See how leaders bridge the gap together by attending ‘Collaborate with SAP Online’

Here’s the question every sales leader should be asking right now: How healthy are your relationships with customers? Not your campaigns, not your channels but real relationships.

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

The email had a group. Social had a group. In store, ecommerce, service, each has its own stack, its own metrics, its own version of success. And inside, it looked like progress. All teams were hitting their numbers.

But from the customer’s point of view it feels like dealing with many companies wearing the same brand. Marketing sends “We missed you!” email a day after a frustrating support call. In sales you don’t know if the customer has already watched the demo. Store purchase history is not visible in the ecommerce group. There is no continuity. There is no memory. There is no relationship.

On March 11, 2026, some of the sharpest minds in marketing, CX, and customer engagement are coming together to tackle just that. Engage with SAP Online is a free, one-day event designed for leaders who are done developing channels on their own and are ready to rethink how their organizations build and maintain customer relationships.

Who is speaking and why is important

The event opens with Sara Richter, CMO of SAP Engagement Cloud, sharing the latest results from the SAP Engagement Index, a global survey of 10,000 consumers and 4,800 senior decision makers. But the real draw is the next plan.

Mark Ritson, professor, founder of the MiniMBA, and arguably the no-nonsense voice in marketing today, presented the keynote: “Customer Experience Trends: What’s True, What’s Wrong, and What Matters Most Now.”

If you’ve followed Ritson’s work, you know what to expect: no hype, sharp diagnosis and a keen eye for how customer behavior is changing faster than most brands realize. He will explain why loyalty can no longer live in marketing alone and what leaders need to do about it.

From there, two more moments bring this idea to life:

• Jutta Richter (head of 1:1 campaign management, BMW Group) tackles the question of how to influence the modern customer journey, and how brands can emerge in alignment when customers are already at the center of the decision.

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

At all times, the focus is on what works, what doesn’t work, and what needs to be done about it.

As Ritson himself put it in a contribution to the Engagement Index: “Engagement is not something one department can fix. Each team shapes the brand, and real progress comes when they work with a common understanding of the customer.”

Background: Why this discussion is urgent

This event does not happen in a vacuum. Preview the findings of the SAP Engagement Index, which will be presented in full at the event, pointing to a growing disconnect between what customers expect and what most organizations can deliver.

Among the headlines:

• 75% of consumers say they are tired of disorganized products that pass them between multiple people or groups to solve a single problem.
• Yet 77% of brands say their communication strategies already deliver a seamless experience.

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

The channel contrast alone tells the story. Customers moved, but too many brands didn’t follow:

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

And when SAP tested how well organizations align people, processes and technology in collaboration, only 21% achieved a high level of maturity. most, 63%sit in the middle: it can deliver basic personalization, but struggles to communicate across marketing, sales, service, and commerce that you want a consistent experience.

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

From channels to relationships

The conditions that drive this divide have been built up for years. Customer acquisition costs have increased significantly across all sectors. Third-party tracking is eroding. If it costs that much money to acquire a customer, you can’t afford to lose it to a small offering 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 ideas long before a brand message arrives in their inbox. Small moments that once belonged 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 are active. AI has moved from an experiment to a tool for action. Real-time processing is no longer just a business. The ability is there. The question is whether organizations can reorganize to use it.

At SAP, they call this the Interaction Era: from organizing channels and departments to organizing the customer relationship as a whole. A world where engagement is not episodic but continuous, where loyalty is the result of connected things, and where every activity that touches the customer journey is visible and coordinated.

Research shows that the goal is already there:

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

The challenge is to: move from channel-centric development to relationship-centric orchestration. That means that unified customer profiles are visible across all departments. 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.

Speakers and staff at Engage with SAP Online on March 11 are creating the playbook. If you’re ready to see what that looks like in action, this is half a day well spent.

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!