Simplify Your Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Strategy: Think Big, Start Small, & Drive Adoption

Customer experience is a must-have, dynamic revenue driver for your business. The pandemic has forced organizations across the globe to rethink their business strategies and realign them to be at par with customer demands. In this dynamic environment, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) becomes indispensable. According to Gartner, a DXP is an "integrated set of core technologies" designed to facilitate the "composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences". In other words, a DXP is a platform for overseeing digital assets across diverse channels, including websites, mobile apps, and customer portals.

Digital experience platforms play an influential role in amplifying customer satisfaction and engagement by capitalizing on the strategic ability of interoperable and hybrid technologies. According to a recent Forrest report, DXPs provide the “architectural foundation and modular services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate, and optimize digital journeys at scale — to drive loyalty and new commerce outcomes across owned and third-party channels.”

The emergence of a Digital Experience Platform for your business

Digital transformation has immensely driven consumer expectations, leading to organizational changes across various industries. To embrace this exponential shift and connect with customers based on their ever-changing demands, DXPs offer:

• Personalization by accumulating deep data insights into customer behavior, preferences, needs, and content consumption across multiple channels.
• Composable Architecture for seamless integration of existing and cutting-edge marketing tools.
• Agile Digital Marketing Environment for multi-channel content creation and distribution, with less reliance on web developers.
• A 360° customer view considering integrated data analysis, reflecting on their browsing and purchasing behavior, geographies, and languages.
• Compliance with standard regulations to protect your brand reputation, revenue, and customer privacy.  

A positive digital experience is and will continue to be the topmost priority for your customers around the globe. As digital channels continue to emerge, the need for digital strategies to embrace these channels rises each day. So, brands must draw upon the potential of DXPs to meet the expectations of their customers, right now and in the future. 

Harness the power of Drupal open source content management system to meet evolving customer expectations

Your supreme priority is to have an expansive online presence of your enterprise with bespoke customer experiences for each of your customers. Here is where Drupal, an open-source content management system, comes into play.

Drupal, with its vibrant community support, robust security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness as a free, open-source platform, is the go-to choice. It not only provides a versatile and reliable foundation but also offers enhanced and integrated user engagement for compelling digital experiences. Drupal stocks standard features that help customize, structure, and deliver content for dynamic web experiences.

Kickstart your CX and Digital Transformation Journeys with Drupal

You could be a large corporation, educational institute, government agency, or any kind of organization; you can rest assured that Drupal is a leading choice. Drupal offers:

• Content management capabilities to cleanse, create, deliver, manage, and reuse content under a single roof.
• Compatibility to deliver omnichannel experiences through all touchpoints like social media, mobile apps, email communications, etc.
• Accessibility to make your website usable to a sizable set of audiences with disabilities. 
• API-first approaches, which can also be referred to as pure headless CMS, facilitate third-party API integrations.
• High performance for low code.
• Omnichannel experience on account of content control over multiple platforms and channels, without hampering the performance of your website.
• Multi-lingual properties to support global businesses to increase user engagement with your brand. 
• Reduced costs as it is license-free and allows the authoring of content for all platforms under a single CMS.
• Content hosting capabilities to improve content quality and support immediate content updates to personalize as per the needs. 
• Flexibility to create and manage a wide array of content types like videos, podcasts, infographics, blogs, and others. 
• Robust Security against potential risks; Level up protection with regular patch releases and updates.
• Customizability to accommodate a wide range of your business requirements with over 40,000 modules, plugins, and themes to enhance your website. 
• SEO capabilities to simplify, structure, and organize content with keywords.
• A dedicated community for merging retrospects and feedback to function and deliver user experience for every new version of the Drupal release.

Nevertheless, Drupal has been capturing the modern needs of every business efficiently, but to match a continuously evolving content management system, you need to adopt newer and more efficient methods to manage and publish content across multiple channels. Here is where Acquia DXP with Drupal comes into the picture. 

Role of Acquia DXP with Drupal open source content management system

The rapidity of the digital transformation led the modern omnichannel experience landscape to strive for impeccable content management efforts. It advocates the need for investing in an open and composable approach toward content. Therefore, Acquia DXP with Drupal is a potent tool for facing the challenges of your digital transformation journey.

Making the difference with Acquia DXP

Digital enterprises will continue to face challenges, while planning to scale, across four key areas:

• Content

Your customers expect flawless content delivery on all digital channels. Thus, you have to make provisions to create, access, publish, and market content across all channels and devices with the same look and feel.

• Applications

Throughout the digital transformation journey, digital applications are part and parcel of it. Thus, digital enterprises should make the developer's life easier. They must have the flexibility to innovate, craft, deploy, and scale applications as per the changing market demands with maximum dependability. 

• Data

Undoubtedly, data drives the digital experience. Factors like rigorous content creation, application development, omnichannel marketing, and the involvement of various devices contribute to the increase in data. To deliver tailor-made experiences and accomplish their objectives, you need deep data insights from every segment.

• Security

With the acceleration of digital transformation, the only factor that accelerates with a faster pace is risks. The concept of ‘digital-first' brings in security management, compliance management, brand management, legal, and corporate risks to deal with in this privacy-conscious world. Privacy is the core of any business operation. Whether it is a new application or new customer journey mapping, you need to strategize everything from the beginning. 

In a customer-centric market, Acquia DXP powers your digital business with feature-richness, scalability, and reliability at its core, battling these challenges. It scales your digital experience with promising secure modules, personalized experiences, seamless integration properties, and user engagement for every customer. In addition to this, Acquia DXP offers:

• Composable Enterprise: Achieve maximum flexibility to accommodate MACH services and help your business stand out in this competition.
• Data Analysis: Achieve deep data insights to fuel customer experiences.
• Application Management: Support, develop, and scale content-rich applications.
• Multi-channel Experiences: Offer omnichannel experiences crafted for each customer and catering to their needs.
• Product Experiences: Deliver value to customers by creating compelling product experiences with no code, easy integration, headless, and SaaS tools.
• Accessibility: Offer your customers easy access to content on any digital screen.
• Agile Environment: Satisfy your customers at each point of contact throughout their journey with maximum agility.
• Composable Design: Reuse and design any design element across any digital experience.
• Integration: Easily integrate with all back-end systems as per your business needs.

Acquia DXP with Drupal helps employ the best features of trending tech stacks and enhance your website performance, helping you deliver comprehensive and contextualized digital experiences.

Strategize your DXP Roadmap with Acquia and Drupal

To empower your business agility with Acquia and Drupal, you need to employ a DXP roadmap that will help you to arrive at your digital destination. 

To ensure a smooth transition, here are some tips to strategize your DXP roadmap with Acquia and Drupal:

Think Big 

Set Goals: 

The popular saying, "A rudderless ship and a purposeless person are initially stranded in the desert sand," applies to businesses as well. You have got an application that claims to offer your customers their expected level of functional performance. But, do you have any indicators that indicate the state of service, and support your claims?

As a business, you strive to reach a broader spectrum of audiences. Therefore, to achieve greater brand visibility, you need to prioritize innovation to enhance the customer experience throughout their journey. This propels the need to set goals and service level indicators to deliver a unified customer-centric journey that incorporates various technologies, processes, and teams across the organization. 

Some popular service level indicators that can help to understand your functional needs:

• Availability
• Performance
• Response time
• Throughput
• Security

You can relate this concept of setting goals with CMS buying/implementing. While selecting a Content Management System (CMS) within your organization, your goal may be enhancing the performance of your website and if the CMS can address the security needs of your organization.  

Start Small

Change is inevitable and so are the demands of modern customers. Customers look for a simple, yet critical way to get served. Right from product quality to on-time delivery, and availability to performance, customers expect reassurance for every penny they have invested in your brand. Thus, to offer a mind-boggling customer experience and reach, you need to work on all the components between your service offerings and customers' expectations. 

To align your business with an amazing customer experience from your customers' perspectives, you need to:

Identify: Check your unique customer requirements by evaluating your customer experience with the technology, existing strategies, primary shortcomings, and the need for new technology.

To match the proximity of customer perspective, while choosing a CMS for your business, you need to ask if:

• The CMS can perform all the functions assigned to it?
• The CMS is easy to use?
• The CMS is responsive?
• The CMS is reliable?
• Are you enjoying using this CMS?

Evaluate:  A customer is satisfied if he can use your CMS beyond mere web content management. Therefore, to pace up with their perspective of customer experience, you should evaluate the needs such as the need for another technology, the need to update or replace, the need for improving the existing assets, and others.

In a parallel scenario, every vendor understands the emergence of the need to meet business and marketing goals such as security, performance, usability, etc. But, organizations start looking out for fulfilling their strategic goals such as the CMS's capability to deal with content intelligence, lifecycle, and breaking down of information and cultural silos. 

Align your business needs with the Acquia DXP: Once you evaluate the needs from a customer and business perspective, it's time you start looking for business outcomes. Check if the DXP addresses your business needs like installation, time to market, the total cost of ownership, customer journey mapping, and security compliance.

Your DXP should be capable of managing incidents proactively, enhancing performance, providing micro business-level observability into all the major components, etc., to have outcomes such as:

• Higher revenues
• Increased website traffic
• Competitive intelligence
• Content Management
• Digital Monitoring

To get a positive business outcome, you shall involve assets such as:

• Customers
• Business process
• Best practices

Drive Adoption

Engagement: Check your DXP if capable of content management and delivery at the right time, in the right channel, and engaging your customers in different stages of the customer journey. 

💡Tip: Before jumping to any conclusion, try the DXP and review, test, and run. Check if it addresses all the required functionalities and your requirements.

Cultivate Advocacy: Deliver content-driven experiences across all the touchpoints in a customer journey with more engagement and personalization with higher ROI and customer retention.

As the need for engagement, personalization, and content management will only increase with the constantly-evolving digital transformation ecosystem, your business will need solutions that will help broaden the spectrum of your digital presence from time to time and lead to incremental revenues. 

Are you ready to scale your business and build remarkable digital experiences? 

Srijan is a leading web development company that partners with Acquia to bring you the core functionalities and fine-tuned services for your Drupal websites. We help you to embrace innovation and deliver top-notch customer experiences. Talk to our Acquia experts today and elevate your business on a global scale.