Digital-first customer experience is transforming customer service

Tue, Sep 9, 2025, 11:31 AM 3 min read

In the last few years contact centres have profoundly transformed, steadily yielding to the broader concept of 'customer experience'.

Contact centres are converting from only having live agents to including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised. Central to this transformation is the digital-first customer experience, which involves customers interacting with an organisation through digital channels such as live chat and chatbots, messaging, social media, and websites.

The hallmark of a digital-first customer experience is data that captures the entire scope of a customer’s interactions with a business. A broad view of a customer is taken that considers contact beyond the contact centre to encompass all possible customer engagement scenarios (such as using the mobile app or conversing with marketing or sales) and to learn from customer interactions.

AI is one of the most powerful tools to assist with this endeavour: AI can analyse large volumes of data to uncover and interpret patterns of customer behavior, to predict customer needs and enable proactive responses, and to provide human agents with customer information accompanied by recommendations for resolving their issue.

AI impacts the digital-first customer experience in other ways as well. GenAI provides a customer experience marked by self-service capabilities and proactive recognition of customer needs. GenAI lets agents focus on addressing complex inquiries. For supervisors, GenAI provides analytics of agents’ interactions with customers. Agentic AI is playing a large role as well in the form of agents that perform tasks on a user’s behalf acting autonomously, making decisions, and adjusting its approach based upon new information or changing circumstances.

Organisations have kept busy building digital-first customer experiences because they symbolise what customers have been demanding since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic: one that provides access to a selection of digital channels apart from traditional channels such as voice; one where they are recognised regardless of what channel they use to engage; one where they enjoy a consistent, context-driven experience; and one where their thirst for self-service is quenched. What’s more, customers demand this experience regardless of organisation size or industry.

There are some critical steps an organisation should take when implementing a digital-first customer experience. One is to map the customer journey using tools such as Salesforce’s marketing cloud to fully understand how each customer is engaging with the company.