What is a Digital Experience Platform?

Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) are one of the new hot technology trends – it seems that there’s a story about a company switching to a DXP every week. In this, the first of a 3-part series, we’re going to explain what a DXP is and some of the advantages of having a digital experience platform for your business.

For years, companies have relied on Content Management Systems (CMS) to help integrate their website content. While a CMS is a great tool for streamlining the uploading of different types of content, without integrations it’s basically a one trick pony. You can’t personalize the website homepage for a user who goes to the website of their insurance company during the day, or opens the mobile app at midnight from the side of the road to highlight the make a claim process. For that kind of personalization, you’d need a Web Experience Management (WEM) system – that allows you to build out personas and have different versions of the website for different user types.

If you are able to identify different persona groups in your customer base, you can then personalize interactions. Continuing the example above, let’s say you’re a customer who has explored an insurance website before and looked at details around car insurance. Using persona-based personalization, we’ve identified you as a person who is interested in car insurance. And then the next time you visit the website, the homepage can have content that’s swapped out specifically talking about car insurance, to help you with your decision. Now let’s say you’ve purchased car insurance from this company and you’re all set up and you’ve downloaded the mobile app. And then one late evening on your commute home, your car breaks down. Using location-based, or time-based personalization, when you open the app we can see that you’re not at home, and can float out the “Make a Claim” feature of the app, front and center on the homepage, just in case you need it.

The problem with WEM systems is that they are limited in scope. They were primarily designed from a marketing perspective, so they didn’t integrate with the Customer Relationship Management software often used by sales departments. Without custom integrations for each siloed system, the data has to be manually extracted and applied – which takes a lot of time and resources. Even custom integrations aren’t an easy solution as each one has to be built by a developer and managed through any changes with the constituent parts. A DXP solves the issue of siloed components by being a one stop shop for all of the various systems a company may have that relate to their customers and products.

DXPs differ from Content Management Systems and even Web Experience Management systems through their ability to integrate with multiple existing, legacy, and related (or adjacent) technologies to deliver an experience that is unified, continuous, and optimized. Which is a fancy way of saying that a DXP allows an integrative experience across multiple digital touchpoints. So the social media that customers use to connect with a brand, the email marketing program, the online store and ordering system, and the customer care system are all connected and can be updated in one place. There is a lot of work upfront when creating a DXP, but you can get exactly what you need – no more, no less.

Some of the advantages of using a Digital Experience Platform include:

1. Actionable Insights: The DXP integrates all of the channels – in store sales, digital billboards, mobile devices, e-commerce, etc. and allows a company to use the data to inform their next move. A customer service representative will have the customer’s entire history as they get on the call. The sales team will be able to see the interests and lead score of a potential customer before the sales call and tailor their pitch accordingly.
2. Become More Customer-Centric: Today’s best performing companies are providing superior customer experiences. By integrating a DXP with the internal systems the company is already using, you can visualize the customer journey, identify any potential pain points, and correct them – putting the customer first.
3. Optimal Content Utilization: Allowing content managers to swap out from a bank of preexisting content that is used across other touchpoints that are deemed relevant to the user. Getting a personalized message for that persona without recreating assets that might already exist.
4. Integrating New Solutions: With custom integrations to traditional CMS or WEM platforms there’s a disincentive to adapt to new tools because every change will require a new integration to be built which could take a lot of time and money if it needs to integrate with several current solutions. With a DXP everything is already connected so you can change things once and have them work with all the other solutions you’re using.

A DXP is expensive with licensing being just one of the fixed costs, and implementation and maintenance being another, but when you consider the potential benefits to the business over the long term, the cost can certainly be worth it.

In the second part of our series on Digital Experience Platforms, we’ll be taking a look at how Y approaches DXPs. The third part will discuss some feature callouts from DXPs that we think are game changers!

Ready to learn more about how a Digital Experience Platform could transform your business? Contact us today.