A digital experience is the user's interaction with a digital touchpoint, which could be a website, mobile application, social media platforms, IoT devices, and so on. The goal of a digital experience is to provide a unified and optimized experience across the entire customer lifecycle and all channels of interaction. A digital experience is not limited to just delivering content and managing customer interactions across different digital channels and platforms, but also about connecting experiences across them.
Experience is an important driver of brand loyalty with 80% of customers indicating they have switched brands because of poor customer experience. In today's technology-driven world, the proliferation of digital touchpoints has made it challenging for enterprises to provide a consistent user experience across multiple channels and platforms. With the global average number of devices and connections per person expected to reach 3.6 by 2023, the need for a unified customer experience across all digital touchpoints will become even more important.
That's when a DXP comes into play. A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a technology platform that combines multiple digital marketing tools and platforms into one package to help enterprises deliver the best possible digital customer experience.
What is a digital experience platform (DXP)?
DXP is an integrated set of tools and technologies that enable enterprises to offer their diverse audience base a personalized and consistent experience across many digital touchpoints. DXP is an evolution of web content management (WCM) and it includes a traditional content management system as one of its components. The additional components that make up a DXP are digital asset management (DAM), eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), insights and analytics, personalization and automation, product information management (PIM), and APIs and integrations.
Why does the digital experience platform (DXP) matter in your digital transformation journey?
Digital transformation is the second phase of IT-enabled business transformation with customer experience as the key driving force. It is a paradigm shift from traditional product centricity to customer centricity powered by digital platforms. DXP can accelerate your enterprise digital transformation journey in the following ways:
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Improve Omnichannel experience
According to research, 90% of customers want brands to offer an omnichannel service. DXPs connect and synchronize various digital channels and platforms that improve omnichannel experiences for your customers. The proliferation of digital channels and devices means that an increasing number of customer digital touchpoints necessitates optimized content management and delivery for a uniform experience. Even as your customers move across channels using various devices, you can still offer a seamless experience with DXP.
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Data-driven marketing and customer engagement strategies
DXPs enables you to track customer interactions across all digital touchpoints and extract data that can help you to understand your customers much better. The analytical capabilities of the DXP will help you to leverage customer demographic, transactional, and campaign data, along with other information to drive your marketing and customer engagement strategies. It enables you to continuously optimize experiences, leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. -
Personalized experiences
DXPs enables organizations to connect customer data across different functions and departments. It breaks down organizational silos to facilitate collaboration between departments to improve customer responsiveness and deliver personalized experiences at scale.
How to know if you need a digital experience platform (DXP)?
If you intend to create a unified customer journey that spans multiple channels, platforms, and devices, then DXP will help you achieve such an objective. However, DXP implementation requires proper assessment by using some of the following business and technology criteria:
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The high number of digital customer touchpoints
If your business provides customers with multiple digital touchpoints to connect with the brand, a DXP can help you to deliver and update different content types to these touchpoints seamlessly.
Alternatively, if you want to expand your marketing and sales activities to more online channels and platforms, thereby increasing the number of digital customer touchpoints, then a DXP is a viable solution to consider.
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Inconsistent branding and messaging challenges
Your business has been facing inconsistent branding and messaging challenges due to lack of a centralized campaign management. If you have been creating separate campaigns for each channel, you can now deliver consistent messages across multiple channels through a DXP. A DXP enables you to draw from a centralized pool of content that can be leveraged across different marketing and sales channels.
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Collect and consolidate customer data across platforms for actionable insights
A ton of customer data is generated from different channels and platforms. To leverage such data and extract actionable insights, which can drive your marketing and sales campaigns, you must accumulate and merge customer data. A DXP enables you to dynamically collect and consolidate real-time data from multiple platforms for robust reporting and analytics. A DXP will also help you to precisely target specific customers for a given product or campaign through effective utilization of the available customer data. -
Deliver personalized user experiences
A DXP can help you to deliver personalized user experiences through better segmenting and targeting. A DXP enables you to analyze user history and behavior across digital touchpoints to create a unified view of your customers. A unified customer profile will allow you to deliver highly personalized experiences, leading to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Access product information through a centralized repository
Another key feature of a DXP is that it allows you to set up a centralized repository of product information and data. This will enable a higher level of team collaboration and facilitate seamless dissemination to your sales and eCommerce channels.
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Integrated technology solutions or siloed solution
The option of adopting an integrated technology solution or siloed applications and tools to deliver exceptional customer experiences is largely dependent on the scale of your business. You also need to consider whether your long-term marketing initiatives require a platform with an integrated set of tools or if point solutions will suffice.
What is the difference between DXP, CMS, and WEM?
CMS is the traditional platform that enabled businesses and individuals to manage content for their online presence, which was essentially a website in the initial days of the internet. As the internet evolved, an enterprise online presence spanning multiple channels and platforms led to the emergence of WEM systems. DXP further builds on the CMS and WEM functionality to provide an integrated platform to deliver consistent and personalized experiences across digital touchpoints.
Content management is at the core of all three platforms, however, there are a few differences:
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Content Management Systems (CMS)
CMS started as a software platform to automate tasks to publish and manage content online. As content type and volume increased, CMS also evolved to enable users to create, organize, and deliver different content for a variety of applications such as websites, mobile applications, and other online platforms.
Traditional or coupled CMS enabled businesses to create simple websites while the decoupled CMS separated the back-end and front-end to simplify content management. The headless CMS also separates the back-end and front end, but it doesn't have a fixed front end. The information is delivered through an API to various front-end channels. As CMS integration with other enterprise systems became important, open-source CMS gained prominence.
As digital channels became integral to the brand's success, Web Experience Management (WEM) emerged to meet the enterprise's needs for maintaining an overall online customer experience across multiple platforms and devices.
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Web Experience Management (WEM)
As the enterprise expanded its online presence across multiple channels, it had to share not only content, but also elements like forms, and applications. The systems gave the enterprise the ability to collect more granular user data to drive personalization. These systems introduced rule-based personalization to the online experience and gave the ability to collect user behavior data, define personas, and create and deliver unique content to the targeted audience. -
Digital Experience Platforms (DXP)
DXP is not limited to content but also enables the sharing of all types of digital assets across different digital touchpoints. The key driving force towards DXP adoption is its ability to offer customers a holistically connected experience, where every interaction with any touchpoint is leveraged to optimize the next interaction. Artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, built into the platform, facilitate optimization and a higher degree of personalization.
How Acquia Open DXP nurtures and facilitates lasting customer relationships?
Brands create tremendous amounts of content, which is crucial in the delivery of personalized digital experiences. Acquia's traditional strength in managing textual website content has been augmented with its acquisition of Widen, DAM, and PIM software companies. It provides a strong foundation for collaboration, and control of the full digital content lifecycle and enables marketers to offer rich personalized experiences to customers, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Acquia has added enterprise-grade, cloud-native DAM and PIM capabilities to its Open DX platform. Acquia DAM enables marketers to manage content versions and workflows to ensure consistency across all digital touchpoints. Acquia PIM seamlessly connects product information and data from multiple systems, such as product lifecycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, to the digital assets and marketing copy, centralizing it to populate sales and eCommerce channels. Such combined capabilities help enterprises create exceptional digital experiences to match evolving customer preferences.
Acquia Open DXP’s customer data platform (CDP) tracks customer activity across an enterprise's various applications and updates profiles in real-time. It leverages multiple data elements to create unified customer profiles, which are further categorized into different segments. Marketers use customer segments from CDP to match customers' interests and buying patterns with content, and in the process, also drive sales revenue.
Why is Srijan your best digital experience partner?
As a digital experience services company, Srijan has a wealth of experience driving the digital transformation of companies from Fortune 500s to nonprofits. We can help you accelerate your operational excellence to enable you to achieve a competitive advantage and create greater value for your customers. Our expertise in innovation enablement can help you build a strong core of innovation to ensure that digital innovation is strategically applied across your organization, which will enable you to drive business transformation.
We can help you with DXP assessment and implementation services, setting you up for the future and maximizing your return on investment. For more information, get in touch with us right away.
