Brands today are louder than ever, yet increasingly disconnected from the audiences they aim to reach.
A Sprinklr benchmark report has revealed that retail brands are more socially active than any other sector, yet 78% of these brands fail to generate meaningful engagement.
This gap highlights the growing CX challenge that visibility alone no longer builds loyalty, and customers increasingly reward brands that deliver timely, relevant, and human interactions across every digital touchpoint.
Joy Corso, Chief Administrative Officer at Sprinklr, argues that the main issue for many brands is their inability to create meaningful customer connections.
“Brands don’t lack visibility. They lack relevance,” she said.
“The brands winning on social aren’t the ones saying the most – they’re the ones showing up in the right moments, with relevance and clarity to create meaningful connections.
“Brands that listen continuously across every customer touchpoint, use AI to separate real signals from social noise, and act on those insights through a single, unified system are well prepared to win the moment.”
The State of Brand Engagement
Sprinklr’s 2026 Social Index benchmark report argues that most brands remain highly active on social media but continue to fail to create meaningful customer engagement or emotional connection.
Analyzing 1,160 brands across various sectors, the report found that many companies still operate with campaign-driven and siloed social strategies that prioritize posting volume over audience relevance.
The 78% failure rate for retail scored these brands a median Social Index score of just 1.9 out of 10 for presence.
Among technology brands, this sector is taking the opposite approach, as 76% remain stuck in “broadcast mode,” focusing heavily on product launches over community building,
With telecom, more than 60% had experienced negative sentiment toward the brands that were linked to customer complaints and service issues.
Furthermore, financial services brands revealed that faster responses do not necessarily improve trust, with leading brands often responding twice as slowly as average performers while maintaining stronger sentiment through higher-quality interactions.
Across all industries, Sprinklr uncovered that brands with stronger performance in customer engagement focused on enhancing areas such as cultural relevance and proactive community management.
The Channel-based Gap
Sprinklr’s report argues that this gap exists because many brands still approach social media traditionally, treating it simply as a distribution channel rather than a real-time CX environment.
With marketing teams focused on publishing promotional content, customer service teams managing complaints separately, and social teams measuring success through isolated metrics, many brands often struggle to build a connected and responsive customer experience across channels.
Furthermore, budgets are still allocated by platform and campaign cycles, while content calendars are planned weeks in advance.
When teams work in silos, this approach assumes that customer attention can be controlled through scheduled messaging, but social platforms now operate in response to unpredictable trends and experiences, with customers expecting timely responses and real-time engagement.
According to Sprinklr, many brands continue to treat social feeds as customer service queues, often over-prioritizing visibility and output and leading to feeds dominated by repetitive product posts, reactive support or transactional messaging.
Rather than spaces for two-way interaction and community participation, this reactive approach can feel overly corporate and disconnected from the buyer’s needs, leading to content that audiences instinctively ignore.
In sectors such as telecom and retail, the data also shows that brands that rely heavily on public customer service interactions can unintentionally damage sentiment, where complaint-driven conversations dominate the online engagement space.
Sprinklr argues that the underlying problem is operational, with many businesses still separating marketing, customer care, and audience intelligence into different functions.
As a result, this makes it difficult to respond consistently to customer moments across channels, limiting a brand’s chance to build trust, maintain relevance, and create personalized interactions that drive long-term customer engagement and loyalty.
The Future of Social Strategy
From here, Sprinklr argues that brands need to move away from channel-based social strategies and build operating models centered around real-time customer moments.
Instead of separating marketing, customer service, and social engagement, brands will likely perform better if they unify these teams through shared data, customer intelligence, and coordinated workflows.
Karthik Suri, Chief Product Officer at Sprinklr, explains how the report enables brands to better understand their audience and help identify performance strengths, weaknesses, and areas to build trust, loyalty, and long-term relevance.
“The Sprinklr Social Index gives leaders a more complete view of their social presence,” he explained.
“Revealing strengths, blind spots, and the moves needed to earn trust, loyalty, and cultural relevance.”
According to Sprinklr, leading brands are those that continuously listen to conversations across social platforms, identify emerging customer needs using AI-driven insights, and respond quickly with relevant, personalised interactions.
With these results, Sprinklr recommends that brands prioritize storytelling, cultural relevance, and community participation over posting frequency or promotional output alone.
For CX leaders, the report highlights the importance of creating a more connected and responsive customer experience across every digital touchpoint.
When customer care no longer operates separately from marketing or audience engagement, brands are better positioned to deliver consistent, timely, and personalized interactions that strengthen trust and improve customer perception.
This can also include using AI-powered social listening and customer intelligence tools to detect sentiment shifts, service issues, and emerging trends in real time, allowing teams to act proactively to customer moments.
In order to patch up team separation, CX leaders must also focus on reducing friction between departments to improve collaboration between marketing and customer service.
As consumer expectations continue to shift toward immediacy, relevance, and authenticity, brands that succeed online are now defined by how effectively they respond to customer moments as they happen.
