Salesforce has today released its tenth edition of the State of Marketing Report, revealing a widening gap between customer expectations and marketing execution.
Despite this, AI agents are reportedly contributing to measurable improvements in marketing performance and customer experience, driving $262 billion in sales during the holidays alone.
However, uneven AI integrations and weak data foundations may be preventing marketers from fully closing this gap.
Rising Customer Expectations are Straining Customer Onboarding
The report reveals that 85% of marketers believe customer expectations are higher than ever, with 69% saying that acquiring new customers is getting harder.
With customers now expecting more relevant content, faster responses, and seamless interactions across channels, marketers can no longer rely on generic, inconsistent campaigns.
Furthermore, customers are now also expecting meaningful engagement rather than one-way broadcasts, with 83% of marketers seeing a growing customer demand for two-way dialogue.
From this, customer dissatisfaction can rise from marketers’ inability to meet these demands, as 51% of respondents agree that campaigns sometimes feel generic, with many customers still receiving broad communications rather than experiences tailored to their needs.
With responsiveness being another customer expectation, 69% of marketers admit that they struggle to promptly respond to customer and prospect inquiries, with many customer replies still being manual to this day.
If a customer is required to reach out repeatedly or wait excessively for a reply, this can cause friction in the customer journey and prompt many to look elsewhere, hindering customer onboarding.
With onboarding being the first stage of the customer journey, relevancy and responsiveness are critical here, causing misunderstood or poorly engaged customers to experience friction or drop out early.
Rising expectations strain the onboarding experience because of gaps in data and execution.
Data Unification Gaps
Despite customers expecting seamless experiences across marketing, sales, and services, many organizations lack a unified view of the customer.
Marketing teams aren’t always as involved in the customer journey as expected, with only 58% having full access to service data, 56% to full sales data, and 51% to full commerce data.
Without integrated data across touchpoints, customer onboarding can feel disjointed if marketing teams don’t have full access to the necessary data that makes up the customer journey.
If marketers lack a complete profile, this can lead to less personalized campaigns, resulting in irrelevant or repeated communications.
Personalization Gaps
With personalization being another rising customer expectation, targeted content is important at every stage of the customer journey, including onboarding.
Despite this, many marketing teams struggle to execute enough personalization, with 78% agreeing they need more personalized content than they can currently produce.
With many marketing teams far behind customer expectations, this reflects the widening gap between what customers expect and what organizations can currently deliver.
Furthermore, 46% say they are lacking data on customer preferences, meaning many marketing teams do not have enough reliable, detailed information about what individual customers want, prefer, or intend to do next.
This reveals that customer expectations for relevance are rising faster than organizations’ ability to produce and deliver personalized content at the required volume and speed.
Without strong preference data, even advanced AI tools cannot deliver highly relevant experiences.
Customer Satisfaction Gaps
Rising expectations also create a higher bar for customer satisfaction, linking closely with immediate engagement and relevance, onboarding sets the level of satisfaction a customer expects to receive throughout the customer journey.
If marketers fail to provide a responsive, relevant communicative experience during the first stage, this can damage early satisfaction levels.
However, even with AI tools, 61% of marketers agree that full integration is still a work in progress.
When AI is not fully integrated, it cannot access the complete customer context, limiting its ability to deliver consistently and offer relevant experiences across the journey.
This highlights that most marketing teams are still in integration transition, with customers only likely to expect higher satisfaction levels once its deeply connected to unified data and operational systems.
Rising customer expectations reflect a demand for personalized, responsive, and seamless interactions, however, organizations struggle to meet these expectations due to their limited access to data and personalization capabilities, with these gaps being particularly evident during onboarding.
The Impact of AI on CX and Marketing Performance
AI is transforming how marketing teams operate and interact with customers, as well as changing how customers are experiencing brands, evident in customer expectation shifts, measurable performance, and how it gets work done.
Adoption and ROI
Many organizations are now using AI to complete daily marketing tasks, with 75% of marketing teams using at least one AI tool in their operations.
This is from previous positive results of AI driving profit after adoption, with 82% of marketers who use or planning to use AI agents expect to see moderate or major improvements in marketing ROI.
And this has proven correct, with respondents seeing a 20% increase in marketing ROI, allowing marketing teams that have adopted AI to target audiences more accurately, allocate their budgets more efficiently, and optimize campaigns in real time.
Furthermore, high-performing marketers are almost twice as likely to use AI agents in their operations compared to low-performing ones, showing a strong association between AI agent use and marketing performance.
Productivity and Insight
AI agents are designed to give marketing teams back time to develop deeper customer insights, experiment with new channels, and improve upon creative strategies.
As a result, marketing respondents now expect to reclaim roughly eight hours per week from AI adoption, shifting repetitive tasks to agents and focusing on higher-value tasks can improve customer understanding and experiences.
Across a marketing team, this increases overall delivery without increasing headcount, meaning reclaimed time isn’t just about efficiency, but changes how teams allocate effort.
AI agents are, in return, reducing execution friction and increasing the proportion of time spent on insight, experimentation, and customer-centric strategy.
What Do These Results Say About CX and Marketing?
Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report shows that as AI emerges as a key enabler of CX and marketing performance improvements, customer expectations are rising faster than these marketing teams can respond, with or without AI tools.
However, by adopting AI into marketing workflows, this directly impacts higher ROI, improved customer satisfaction, and stronger conversion rates for lower costs.
This also reduces time for marketing teams to deepen their insight and produce more strategic work, allowing high-performing teams to adopt AI, unify data, and respond to customers in real time.
