Your best customer has read your playbook. You handed it to them yourself, one automated email at a time. They fill their cart, linger over checkout, and leave, right on schedule, because your follow-up discount email runs like clockwork, and they’ve learned to set their watch by it.
In fact, Iterable’s 2026 Customer Engagement Report has a name for them: the apex consumer.
What does this shopper really want, the one who’s learned your playbook well enough to play it back?
Start with what they do. In the past year alone, 37 percent of shoppers said they abandoned a full cart on purpose, holding out for the discount they knew was coming. Another 67 percent said they will sit on a purchase until the discount gets better.
They know exactly how your marketing behaves. So what does this apex consumer respond to? Let’s find out.
Customer engagement and business impact statistics
1. Customer experience looks better from inside the company
In its 2026 State of Customer Experience Report, Medallia stated that 66 percent of customer experience (CX) practitioners believed CX had improved over the past year, while just 17 percent of consumers said the same.
Even as companies collect more feedback than ever, the data showed that 30–40 percent of CX departments do nothing with it once it arrives.
“Gathering insights alone isn’t a strategy, and the real magic happens when you stop just listening and start actually doing something with what you hear,” says Carrie Parker, chief marketing officer at Medallia.
2. Most customers won’t tell you why they left
Qualtrics, in its 2026 Consumer Experience Trends Report, said that only 29 percent of customers share feedback directly with a company after a bad experience, down 7.5 percentage points since 2021. Meanwhile, 30 percent say nothing to anyone at all, up nine percentage points over the same period.
This creates a problem. The assumption was that dissatisfied customers will complain, giving teams the chance to respond to them. More and more, they don’t.
“Companies are flying blind while customers vote with their wallets,” says Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute.
3. A decade of spending has bought no improvement
In its Q1 2026 national report, the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) put US customer satisfaction at 76.7 out of 100, the exact level it held in 2013, despite companies spending well over $100 billion a year on CX since then, with, in ACSI’s words, “no detectable return.”
If CX spending continues to rise while satisfaction remains flat, where is the investment going? The ACSI data suggests that customers judge experiences on whether they are easy, reliable, and useful, not by how much money companies spend on improving them.
Customer complaints, meanwhile, hit a record high, rising 16 percent year over year. The data also points to a risk ACSI calls “pent-up defection”: Retention has held even as satisfaction stalls, meaning customers are staying while growing less happy.
4. The sale isn’t the end of the customer journey
Attentive found that 69 percent of shoppers say post-purchase content, such as reviews, care tips, and photos or videos of the product in use, makes them feel more confident after buying.
The same report links stronger post-purchase engagement to fewer returns and more repeat purchases. Education, onboarding, support, and community content are all ways for brands to encourage repeat purchases and build trust.
For example, Big Barker, which makes therapeutic mattresses for large dogs, runs a standing campaign that pays customers a $25 gift card for a 20- to 50-second video review. Big Barker uses Jotform to collect the clips and route them to its CX team fast enough to act on.
“I really liked the fact that you could carry out the Slack integration inside Jotform, instead of using a software integration platform like Zapier to connect the two,” says Dan Wiggs, Big Barker’s Platform Manager.
5. Most customer journeys still belong to nobody
Iterable found that only 30 percent of marketing teams own the end-to-end customer journey. For the other 70 percent, no single team is accountable for the experience as the customer moves through it. The customer travels one continuous path while, on the brand’s side, the path is covered by multiple teams that each see only their stretch of it.
6. The best retention strategy starts before customers complain
In a 2026 analysis of 312 companies that improved retention by 10 points or more, marketing agency Focus Digital found that proactive customer outreach produced the largest lift: about 14 percent. The biggest gains came when teams contacted customers before usage declined rather than after complaints surfaced.
Of every retention lever studied, including loyalty programs, onboarding improvements, and multichannel support, proactive outreach delivered the strongest results.
Personalization, relevance, and customer trust statistics
7. Brands can’t personalize what they can’t see
Arktic Fox’s 2026 Inside Digital & eCommerce report presented the results of a survey of more than 100 Australian retail and brand-manufacturer leaders. Over 80 percent said their ability to resolve customer identity into a single view is still a work in progress.
Meanwhile, 73.3 percent described their data and marketing and technology systems as only partially integrated.
The promise of personalization is to treat every customer like an individual. But if brands can’t yet assemble one coherent picture of who that customer is, then the “personalized” message is often built on a fragmented, partial view.
8. Most brands admit their personalization is for show
Iterable found that 64 percent of marketers admit the personalization they deliver is more about optics than impact.
This is a damning admission. If marketers can’t confidently explain why a customer received a message, it’s difficult to know whether the experience feels relevant to the customer receiving it.
9. Customers don’t want to hear from you that often
According to CSG’s 2026 State of the Customer Experience report, 70 percent of people say brands send so many messages that they no longer care what those brands say. More than a third have stopped buying from a brand altogether because of the overcommunication.
Your customers don’t experience marketing channel by channel. They experience it as one continuous stream of notifications, emails, texts, ads, and reminders. The customer’s defense is to tune out the whole channel, which means even the message that was relevant never lands.
10. People still reward brands that get them
In its 2026 Personalization Trends report, Attentive stated that 93 percent of customers say they’re more likely to keep buying from a brand that personalizes the experience and 73 percent say they are more likely to purchase when the product recommendations are relevant. The appetite for personalization, therefore, is intact, even rising. What’s collapsed is tolerance for the generic version of it.
11. Customers will share more, but only on their terms
Qualtrics found that 86 percent of customers are willing to share more personal data when organizations are transparent and clear about how it will be used. This reframes the privacy problem as more of a permission problem. The brands that ask plainly and say what they’ll do with the answer get the raw material.
12. Your customers can tell when they’re in an automated campaign
MoEngage, in analyzing 40 billion messages sent to North American customers for its 2026 Customer Engagement Benchmarks, found that generic broadcasts drew unsubscribes at roughly 25 times the rate of personalized, journey-based messages and converted at a small fraction of the rate.
This data is an eviction notice for old-school email marketing tactics. QSR Magazine, for example, reports that journey-based, contextual emails boast an unsubscribe rate of just 0.06 percent, while standard broadcast emails suffer a 1.49 percent unsubscribe penalty.
13. Even good personalization has a trust ceiling
According to Braze’s 2026 Global Customer Engagement Review, 27 percent of respondents refuse to share any data with AI agents, even when promised a better or more personalized experience in return.
A brand can ask transparently and still get a no. For some consumers, the objection isn’t the data request itself; it’s the AI system sitting on the other side of it.
Brands are largely blind to this. In fact, 93 percent of marketing leaders believe AI helps them accurately understand customer needs, while only 53 percent of consumers feel brands truly anticipate what they want.
AI and customer engagement statistics
14. The rush to AI is exposing old data problems
Adobe, in its 2026 AI and Digital Trends report, stated that 62 percent of companies plan to hand conversational customer engagement to agentic AI within 18 months, and more than three-quarters of companies expect agentic AI to handle at least half of their customer support in that window.
The ambition, however, is running ahead of the infrastructure. By Adobe’s own count, just 39 percent of those companies have a unified customer data platform capable of supporting a rollout of that size. The customer, in other words, is about to meet a lot of AI built on data the brand admits it hasn’t unified.
15. Your customers can see the cost-cutting behind the chatbot
SurveyMonkey found that 81 percent of consumers believe AI customer service exists primarily to save the company money, not to improve their experience. And 84 percent think human agents are more accurate, while 89 percent want the option to reach a person to always be on the table.
This is the apex consumer applied to service. The customer isn’t fooled about why the chatbot is there, and that taints the entire interaction before it starts. A tool customers perceive as a cost-cutting measure also doesn’t get much grace when it fails.
16. AI has made content abundant but not necessarily valuable
In a survey of 307 US consumers conducted in March 2026, Gartner found that 49 percent say generative AI has made the overall quality of content worse, a figure that climbs to 57 percent among Gen Z and millennials.
As Gartner VP Analyst Kate Muhl put it: “AI-generated content is increasing the volume of media that consumers encounter but not necessarily the value.”
That leaves brands with the same challenge they’ve always had: Give customers something worth opening, reading, clicking, or sharing.
17. On social, customers are already blocking the AI slop
In its Q1 2026 Pulse Survey, Sprout Social found that 56 percent of consumers say they see low-effort or repetitive AI content, known as “AI slop,” often or very often in their feeds. Among Gen Z, 50 percent have already unfollowed, muted, or blocked a brand or creator over it.
The report recommends two fixes: Keep a human involved at every step of production, and label AI content, since unlabeled AI is what people object to most.
18. AI is becoming a starting point for discovery
In its 2026 Annual US Consumer Survey of 1,554 consumers, venture firm Goodwater found that 19 percent of Americans now begin an information search with an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Among daily AI users, 37 percent start with AI and 32 percent with Google.
These customers may distrust AI-generated content, limit what data they share, or prefer human support for complex issues while still using AI to help them navigate the internet.
19. The human touch is becoming a competitive advantage
Braze found that more than 99 percent of marketing leaders are using AI in customer engagement. Yet 27 percent of consumers say brands aren’t maintaining a human touch, and 35 percent feel disappointed when AI interactions feel impersonal.
The brands pulling it off are, according to Braze’s findings, sometimes doing it so well that customers don’t realize AI was involved at all.
20. AI starts with a trust deficit
In its 2026 Digital Trust Index, a global survey of more than 15,000 people, security firm Thales found that 77 percent of consumers wouldn’t trust a company more for using generative AI, and 37 percent would trust it less. Just 23 percent trust companies to use AI responsibly with their data.
The fact that this comes from a security company instead of a marketing company should give you pause. That means every customer-facing AI feature inherits questions about data use and accountability before it delivers any value.
21. There is no average AI user
In a survey of 8,000 consumers across eight countries, Klaviyo found shoppers split four ways:
- Twenty-six percent are enthusiasts who hand tasks to AI without second-guessing.
- Twenty-one percent are holdouts who avoid it.
- Ten percent use it but double-check everything.
- Forty-three percent, the largest group, are still deciding where it belongs.
The data argues against a one-size-fits-all rollout. As customers sort themselves into different AI comfort levels, brands have more to gain from flexibility than from forcing every interaction through the same AI workflow.
Omnichannel engagement statistics
22. Customers don’t have a main channel anymore; they have a different one for every errand
Mobile is now the first-choice shopping channel for 43 percent of consumers, ahead of physical stores at 34 percent and desktop at 23 percent. This is a near-even split that means no single channel commands a majority, according to Drapers’ Connected Consumer 2026 report, for which 2,000 UK fashion shoppers were surveyed.
The starting point of a shopping journey has become “mission-dependent,” according to the report. One customer in 10 already browses for fashion using AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, while 7 percent have made purchases based on those recommendations.
23. Customers expect the brand to remember the last conversation, wherever it happened
About three-quarters of consumers (74 percent) say having to repeat themselves is very frustrating, and they read it as a sign the brand doesn’t value their time. The data comes from Zendesk’s CX Trends 2026 report, a 22-country survey of more than 6,000 consumers that found people now expect to pick up a conversation where they left off, regardless of which channel they used or how much time has passed.
The expectation is in-context memory; customers increasingly assume the brand knows what they told it five minutes ago.
24. Most brands are talking in four places at once
Of the 628 billion business messages Infobip moved across its platform in 2025, 97.7 percent went to customers whom a brand was reaching on two or more channels. A quarter of those messages, which was the highest proportion of interactions, came from brands running four channels at once. More traffic flowed through five-channel setups than through two.
Volume on its own isn’t coordination, though, and Infobip draws that line: Running four channels is multichannel; syncing them so the customer gets one consistent thread is harder.
25. The best channel depends on the moment
Email still gets opened. The global open rate is about 55 percent. However, it rarely gets clicked, with click rate sitting at 3.7 percent. SMS clicks at 25.7 percent, seven times email’s rate, and WhatsApp lands near 51 percent. Dotdigital pulled those figures from a year of email, SMS, and WhatsApp campaigns across 43 industries.
The spread indicates a division of labor. Email is where customers browse, SMS is where they act, and WhatsApp is where they talk back.
26. The best moment to engage is often mid-task
The advantage of an in-app message is context, because it reaches the customer mid-action, when what they’re doing is the strongest signal of what they want. MoEngage found that for European retailers, in-app messages tied to where a customer is in their journey converted 2.8 times better than generic broadcasts.
The strongest signals increasingly come from behavior rather than profiles. A customer revisiting a page or stalling at a particular step is already telling you what they need next.
27. Customers increasingly want to talk to brands the way they talk to people
Across 22 markets, 73.3 percent of customers say they’d rather message a business than reach it through traditional channels, according to a Meta-commissioned Kantar survey.
A message thread sets an expectation a marketing email never did: that someone’s on the other end, and that a reply is coming. Once the conversation starts, silence is much more noticeable.
This is where conversational AI tools come in. Jotform’s AI Chatbot for WhatsApp, for instance, trains on a business’s own FAQs and documents to handle routine questions about orders, returns, or scheduling in the moment, so the human team is free for the conversations that need them.
Customer feedback statistics and customer engagement metrics
28. Tracking conversions still doesn’t tell you if the customer felt heard
Customer.io’s 2026 State of Customer Messaging report says 66 percent of marketers now track conversion as their primary metric, compared with 34 percent still leading with open rates.
A customer can convert and still leave frustrated. So while engagement metrics tell you whether someone acted, feedback metrics tell you how they felt about acting.
29. The customer notices when nothing changes
Iterable found that 70 percent of marketers won’t change a live program even when their own data signals they should. The campaign keeps running as built, regardless of what the numbers say. So the customer gives feedback, whether it’s directly in a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey or indirectly by abandoning a cart, and sees nothing change.
Terry Anderson, Senior Product Scientist at Qualtrics, argues that the solution is to tell the customer plainly that you heard them and made a change, then show them the result. This way, she says, data collection becomes a conversation rather than a “one-way extraction.”
30. Speed is easy to measure, which is why brands measure the wrong thing
The metrics that are easiest to count, such as the time it takes you to answer and the number of tickets you close, tell you the least about whether a customer’s problem was resolved. Zendesk found that 78 percent of CX leaders now say AI is forcing them to rethink success metrics, even though 84 percent still consider customer satisfaction score (CSAT) to be the most important.
The report points to a shift from speed and volume toward resolution: whether the issue was fixed the first time and stayed fixed.
31. Personalization is still easier to launch than measure
There is a more blunt problem underneath the argument about which metrics to track: Most teams cannot determine impact reliably. According to StackAdapt’s 2026 State of Personalization report, 77 percent of agencies said quantifying and communicating the results of personalized campaigns is still a challenge.
A team that can’t tie a campaign to an outcome can’t defend its budget and can’t tell a good year from a lucky one.
Better customer engagement starts with Jotform
You don’t need a new platform to act on any of these customer engagement trends. You need a fast way to ask customers what’s working and a way to make sure the answer reaches someone who’ll do something about it.
- Start where customers are telling you they’re frustrated: Send a customer feedback survey after a purchase, support interaction, onboarding milestone, cancellation, or renewal. The closer the question is to the experience, the more useful the answer tends to be.
- Make the questions smarter, then act on what comes back: Jotform’s conditional logic lets you adapt to each response; a detractor gets asked what went wrong, while a promoter gets asked what to double down on.
- On AI, take the customer’s position literally: They’ll use it, they don’t fully trust it, and they can tell when its purpose is cost-cutting. Use it for routing, summaries, and instant answers. Keep the human handoff visible.
- Close the customer feedback loop: Jotform’s integrations push responses into the tools your team already works in, so a piece of feedback becomes a ticket or an alert. Automated emails and workflows trigger follow-up the moment someone responds.
Browse Jotform’s customer feedback templates to start collecting signals this week.
Customer engagement statistics FAQs
Track outcomes tied to customer retention and customer satisfaction, including conversions, repeat behavior, resolution, NPS, and CSAT.
A few CX statistics capture where things stand:
- Seventy-seven percent of customers wouldn’t trust a company more for using AI, and 37 percent would trust it less.
- Around 19 percent now start an information search inside an AI tool rather than a search engine, yet only 23 percent trust companies to use AI responsibly with their data.
- Eighty-one percent believe AI customer service exists mainly to save the company money, and 89 percent want the option to reach a human.
This article is for marketers, CX managers, customer success teams, and small business owners who need credible customer engagement data to guide strategy, improve retention, and justify investments in better feedback, automation, and customer communication workflows.
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