Embracing the future of customer engagement: Insights from Braze City x City London

As we reflect on our recent City x City London event, it’s clear that the landscape of customer engagement has not stopped changing. Throughout the day, we explored the changing expectations of consumers, the critical importance of building trust, and the innovative tools that help us create memorable, tailored customer experiences.

We heard inspiring stories from brands across different industries that exemplify exceptional customer engagement. From an airline that alleviates the stress of last-minute gate changes to a bank that empowers customers to manage their finances on the go, these examples illustrate how thoughtful engagement can forge strong connections. Retailers are also stepping up, personalizing experiences not just based on past behaviors, but adapting to changing trends and fashions. These moments may not always be big, but they can resonate deeply with consumers, enhancing their experiences and fostering loyalty.

After all, at its core, customer engagement is about active listening. It’s about recognizing important moments in the customer journey and delivering relevant experiences that align with their customers’ needs. As stewards of customer experience, we have a responsibility to shape how we communicate, connect, and drive mutual value with our consumers.

This responsibility requires both a deep understanding of our customers and leveraging advanced technology to deliver engaging communications and product experiences at scale. While our discussions at the event focused on what’s new, it’s important to also consider what’s next. As AI capabilities continue to advance, we see exciting opportunities on the horizon.

Looking ahead: What’s next in customer engagement?

Over the past two decades, mobile and digital platforms have transformed how brands connect with customers and how consumers allocate their time and attention. As our digital habits become more complex, marketers must shift their focus from sheer reach to relevance within the context of diverse experiences.

At Braze, we are heavily investing in three interlinked areas to enhance customer engagement for both consumers and businesses:

1. Evolution of Canvas: Our vision for Canvas, our no-code customer journey builder, is to continue its evolution into a smarter tool that enables you to operate at higher strategic levels while maintaining agility. This evolution will facilitate cross-team collaboration, testing, and relevance optimization.
2. Reinforcement learning product suite: We are developing a product suite that spans the reinforcement learning spectrum, from rapid optimizations to self-learning automated decision-making systems to highly flexible custom model deployments.
3. Generative AI and autonomous agents: The interplay of Generative AI and autonomous agents will be designed to enhance productivity and improve the engagement process, creating a continuous cycle of improvement.

Together, we are moving away from a volume-driven approach to one that prioritizes specific and meaningful engagement moments. With access to deeper insights and emerging direct-to-consumer interfaces, we can learn more about our customers and enhance their experiences. For instance, the relationship between consumers and car brands has evolved beyond mere transactions; now, companion apps that connect with vehicles create valuable engagement moments that strengthen customer relationships beyond the purchase.

Digital-native brands have understood this from the outset, making sophisticated customer engagement a key differentiator. For many other industries, this opportunity to deeply understand and interact with customers is a relatively new but vital area of investment.

The Japanese concept of ‘o-mo-té-na-shii’ encapsulates this philosophy beautifully. It represents radical hospitality—the art of observation and anticipation of needs before they are expressed. Imagine a future where brands not only gather signals but truly understand their customers’ motivations and contexts, enabling them to act on unspoken needs. This is the essence of digital ‘o-mo-té-na-shii.’

Final thoughts

As we move forward, let’s embrace these insights and innovations to redefine customer engagement, ensuring it is not only effective but also meaningful and human-centered. Together, we can create experiences that resonate deeply with our customers, fostering trust and loyalty in an ever-evolving landscape.

For more customer engagement insights and emerging trends for marketers, check out our 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review, where we surveyed 2,300 marketing leaders across 18 countries to learn what’s working for top-performing brands, what the future of customer engagement looks like, and actionable solutions to the strategic challenges they present.

Forward-Looking Statements

This blog post contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the “safe harbor” provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including but not limited to, statements regarding the performance of and expected benefits from Braze and its products and features. These forward-looking statements are based on the current assumptions, expectations and beliefs of Braze, and are subject to substantial risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Further information on potential factors that could affect Braze results are included in the Braze Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2025, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on March 31, 2025, and the other public filings of Braze with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The forward-looking statements included in this blog post represent the views of Braze only as of the date of this blog post, and Braze assumes no obligation, and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements, except as required by law.