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In recent years, digital technologies have brought the important changes and impacted on individuals, organizations, society, and national level. Digital technologies are defined as information system, social media, mobile, analytics or embedded devices, Internet of Things and connectivity, blockchain technology, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence and argumentation. 

At the individual level, digital technologies change the ways of interaction between people and people, people and companies. Customers use more social network and mobile devices to in communication, access information, and actively sharing experience with other stakeholders. It is especially recognized in the pandemic like Covid-19 situation recently in which the physical communication is restricted It pushes the change to use more digital technologies in online shopping, smart working, distance learning. People actively use digital platform, like e-commerce, digital device as the main tools for their daily communication and interaction.

At the organizational level, the emergence of big data, machine learning and artificial intelligent, and analytics affects to firm performance by faster decision-making process. Digital technologies enable firm’s capabilities in collect customer’s feedbacks, comments, and evaluation along the way they interact throughout the digital journey. Firms may use the results of analytics by using digital analytical tools to create the products and services which meet customer’s expectation. Firms need to revisit their organizational structure, employee’s skill set, business process,  and organizational culture. As resulted, the trends of digital technologies trigger firms the transform themselves to adapt with internal and external stakeholders.

Technological change could be impacted on firm capabilities because it triggers the change of organization to introduce new products and service by reconfiguring capabilities and resources, performing organizational activities, and creating value. Technological change is the challenges of incumbent’s adoption because of its internal capabilities, organizational inertial. Therefore, it requires firms to develop their dynamic capabilities to explore new markets, domains that generated by disruptive technologies.

Due to these new digital technologies, the competition landscape is also changing drastically and reshaping the industries. In automotive industry, Audi embraced the opportunity of digital technologies to break the traditional five to seven years product development cycle. They offer user human interface concept to new cars which focus more on user experience. Meanwhile, Renault has made a big organizational shift in sales, marketing by utilize digital technologies to focus more on 360-degree customer vision and experience. By using website, mobile and social network effort, the change the way to communicate to customers.

 At Ford Motor, they adopted data analysis to study the customer experience of driving car such as vehicle systems, fuel system, brake system, seating system etc. Based on the analytic result, they offered new products with optimized functionalities and capabilities. Similarly in healthcare industry, digital technologies were applied to make it safer, faster, and cheaper for patients. In hotel industry, Marriot Hotel utilized the new digital technologies to change the customer experience and make them feel like home. In summary, some companies have recognized the benefits of digital technologies and transformed themselves to adopt with disruptive technologies. Therefore, they are gaining the competitive advantages in their industries.

It has been proposed the platform-based service such as Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS which affect to the fundamental ways of competing in digital markets and trigger the non-platform-based to adapt to new wave of digitalization. The rapid change of digitalization is affecting not only the competitive landscape in products and services but also the talents market and it motivates the new generation workers to find the working opportunities in digital workplace.

Technological changes have resulted in a hyperconnected world that it shifts away the single ownership to shared ownership as the availability of information allowing people to access  for cocreating brand meanings and experiences. Digital technologies drastically impact on customer behaviors who are using social network or mobile in communication and access information. They become more actively in participating and sharing with stakeholder via digital touch points. Customers become IT experts in accessing and sharing information over the platform-based service. It may influence the buying decision based on comment and rating over social network. They are actively participating in the integration with stakeholders through the multiple channels and media in more complex digital customer journeys and digital touch points become important parts for incumbents to communicate with their customers. The willingness-to-pay customers are more strongly connected to community participation than to the volume of content consumption and they tends to trust the evaluation via social network.

Incumbents are improving the interactions between companies and consumers through multiple touch points of digital customer journey by using social network (e.g. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter). Recently, it was introduced the concept social customer journey to explain the importance of social influences on the purchased behavior throughout the journey in both positive and negative way, for instance, negative customer reviews or social media callouts, endorsing products. It requires firms adopting digital technologies to leverage marketing agility to rapidly iterates between making sense of the market and executing marketing decisions to adapt to the change of customer behaviors. Due to the social influence, customer behaviors and experiences are changing and not equally important at all touchpoints. Therefore, incumbents need to use digital technologies with advanced analytical tools to clarify their customers throughout touchpoints of customer journey.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence, AI-enabled chatbots, augmented reality also significantly influence the integration between firms and customers along the customer journey. It enables customers to interact more dynamically and autonomously to share their experience in the newfound senses of control to access information and the ability to shop anywhere, anytime.

Digital technologies empower customers to interact differently and energetically at all touchpoints of the digital customer journey. Customer behavior and experience become more complex. Particularly, in the context of DT, customers buying behavior is moving from multichannel to omnichannel. The progress of customer through different touchpoints may be more cognitively, emotionally, or behaviorally inclined, depending on a host of situational (e.g., cultural, social, and political) and technological factors .Indeed, incumbents need to find a way to capture, analyze, and use data and information collected from customers along the customer journey by using digital technologies to understand the changing motivations, decision heuristics, and satisfaction assessments of customers.

DT enables firms reinventing new business model, business activities, and processes to create and capture value. There are the relationship between customer experience, customer behavior and business model innovation. Therefore, customer behavior is an important factor influencing the transformational journey of incumbent firm.