Does your customer experience meet the expectations of the AI era?

Customer experience expectations changed already yesterday. A single channel improvement or campaign is no longer enough – new ways are needed to combine emotional intelligence, artificial intelligence, and data into one seamless service. Sitra’s recent megatrend map highlights how technology is merging with everyday life – and this requires companies to boldly build customer experiences that are more personal and precise than ever before. 

Read the summary (Generated by AI, checked by a human) 

• Customer experience has entered the AI era, where a single improvement is no longer enough – emotional intelligence, artificial intelligence, and data must be seamlessly combined.

• The union of emotion and technology is a competitive advantage: AI anticipates, but emotional intelligence builds trust and action. 
  
  
• A unified, shared data ecosystem enables personalized and proactive service, and AI strengthens this by enriching data and predicting needs.
  
  
• Building an intelligent customer experience progresses in three stages: understanding the current state, creating a shared data environment, and defining AI’s role within the service. 

+

When emotion meets technology

Customer experience can no longer be discussed without a technology angle. Artificial intelligence is not just a background factor – it is rapidly becoming the invisible infrastructure of everyday life. And this increasingly shapes how people make decisions and expect to be served. Customer experience should consider data, AI, and emotions.

An intelligent customer experience emerges only when human motivations and technology move hand in hand. AI anticipates customer needs, but emotional intelligence determines whether an encounter builds trust and leads to action. Together, these two components create an experience nearly impossible to copy. A competitor can buy the same technology, but not the same understanding of the customer.

Data is a strategic muscle that must be used

At the core of intelligent customer experience is a data ecosystem that doesn’t operate in silos. Customers do not distinguish between marketing, sales, and customer service – and neither should the organization. When customer information is unified and shared, every interaction strengthens the previous one.

The shift in customer expectations also underscores the importance of transparent, consistent data use. When data is reliable and accessible, AI can enrich it instantly and identify personal customer needs. AI also has an exceptional ability to predict demand and produce recommendations that enable the organization to act proactively.

One excellent example of this is the development of Chinese e-commerce, especially the speed of its service. Customer behavior can be predicted with such precision that couriers can be positioned in advance at specific locations before a major promotional campaign begins. And when the campaign goes live across different channels, logistics and deliveries happen within minutes.

Three steps to building an intelligent customer experience 

When an organization begins developing its customer experience during a technological shift, the process is best advanced without rushing. Below are three steps that help steer development in a controlled manner:

1.  Identify the current state from the customer’s perspective 

• Review the customer journey and define the critical touchpoints
• Determine where the customer experiences friction – and where value is created

2.  Build a unified and shared customer data ecosystem 

• Combine data from sales, marketing, customer service, and operations into one whole
• Make the data easy to use for both people and AI

3.  Define the role of AI as part of the service, not as a stand‑alone technology 

• Decide where AI supports and where it guides operations
• Design use cases so that AI assists the human – not the other way around

Digia´s model consider everything

Digia combines technology with human-centered business design to make the customer experience transparent, consistent, and intelligent. We create a unified customer and data view for the organization, build a scalable data and AI architecture, and help identify the development areas that generate the most value. At the same time, we ensure the success of a people-centric change process.

When the whole is built on a concept that integrates the company’s identity, data, technology, and change leadership, the result is unique customer experiences that create sustainable competitive advantage.

If you want to learn more about developing customer experience in the AI era and optimizing intelligent business, download Digia’s latest Intelligent Business whitepaper (in Finnish).