Digitalization in Customer Interaction

Digitalization is revolutionizing services and the way value is created in customer interaction. The DICIA research project investigates how digitalization changes customer interaction, value creation practices and customer perceptions of value. Emerging technologies amplify the information intensity of products and processes, and increase the connectivity of actors and processes worldwide. Moreover, digitalization brings global competition closer to local businesses. Holding on the present ways of work and attitudes poses a challenge. Digitalization has to traverse company strategy, human activities and connections with customers as a whole. Digital customer interaction has the potential to resolve the productivity paradox in services, but critical questions remain unanswered: How is customers’ value experience formed in digital interaction? How to ensure that the keystones of valuable interaction known from face-to-face communication, such as trust, mutual understanding, and shared view of the value creation approach, come true in the digital interaction? The DICIA research project investigates these challenges from a global perspective in collaboration with Finnish service providers in three different industries, the ICT sector, the construction industry, and professional services. The expected outcomes support the international growth and competitiveness of Finnish service businesses.

The study is carried out by an experienced, multidisciplinary research group that combines basic research and applied research, an ideal set-up to bring novel findings that are elaborated further to enable repeatable implementation. The three research groups come from Aalto University (leader of the consortium), HAAGA-HELIA and the University of Helsinki.