We've digitized the interaction. But have we digitized the relationship?
Why the next competitive advantage isn't another digital channel, but a business that understands the customer relationship.
The Relationship Shift is a three-part series that draws on my experience and perspective to explore why digital leaders must move beyond channels and disconnected customer data to build enterprise-wide intelligence that strengthens customer relationships.
I’ll show how artificial intelligence has begun to reshape customer behaviour and how CDOs and VPs can turn connected data, decisions and operating models into measurable value for their teams and business.
Part 1 — Digital Isn’t a Channel. It’s a Relationship. Why the relationship matters more than individual touchpoints.
Part 2 — When AI Becomes the Customer’s First Advisor. How AI is changing discovery, intent, trust and revealing valuable signals of customer behaviour and intent and signals your business needs to understand.
Part 3 — Coming soon
From Customer Data to Relationship Intelligence. How to connect data, decisions and execution.
Scenarios: Customer buys some new athleisure wear or dress shirt or in-store, then receives advertisements for the same item.
A bank or credit unions member starts an application online, calls an advisor and has to explain everything again.
Someone reports a service issue, only to receive another promotional offer before the problem is resolved.
These aren’t necessarily technology failures. Often, every system is working exactly as designed.
The problem is that each system understands an interaction, but the business doesn’t understand the relationship.
Customers don’t experience your departments
Businesses have spent years investing in websites, apps, CRM, automation, customer data platforms, data lakes and analytics. These investments have improved operational excellence metrics, including accessibility, efficiency and performance.
But customers don’t organize their lives around our internal functions.
Consider a guest researching running apparel. They compare products online, visit a store for advice, make a purchase and later contact Support about a delivery problem.
- Marketing knows what they browsed and clicked.
- The store understands their fit preferences.
- Commerce records the transaction, source and items purchased with it.
- Supply Chain knows which inventory is in stock and en route.
- And Support knows the delivery issue remains unresolved.
Each team holds useful information. Yet the next interaction may ignore everything the business already knows.
Now imagine the relevant context is connected.
- Support can respond without starting over.
- The store can provide more informed assistance.
- Marketing can avoid an inappropriate promotion and wasted ad dollars while a service problem remains unresolved.
The experience becomes more useful because the business is responding to the customer’s situation, not simply triggering the next channel activity.
It’s hyper-personalization at its core.
I’ve seen similar situations where decisions and solutions resulted in more automation, such as automating tasks rather than strengthening relationships.
Automation is often mistaken for relationship building. Addressing a client, member or guest by name in an email or personalizing a homepage banner doesn’t mean a business understands the relationship.
Efficiency matters, but it should strengthen the customer relationship, not come at its expense.
Customer 360 is a foundation, not the destination
For years, Customer 360 has been a central ambition of CRM and data transformation: establish a more complete view of the customer.
That remains valuable. But connecting information doesn’t automatically improve the next decision.
I recall earlier in my career in the gaming space, the VP of Data & Analytics always said whoever can figure this data problem out will have a 10-figure business. Fast forward 20+ years, and here we have the Adobe, Salesforce, Tealium and Segment and others all in the market with some form of CDP solution with an attempt to address all, or part, of this problem. And while these are all sound solutions for what they were built for – IMHO there is still a long runway for these solutions and the opportunity.
Customer 360 helps a business understand what it knows about a customer.
Relationship intelligence helps determine what that knowledge means, what matters now and how the business should respond in-the-moment.
That response might be a product recommendation, a personalized online store search, a service intervention, advice from an employee or simply no additional communication.
This extends beyond omnichannel coordination. It’s about making the right information available to the right people and systems across Marketing, Sales, Service, Digital and Operations, with appropriate privacy and consent controls.
The goal isn’t to know everything about everyone. It’s to use relevant information responsibly to make the experience better.
Change what success looks like
Yes, channel performance still matters.
Impressions and eyeballs, conversion, engagement, acquisition costs and campaign efficiency all help leaders manage investments.
But they don’t necessarily reveal whether the overall relationship is improving.
A campaign can achieve its conversion target while increasing communication fatigue.
A service team can reduce handling time without resolving the underlying problem.
Relationship-focused measurement asks different questions.
Are we making it easier for the customer to do business with us?
Can customers accomplish their goals with our organization with less effort (and still delight them)?
Are problems resolved more effectively?
Are experiences improving trust, retention and loyalty?
Can we demonstrate incremental commercial value?
These outcomes require shared accountability across functions, not just another dashboard, CSAT or NPS score.
The next stage of digital maturity
The opportunity in front of us today is not to replace existing systems, launch another large transformation program or enable the latest shiny AI solution.
It’s to identify where disconnected information creates friction, improve the decisions that matter and connect the teams responsible for delivering the experience.
For example, is a guest’s or member’s shopping behaviour and intent signals connected with your PIM and the ability for the business to react in real-time to serve up the next best hyper-level of personalization? (and why aren’t brand marketers talking about this?)
Businesses that do this well can move from managing individual touchpoints toward building more useful, continuous and trusted relationships.
Insight: Start by aligning teams around shared goals, priorities and roadmaps. Each function should retain ownership of its own priorities and initiatives, but a meaningful portion of its roadmap—ideally half—should contribute to shared, cross-functional outcomes. Without this alignment, teams will continue delivering features, capabilities and experiences in silos, creating disconnected customer journeys and limiting the organization’s ability to unlock greater commercial value.
And that raises two new challenges: the internal operating model (Unlocking Growth: Build an AI-ready + Digital operating model) and the evolving customer expectations.
Increasingly, customers are beginning their discovery and decision-making with AI assistants, sometimes long before they visit a brand’s website or speak with an employee.
While many of us already turn to ChatGPT, Claude, CoPilot, Perplexity and other AI assistants for answers, advice and guidance, this shift is accelerating.
As AI becomes embedded in more connected devices and eventually robotics, such as Tesla’s Optimus, customers will increasingly rely on these technologies to search, discover, compare, influence and make decisions.
(a simple example….when I go for a run, my shoes already tell me in real-time how to fix my posture – next step will likely have it recommending products or brands to help fix this posture issue ?!?)
In my view, over time these interactions could evolve into something more significant: an ongoing digital relationship in which AI becomes a trusted, everyday advisor or a new digital consciousness voice that people depend on to navigate their needs, decisions and daily lives.
Safe to say, these are exciting times. We’ve entered uncharted territory, challenging established playbooks and reigniting the entrepreneurial mindset to think and act differently.
But this isn’t simply a choice to innovate.
The disruption is becoming too significant to ignore, forcing businesses to rethink digital and the customer relationship—or risk being left behind.
That’s where Part 2 of the Relationship Shift begins.
Digital maturity used to mean being available everywhere and having the right technology and tools to help the business operate more smoothly and efficiently.
The next competitive advantage may be understanding the customer relationship everywhere—even as AI increasingly becomes the intermediary between your brand and the customers, members or guests you serve.