same customer
- Channel sprawl — reliance on multiple point solutions operating in silos, generating inconsistent messages across them
- Vanity-metric reporting — opens and clicks that don’t tie to revenue, leading to C-suite scepticism and budget cuts at the worst possible moment
- Personalisation gaps — research shows 84% of businesses believe they deliver “good” or “excellent” personalisation, while only 54% of consumers agree
- Change management — adopting AI, agentic systems, or new martech without retraining teams or rethinking workflows