What Is a Digital Experience Platform and Who Needs It?

Most enterprises are undergoing a digital transformation that includes their content, products, and services, across a variety of digital platforms such as web, mobile, social media, etc. It, therefore, becomes increasingly crucial to understand and deliver enhanced customer experiences in the digital domain. Let’s find out how digital experience platforms are helping companies digitize, understand and deliver better customer experiences.

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By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator, says a Walker study.

According to SmartInsights, 34 percent of businesses have a digital transformation program in place, while 31 percent are looking to start their digital transformation activities shortly.

When digitization becomes the core strategy and customer experience, a top priority, it is vital for companies to understand how customer experiences are shaped across digital platforms.

Enter, Digital Experience Platforms!

What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?

A Digital Experience Platform is a software suite for enterprises undergoing digital transformation, to support their business operations, deliver connected, consistent customer experiences, and glean actionable insights from customer interactions across diverse digital platforms.

Until recently, businesses have been using an array of technologies to engage customers and infer preferences from their behavior, browsing patterns, shopping history, etc., to provide personalized content. They have been using platforms such as Content Management Systems (CMS) and Analytics, Campaign Management tools, to perform these tasks.

Now, companies are looking for an integrated platform where various technologies and tools converge. This can enable them to effectively engage customers and better infer their expectations, therefore delivering highly personalized and compelling experiences across all touchpoints throughout their journey.

Also Read: Will Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) Be the Next Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)?

Digital experience platforms are software designed to develop and manage customer experiences, across all digital channels, touchpoints, and devices.

DXPs will mature to deliver more features that offer the flexibility to:

• Create a unified view of customers by tracking their activities, interaction, and keeping a tab on their behavioral, browsing, and location information.
• Build responsive and interactive digital services and applications.
• Curate and personalize compelling content based on customer profiles.
• Create and manage targeted campaigns.
• Enhance team (employee) productivity by integrating all information and tools in a unified platform and eliminating silos.
• Provide long term cost benefits of investing in a single system and reducing training costs of employees.

Who Needs a Digital Experience Platform and Why?

Existing digital technologies offer multiple products such as content management systems, enterprise presentation and search portals, analytics, campaign management, etc., which result in data silos. Personalization is usually performed through static rule-based configuration in traditional systems. Also, the digital transformation of legacy systems involves a custom migration effort for content and data with traditional platforms.

DXPs, on the other hand, deliver value with a single, integrated platform that has all the required capabilities, including:

• Rich, responsive user interface technologies for crafting engaging and compelling experiences.
• Context-based, dynamic personalization using real-time behavioral information, navigation patterns, and purchase history.
• Elimination of data silos for a unified experience.
• Flexible and modular integration of various services.
• Open, standards-based components to ease the digital transformation effort and enable reusability.

All stakeholders, i.e. your customers, end users, business teams, technology, and operations teams will benefit from DXP.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to know whether you need a DXP:

1. Are digital channels such as mobile, web, social media, the dominant way your customers interact with you?
2. Do you engage with customers on social media?
3. Do your social media interactions (with customers) influence much of your audience?
4. Do you leverage location-based technologies such as Geo-fencing, Geo-targeting to reach out to your customers?
5. Do your teams have to collaborate to exchange information on customers and campaigns?
6. Is your customer data spread across teams and platforms?
7.  Is your organization currently undergoing (or intends to undergo) a digital transformation?
    

If you answered yes to most of the above questions, you definitely need a digital experience platform.

DXP’s offer both marketing and operational capabilities. By gauging the level of transformation your company is undergoing, you can choose the features you need in a digital experience platform.

Also Read: 10 Best Content Management Systems (CMS) Software in 2020

Conclusion

As businesses embrace a complete digital transformation for connected customer experiences, it becomes vital to arm your employees with the right decision-making tools, relevant information discovery, automated business processes, and efficient self-service. Digital experience platforms have their roots in legacy digital systems and are maturing to help deliver consistent, personalized, and relevant customer experiences. With a unified view of customer data and interactions, they can help anticipate customer expectations, and provide personalized recommendations, improving customer loyalty and conversions.

DXPs are the new technological wave that will help weave a seamless customer journey, help centralize and share context and content across the organization and enable team-work and knowledge sharing to craft compelling digital experiences across channels and touchpoints.

What features do you expect from your DXP? Tell us on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook; we’re always listening!