Attracting customers and keeping them happy requires companies to do more than just churn out new and innovative products. It requires them to build a deeper understanding of how customers will consume those products, whether to grow their businesses or enrich their personal lives.

"This is the essence of the 'experience economy, '" says Oracle Executive Vice President Rob Tarkoff, who is in charge of Oracle's CX strategy and development. Unlike the industrial and service economies, "in the experience economy customers are the innovators in the way they engage with brands and how they use their offerings," he said.

To cash in on the experience economy, Tarkoff advises companies to adopt artificial intelligence to instantly capture data about their customers, apply analytics to that data in real time, and then immediately present relevant offers. "That will be your competitive advantage," Tarkoff said.

But to deliver such capabilities, companies' "customer-facing business functions need to be silo-free, and connected to customers along a marketing, sales, service, and commerce continuum," he said.