An Ultimate Guide to Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
It’s not easy to impress, engage and retain modern customers by beating the cut-throat competition. Every business is trying extremely hard to win customers’ trust by adopting new approaches and the latest technologies.
Today, tech-savvy customers do not make buying decisions just like that. They conduct thorough research and then buy the product that meets their specific expectations.
Implementation of Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps you drive customer engagement in many ways.
DXP allows brands to stay relevant to customers’ needs by creating, optimizing, and delivering personalized experiences. It also facilitates organizations to deliver consistent and consolidated digital experiences across multiple touchpoints.
In this post, I have covered almost all the aspects related to Digital Experience Platform Development. I assure you this blog enables you with exclusive insights into Digital Experience Platform Development that help you understand the essence of DXP for your business.
Table of Content
- What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
- Evolution of Digital Experience Platforms: Shift from CMS to WEM to DXP
- Types of Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
- Benefits of Digital Experience Platform
- How to boost customer acquisition and retention through the Digital Experience Platform?
- How does a Digital Experience Platform work with AI?
- How Digital Experience Platform helps you meet the expectations of today’s customers?
- Do I need a Digital Experience Platform?
- When do I need to implement a Digital Experience Platform?
- Popular Digital Experience Platform Trends to watch out in 2021
- Top 5 Digital Experience Platforms that you should consider for your business
- How to get started with Digital Experience Platform Strategy?
- How is Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform the right choice for you?
So, shall we get started?
Let’s begin with the Digital Experience Platform definition.
What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
The simple definition of a Digital Experience Platform is it’s a highly advanced Content Management System (CMS) that allows organizations to track customer’s activities, locations, and interactions throughout the entire buying journey.
With the help of DXP, companies deliver targeted content to the intended buyers along with extremely personalized and compelling customer experiences based on the customer profile, across a broad range of digital touchpoints.
Here is a definition from Gartner that consists of a technical point of view for DXP.
Gartner defines, “A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.”
DXP allows brands to develop and deploy websites, mobile apps, portals, and other digital platforms and continually improve them to create better experiences.
Moreover, the Digital Experience Platform manages the presentation layers based on preferences, security privileges, and the role of each individual. It enables you with the facilities of content management, personalization, workflow, collaboration, multichannel support, aggregation, integration, mobile support, search and navigation, and more features.
To learn about DXP in detail, you can visit What is Digital Experience Platform – A Brief on How can PIMCORE’s CaaS deliver Outstanding DXP?
Evolution of Digital Experience Platforms: Shift from CMS to WEM to DXP
Before two decades, the companies struggled to inform customers about their products and services. Later on, the Content Management Systems (CMS) are invented to help the brands in selling and promoting their wide variety of products or services. The CMS has allowed the companies to create and publish content related to their offerings on the websites.
After that, Web Experience Management (WEM) came into existence. It allows organizations to deliver content to eCommerce and marketing channels. It also involves analytic capabilities to understand customer behavior and serve their needs in a better way.
In today’s competitive world, delivering content across your different customer touchpoint such as websites, mobile apps, emails, social media, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality devices, customer portals, digital signage, POS systems, etc. is not enough. To improve customer engagement, you need to connect your content with the experience.
Customers use multiple devices during their buying process. Therefore, along with content, make sure you deliver connected, consistent, and continuous experience to buyers that helps them to make the right buying decisions.
To enable the customers with a compelling experience across all the channels, companies have started adopting the Digital Experience Platform.
Let’s have a profound understanding of each CMS, WEM, and DXP one by one.
Content Management System (CMS)
The term itself indicates Content Management System allows companies to manage content on desktop computers and mobile apps. It allows companies to create, manage, and track content, images, videos, data, and other collaterals required for online presence. Thus, it helps the companies to maintain consistency of content and voice across their different online domains.
CMS also facilitates you with version control and management as well as authoring workflow to maintain consistency in your large-scale global sites. CMS is also known as Web Content Management (WCM).
If you want to learn about the difference between CMS and DXP, you can visit CMS vs. DXP – How Both are Different From Each Other?
Web Experience Management (WEM)
With the emergence of new customer touchpoints, Web Experience Management was introduced to manage cross-channel functionality for data and content. It allows the different business units of the company to share information digitally.
WEM introduced role-based personalization. It enables you with greater insights into customer behavior by collecting the data. It defines the consumer persona and allows to create and deliver content more consistently across all online and offline channels to the target audience.
Through the Web Experience Management system, you can share content, logic, data, and other components across the varied channels consistently.
These systems allow companies to automatically create personalized, tailored, and cross-channel communication for each customer.
Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
Nowadays, it is quite impossible to gain customer attention through Content Management Systems and Web Experience Management due to the highly dynamic requirements of the buyers.
Digital Experience Platform allows you to create fully integrated multi-channel marketing experiences. Businesses can deliver the content to different touchpoints including in-store, online, eCommerce systems, kiosks, customer portals, billboards, and more.
Compelling digital experiences are no longer just a way to drive customer engagement. However, it is quite essential to earn customer loyalty and satisfaction in the post-acquisition phase.
With the increasing usage of backend applications, the digital journey has expanded. These backend applications are necessary for your different teams to manage their operations seamlessly and effectively. Companies need to integrate these backend systems to enable customers with a consistent experience from acquisition to consultation.
Gone are the days when digital platforms are required and used by the marketing team. Now, different teams of the company need to use digital solutions to improve their productivity, streamline business operations, and generate better revenue.
Implementation of Digital Experience Platform allows you to create and deliver a connected and consistent digital experience to your consumer-facing and internal digital solution.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) capabilities
All the modem DXP come with integrated AI and ML capabilities. It processes and analyzes customer’s browsing, search, and buying histories along with their demographics, interactions, and locations. It becomes easier for the companies to predict which product the customer is interested in.
DXP also helps them to design the personalization strategy accordingly. You can deliver relevant content and opportunities to the target audience while they are about to make a buying decision.
Therefore, DXP is a level-up solution than a CMS or WEM. It helps the brands to deliver digital experiences across all the intended customer touchpoints and on any device.
Types of Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
There are different types of Digital Experience Platform available in the market. And, all the DXPs are not alike. The modern DXP evolved from different types of systems based on a business’s specific use cases over a period of time.
Here’re the three basic types of Digital Experience Platforms.
CMS DXPs
Marketing advertising agencies and creative firms are involved in B2C initiatives. To perform these activities, they need a solution that has advanced capabilities than basic CMS.
These systems allow you to collect the customer data that is used for customer segmentation later on. CMS DXPs help companies to solve the issues related to customer acquisition.
Challenges addressed by CMS DXPs
- Targeting offers
- Generating interest and awareness
- Improving purchases
CSM DXPs are highly used in B2C business such as retail, fashion, etc. where the sales cycle tends to be transactional and short and target audiences are larger in volume.
The popular CMS DXPs facilitate business with a wide range of features.
Important features of CMS DXPs
- Web-based analytics
- User segmentation
- Email campaigns
- Advertising campaigns
With the help of features like analytics and persona-based segmentation, you can meet your pre-purchase consumer-facing endeavors such as demand generation, delivering personalized promotions, customer acquisition, and accelerating the sales funnels easily.
Some of the CMS DXPs contain commerce capabilities, while others offer portal-like features such as logged-in experiences. All these features and capabilities eventually empower your partnership and customer acquisition strategy.
Portal DXPs
Portal DXPs are primarily designed for B2C and B2B firms of manufacturing and fintech domain to manage post-sales CRM and customer support activities. The main objective of these companies was to earn customer retention, loyalty, and renewal.
This type of Digital Experience Platform also supports digital workplace scenarios where you can consider traditional intranets. Well, the digital workplace solutions are more dynamic and engaging than the intranet. Portal DXP can work in sync with any of your workplace solutions effortlessly.
You have the flexibility to integrate these portals with any of your existing enterprise systems and any third-party applications or software. Moreover, it allows you to integrate your corporate intranet portals to provide support to suppliers and partners.
Portal DXP enables you with a full digital transformation strategy that allows you to leverage the maximum potential of your internal and external resources. Through all these, Portal Digital Experience Platform Development help you create and deliver strong customer experiences.
Important features of Portal DXP
- Workflow automation
- Mobile support
- Content Management System
According to Forrester, the right Portal DXP contains integration capabilities that are important for the digital transformation of your business. The Portal DXP allows for the management of reusable modules and services when you need to evolve your strategy quickly.
Commercial DXPs
Commercial DXPs are highly used by retail businesses to push their promotional content to their eCommerce websites. It is also suitable for online shopping.
Important features of Commerce DXPs
- Inventory management
- Shopping cart
- Fulfillment
- Check-out
- Payment integration
While looking for a Digital Experience Platform, it is not compulsory that you will have these features built-in. But, you should pick the one that allows you to integrate these features into your Digital Experience Platform Development.
Generally, DXP is related to the content but they contribute significantly to your online commerce endeavor.
For example; when you launch a product on an eCommerce website, marketplaces, website, and other online platforms, you need to use content management to support the promotion of products in the catalog.
Benefits of Digital Experience Platform
Implementation of Digital Experience Platform enables you with several lucrative benefits. Let’s talk about them one by one.
Improve customer experience across multiple touchpoints
With the emergence of multiple digital platforms, it becomes convenient and easier for brands to reach their target audience. They are utilizing the maximum potential of websites, mobile apps, emails, social media, chatbots, and in-person interactions too.
Digital Experience Platform helps the companies to maintain their brand consistency across all the output channels. DXP allows you to utilize the personalization capabilities to drive tremendous customer engagement.
The advanced platforms come with built-in capabilities of data analytics and trend analysis to help you with customer behavior tracking across every critical touchpoint. Later on, it helps you to understand customer expectations and meet them effortlessly.
DXP is the smart investment for every business
To manage different business operations, companies need to develop and deploy different software.
For example; organizations use Content Management Systems (CMS) to create and manage the digital content, portals for content aggregation, campaign management to run various digital campaigns effectively, analytics for tracking customer behavior, and more.
Earlier, to address all these needs, companies needed to deploy separate software which required considerable investment.
Digital Experience Platform is the one-stop solution for all such needs. It allows you to integrate different software and applications under a single platform. It allows you to access the updated data all the time across all your systems. Offering an integrated approach, DXP allows you to develop a responsive application as well.
Undoubtedly, instead of investing in 5 to 8 different software, it’s a smart move to invest in an advanced DXP that enables you with all the robust capabilities.
Reduce time-to-market using AI
Today’s customers are getting smarter with each passing day. To meet their changing expectations, companies need to understand their mindset. To get insights into your customers’ needs, you need to analyze relevant data.
You can learn about your customers by tracking their contact information, social media interactions, preferences, purchase history, demographics, communication information, browsing data, and more. The study of your customers enables you with actionable insights that add incredible value to your business.
By integrating Artificial Intelligence into your DXP, you can perform this analysis seamlessly. The technology helps you identify important customer information from a large chunk of customer-related data.
The amalgamation of AI and DXP allows the companies to work on updated, accurate, and consistent information about the customers on the fly.
Boost business productivity
Generating better revenue is the ultimate goal of all organizations. This can be achieved only through an increasing number of customers and their retention. Digital Experience Platform plays a critical role when it comes to delivering compelling customer experiences.
The advanced DXPs allow you to utilize content and commerce elements to deliver a desirable customer experience and attract targeted users.
Additionally, DXP is a flexible system that permits companies to integrate their existing enterprise systems and third-party applications through APIs. So, when you need to introduce a new service in the future, it becomes easier for you to integrate it into the platform. This simplifies the business operations like never before.
Leveraging the content, commerce, and integration capabilities of the Digital Experience Platform, brands improve conversion rate, increase sales, and reduce operational cost respectively. In the end, all this contributes to improving your overall business productivity.
Address all the customer pain points successfully
When customers interact with any of your digital platform/s, they become your prospects. Their conversion from prospects to loyal customers is a journey. To create a successful marketing strategy you need to track their interactions across your sales and marketing channels at every stage. This is not a one-time job, make it your standard practice to pave the path of success.
DXP enables companies to have complete control over analyzing all the channels through which their target audience interacts with the brand. It helps you to understand your customers’ needs and challenges.
DXP provides you the measurable data that you can utilize in making a stronger marketing strategy.
The customer data helps you figure out the customer pain points through their interactions across different channels and design a customer journey mapping strategy. Based on your customers’ pain points, you can propose the relevant products and services to them.
Get exclusive insights about your customer activities
DXP enables the organizations with a single interface where you can have a consolidated view of all the customer interactions and activities across all the customer touchpoints.
This information enables the management team with actionable insights and makes effective strategic decisions. The right business decisions ensure the success of your brand.
This clearly depicts how the Digital Experience Platform is essential to stay ahead in today’s competitive business space.
By analyzing the customers’ interactions and activities, you can easily predict future trends and offer them more relevant and accurate recommendations. Thus, offering a thorough analysis of customer behavior, DXP helps companies attain improved customer loyalty, better customer engagement, and ensure higher retention.
Connect the business
Well, DXP is a very advanced system but it is not sufficient to address all your business requirements. You need to deploy some other software as well.
For example; you need to use an eCommerce solution to manage transactions and inventory, marketing software to bring customers to the door, customer support solutions to provide quick support to the existing customers, and more.
You can connect DXP with any of your business solutions. It uses APIs to organize and aggregate the data to define and deliver the right experience to the customers every time they interact with your brand.
Technical benefits of Digital Experience Platform to customers and organizations
DXP Capabilities | Benefits to Customers | Benefits to Organizations |
---|---|---|
Personalization | Each touchpoint creates the right value for customers. For instance; you have filled an online inquiry form to avail of certain products or services. When an executive of the service provider contacts you, they already have the data about you through that online form. | The flexibility of integration in any enterprise system or 3rd party apps such as CRM, marketing, social media, etc. enables brands with a complete view of each customer. With help of Machine Learning and an intuitive dashboard provided deep insight into customer behavior. |
Flexible architecture | Improved experience on all the preferred channels. | Provides microservices architecture and hybrid headless to deliver the same content across multiple channels. Reduces the burden of your marketing team for creating more content to deliver a better customer experience. |
Adaptability | Connect when they want and how they want. | DXP allows you to integrate and adopt the new technologies and connect with your target audience as new technologies introduced or digital maturity increases. |
Integrated control center | Experience connected and consistent journey across all the touchpoints. | Leverage the right mixture of customer data, analytics, and omnichannel content to create compelling experiences that improve customer retention. |
How to boost customer acquisition and retention through the Digital Experience Platform?
Personalization
Personalization is about improving customer engagement. It can be achieved through the right mixture of a great design and consistent customer experience. You can drive customer engagement by sharing this amalgamation across different customer touchpoints starting from one-to-all to one-to-one approach. It is the best way to move from a generalized to a personalized approach.
Digital Experience Platforms enable you with exclusive customer insights and behavioral data that help the brands to create relevant and individualized interactions.
Implementation of DXP solution helps you recognize optimal experiences for each customer and modify the digital presence of your organization accordingly.
Make sure your internal teams are aligned with the implementation of the personalization strategy. To enable customers with a higher value, you need to ensure the buyers are getting the same experiences across all the sales and marketing channels.
In most organizations, it is believed that personalization is the responsibility of the marketing department solely. Well, that’s not the case. It is true that personalization is driven by the marketing team but it won’t be effective without alignment with their teams of the organization.
All the teams are equally responsible for designing the personalization strategy as it is strongly connected with the approach, implementation, aim, and overall optimization strategy of your company.
Through the Digital Experience Platform, you can collect a wide range of data such as purchase patterns, sessions, customer profiles, website visits, transaction history, and more data. You can analyze this data, understand the customer behavior and accordingly enrich the personalization strategy.
How Digital Experience Platform supports personalization?
- Connects siloed engagements
- Allows for real-time decisions making
- Drives agility in marketing personalization
- Leverages machine learning and predictive analytics
- Uses location-sensing such as beacon-based technologies
Image credit: pimcore.com
Interoperability
To leverage the optimum digital engagement, companies need to establish interoperability between the systems. This is not a choice for an organization but it’s mandatory to attain the expected success. Management and technical teams cannot collaborate on organizational, technological, and strategic levels without establishing interoperability between the digital commerce platform and Web Content Management (WCM) technologies.
The proliferation of data repositories and Web Content Management can result in inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the product of content management. It allows the brands to deliver fragmented customer experiences.
Interoperability enables the IT leaders to bring different departments that are performing varied customer-facing functions separately such as email marketing, customer engagement centers, website management, retail stores, digital commerce, and more. It becomes easy for the team to attain a shared vision around digital commerce and WCM.
Basically, interoperability is all about bringing all these different systems together.
How to create an interoperability strategy?
While defining interoperability strategy, you need to
Start with your ultimate goal
Define an ideal scenario from your viewpoint where the maximum collaboration of systems, processes, and teams takes place in order to attain expected business results and overcome all the hurdles. Do all these with a customer-centered mind.
Develop a data repository
Create a centralized repository for all your existing data silos and manage the data of different functions such as websites, digital marketing, digital commerce, and more consumer-facing platforms where you need to deploy the content. Compare the cost required by WCM to align the systems with the cost of maintaining numerous silos.
Take actions on the data
Design a rough strategy for achieving a compelling customer experience and improved ROI. Check out whether your existing data silos effectively support that new data repository or not. Usually, sticking to the silos will not be compatible with your long-term growth strategy.
Advantages of a good interoperability
- Enhanced contextualization
- Improved relevance of delivered customer experience
- Cross channel continuity and a non-disrupted customer journey
- Improved user experience or storefront
- Address the complex cross-channel and marketing requirements
Image credit: pimcore.com
Advanced CMS
To enable the customer with the best experiences, the organizations have been constantly investing in advanced marketing technologies, innovation, and personalization. With the help of Content Management Systems, you can create and deliver consistent, seamless, and unified customer experiences through rich media and content throughout their buying journey.
Digital Experience Platform also helps them in transforming their eCommerce operations too. The platform helps companies to create requisite transformative influences over their target audience in two ways.
Contextualization
Contextualization in content is the key to personalization. Understand the perspective of your customers and deliver consistent and highly relevant experiences to them across different customer touchpoints.
Creating contextual content is critical. You can’t make the content for commerce so impactful if the context of the target audience is unknown to you.
Over a period of time companies have realized, in the convention processes, customers do not see any difference in their buying journey starting from discovery to purchase to order fulfillment. Contextualization offers bespoke experiences and real-time personalization.
Enabling customers with the contextual content for commerce, you can scale their experiences all the time.
Image Credit: pimcore.com
Analytics
Customers prefer to buy from the companies that identify, remember, and provide them the recommendations and offers. To achieve this, marketers need to get insights about the most valuable aspects for the customers using visitor features, create limitless segmentation to understand the actual reason for interactions, and analyze cross visit data and visit trends.
Image Credit: pimcore.com
To understand your customer, you need to be clear about
- How do customers interact with your brand?
- Are these conversations related to research, inquiries, and abandonment?
- What are the outcomes and learning?
- What are the other better ways to optimize customer engagement?
- Is it possible for you to measure all the experiences?
- Have you considered the multi-channel attribution model in order to impact every engagement across different channels?
Integrating advanced analytics in your Content Management System and portal, you can address all your queries by improving customers’ lifetime value and boosting customer-centric innovations at the same time.
AI-based content management
Because of the increasing need for personalization, B2B and B2C organizations have started adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. The popularity of AI is increasing due to its outstanding capabilities that contribute significantly to improving customer experience. AI also helps brands in addressing the changing needs of content management and digital interactions.
Consideration of AI allows companies to automate the process of creating customer personalization. The technology analyzes the different content journeys taken by your target audience and provides you insights into their preferences and interests.
With the data, it becomes easier for you to design an effective personalization strategy and deliver an amazing customer experience.
For example; a customer is not responding to one type of personalization approach. Integrate AI in your Web Content Management that automatically tracks what your targeted audience is viewing. Thus, you can test, analyze, and enrich the experiences on a continuous basis.
These days, most of the Web Content Management systems work as a data hub where all the data is gathered from different sources, transformed and merged with other relevant data, pushed to different channels, and more. It also offers functionality such as image tagging when an image is uploaded.
With AI, WCM allows you to create and publish related content. This content should be based on the analysis of customers’ sentiments.
Content-as-a-Service
Since the essence of multichannel increases for the customer journey, content becomes the top priority to ensure the digital success of your business. Thus, CaaS comes into the picture.
CaaS stands for Content-as-a-Service. These days, to drive customer engagement from different sources, brands need to distribute relevant content across different applications such as websites, mobiles, connected devices, smart TVs, and more customer touchpoints that your target audience is still exploring.
CaaS is a platform where content is delivered via APIs and made accessible through web services. It also involves all the content-based eCommerce and transactional processes.
Here’re the three main approaches for content delivery. Let’s have a brief introduction to all of them.
Traditional CMS
The traditional CMS is also known as coupled CMS. It has a strong connection between the CMS and the delivery layer. A presentation layer is also incorporated into this type of CMS that is required for assembling and delivering the web pages.
It results in a solo development platform and a standard presentation that restricts building more user interactions.
Headless CMS
Headless CMS focuses on the back-end part. It provides a set of tools to the content creators to get their workflows readily consumed in a CaaS environment. It does not have a presentation layer.
Headless CMS sends the content to the different systems with the help of APIs as and when your frontend system sends requests for the content.
Hybrid CMS
Hybrid CMS is also popular as decoupled CMS. In this type of CMS, the content is accessed and managed separately through the CMS API, just like headless CMS. It does not have frontend delivery capabilities if you need it.
Decoupled CMS and Headless CMS ensure that content repositories can be accessed directly from APIs. It also makes sure the content is delivered to the target audience through any technology and application.
Content-as-a-Service uses Headless CMS. It addresses the requirements of business users and allows for collaboration throughout the content life cycle starting from strategy to planning to analytics to authoring to optimization. It eliminates the content silos automatically and assures a smooth flow of content to deliver consistent customer experiences across multiple touchpoints.
Flexible architecture
Web Content Management architecture-related decisions are critical. It can have massive implications for WCM stability and performance. Every architecture has a solid vision, strategy, and implementation plans based on the specific business needs of an organization. The architecture of WCM depends on
- How a business is modeled?
- How the digital ecosystem of a business is structured?
- How does the business utilize the potential of WCM?
Most of the advanced WCM addresses the needs of rich digital interactions on the web, mobile, social and other platforms. To meet the specific requirements of the different channels, developers adopt an API-driven approach to empower the content management technology. In simple words, developers have started adopting headless and decoupled content management systems instead of traditional architecture.
Traditional WCM architecture
In the traditional WCM architecture, codebase and frontend display functionality are coupled with the admin portal and backend.
Decoupled WCM architecture
Decoupled WCM architecture conceals the admin or backend layer from the presentation or display layer. It publishes the flat files to third-party destinations with the help of APIs. When it comes to multi-channel dissemination, it helps a lot.
Headless WCM architecture
The specialty of headless architecture is it is specifically designed to manage API-driven experiences. For example; APIs do all the heavy lifting activities. Thus, headless is the best-suited architecture to multi-domain environments. Offering API connectivity, headless WCM provides businesses with multiple options to pull the content from different systems.
The Web Content Management platform is architected squarely depending on the kind of projects you consider under WCM.
How does a Digital Experience Platform work with AI?
These days, it is highly essential to deliver compelling custom experiences across different customer touchpoints. Businesses have to collect the data from multiple sources. Also, you need to deal with the growing customer base along with the increasing number of products and services.
How do you maintain all these criteria and improve all these?
Artificial Intelligent helps you to create and deliver innovative experiences along with personalization and generating hidden insights within your data.
The amalgamation of AI and DXP allows you access to data from every customer touchpoint and tool. AI helps you a lot understand and improve the customer experiences starting from acquisition to loyalty.
Contextual personalization
Companies can consider personalization through both role-based and experience-based. AI-enabled experiences offer a wide range of elements to the companies such as store location maps, regional contact numbers, product grids, and more. To apply personalization to these elements, you can design the rules manually.
For example; a visitor that visits a marketplace website from his home through his desktop has completely different requirements when he visits the mobile apps of the same marketplace while he is abroad.
When you try to manage all these micro journeys for each and every visitor manually, there are chances you probably miss some of them. Eventually, this converts into a business loss.
Considering Artificial Intelligence you can take the contextual personalization to the next level where you can consider customer behavior, device use, every piece of content, and the right conversion path to explore, learn, deliver and learn again. This pattern allows the brands to enable the prospective buyer with better experiences and ultimately generate better outcomes.
All the latest Digital Experience Platform contains the AI capabilities that help you to learn about your visitors on an ongoing basis and improve their experience automatically and continuously.
Semantic search
The search query of each buyer is not the same. Their context might be the same but the keywords they use are different. Thus, the concept of semantic search is evolved. It is quite difficult to manage these different keyword combinations manually.
Considering AI for the semantic search, you can deliver highly relevant results, for any query, at any scale. Let your users view the information they are looking for and engage them on your site or app for a long time.
Machine and man
The use of AI is not just limited to utilize the connected data to enable the customers with the information they are looking for. It also helps you to get clarity on what your target audiences are looking for.
You might have questions about how to measure the impact of the experience delivered. For this, you can take the help of some metrics.
With Artificial Intelligence, you can open the door to new business opportunities by getting insights through data and analyzing the latest trends and buying patterns. A thorough analysis of the data helps your team to refine their strategies to boost customer engagement, conversions, and retention by generating better revenue at the same time.
Well, the way AI collects, analyzes and delivers better customer experiences automatically, it seems like in the future human intervention is not needed for these jobs. But, in the current phase, human efforts are quite necessary.
Artificial Intelligence fine-tunes your search, empowers the personalization and provides you insights into your customers and market trends. It gives space to your people to focus more on more innovative ideas and creativity to create a compelling digital experience that enables you with a competitive edge.
How Digital Experience Platform helps you meet the expectations of today’s customers?
Today’s customer demands are quite dynamic. Also, before making a purchase, they have multiple preferences and criteria in their mind. They perform enough research before buying their products to ensure they get the best products at the best price.
To meet the highly dynamic and frequently changing demands of your customers, you can take the help of the Digital Experience Platform. Let’s see how a DXP helps you in engaging and retaining the customers.
Enables you with actionable insights
Digital Experience Platform connects your different internal systems with the varied digital channels. Along with collecting, managing, analyzing, and distributing the data from mobile, web, and social media, DXP also takes care of your in-store, e-commerce portal, customer portals, and billboards data.
Using the DXP, you can perform various customer data-related tasks such as data capturing, profiling, and processing. If performed collectively, all these activities provide a 360-degree view of your customers. This improves your customer service significantly.
For example; if a customer shares a bad experience with your product or service, DXP enables you with customer history so that you can understand their buying journey and service gap and improve the service quality. It also helps your sales team understand the interest and preferences of the potential customers before calling.
Seamless integration with other systems
By connecting DXP with your existing enterprise systems, third-party applications, or other tools and software, you can track buyers’ history, map their journey, and identify the critical bottleneck.
With better insights into your customer behavior, you can redesign your business practices. This helps you create and deliver an excellent customer experience.
Make customer-oriented decisions
Businesses need to use the tools and technologies that are best for the business and are required by the different teams to perform their respective tasks effectively. Digital Experience Platform is an open-source entity so it will be quite easy for you to connect it with any of your systems and solutions.
In the future, if you are required to switch to another tool and update the existing software, you can easily do it without being worried about DXP.
When you apply this to your marketing tools and software, it allows you to leverage agile marketing and improve personalization in manageable steps.
Leverage optimal use of content
Quality content is a critical part of any organization. Especially, when it comes to personalization. DXP allows you to coordinate your content and reuse the content across different channels and environments by decoupling the presentation layer from the content and its metadata. Reuse of the content saves your investment and enables you with better results.
Digital Experience Platform can be used by both B2C and B2B customers. Both B2B and B2C companies can create seamless experiences that bring loyalty, connection and meaning.
Do I need a Digital Experience Platform?
Every business that wants to get the benefits of a fully connected experience should consider the Digital Experience Platform.
Most of the companies want to continue with CMS and are not ready to move ahead with DXP. But, the adoption of DXP depends on your organizational needs.
The Content Management System enables you with the features of content management, workflow management, version management, authorization, and other features.
All these capabilities are already there in the Digital Experience Platform. But, the essence of DXP lies in it allows brands to connect with diverse audiences through multiple touchpoints.
Digital Experience Platform allows the companies to integrate any number of backend systems. It allows marketers to design and deliver highly differentiated and personalized customer experiences.
While deciding whether you need a DXP or not, I would suggest not just think about the current condition of your brand. Think of the next 5 years. Analyze what benefits you can gain by developing and implementing a customer DXP and how it supports and empowers your business.
When do I need to implement a Digital Experience Platform?
Well, you can implement the right DXP now only. But again, it depends on where your company is right now. However, you can consider the platform now. In today’s competitive edge, if businesses do not keep pace with the changing digital world, there are chances they are left behind.
Based on the digital maturity of your organization, you can go with a CMS for now. But, select a CMS that enables you with a pathway to grow into a DXP.
When your goal is to attain better customer engagement through digital transformation, you need to consider a CMS that can scale easily, has a wide variety of APIs for fluid integrations, and can be deployed on the cloud.
As and when your organization, teams, and digital capabilities get mature, you can add more advanced features and functionality that end up implementing a DXP.
But, if you are one of the companies that are looking forward to achieving tremendous growth, then Digital Experience Platform is the must-have digital platform for you.
A Digital Experience Platform streamlines and consolidates marketing and content-related processes and data. It also eliminates redundancy and ensures the ability to integrate fluidly.
DXP implementation processes can also be a catalyst for breaking down silos, streamlining processes, and organizing teams.
As we have already discussed earlier in this post, the integration of AI has completely changed and simplified the way DXP works. It has simplified various jobs whether it’s about automatically identifying the visitors’ trends, using natural language processing to tag content, modifying pages, and creating customer segments. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (ML) improves customer insights, the organization’s ROI, and overall productivity.
Organizations do not only need to focus on downstream needs such as data collection and experience delivery. They also need to consider upstream needs that involve collaborative content creation and digital asset management. To enable brands with an end-to-end content management system, DXP allows for fluid integration with other systems.
Implementation of Digital Experience Platform has transformed the way you operate the business. It enables you with the opportunity like customer-oriented engagement and risk of disruption for organizations for any size and any domain. Thus, DXP is essential to meet the changing needs of today’s digital space.
Popular Digital Experience Platform Trends to watch out in 2021
Brands that are seeking to reach out to the larger target audience have started considering advanced technologies like AI and ML. It helps the companies to create and deliver contextual experience and personalization content for the target audience to meet the changing demands of the customers.
The importance of the Digital Experience Platform is going to increase only. Thus, here I have covered a few most essential DXP trends that assure your decision for DXP implementation will enable you with amazing benefits.
Digitally integrated business
Connected data is the key to the success of any business. Through a modular approach, you can streamline operational processes and workflows across all the tools and teams.
Implementation of DXP provides you better insights into how the jobs performed by each team impact the other departments and the company as a whole. It also ensures providing cohesive customer experiences across multiple touchpoints.
When you pair your Digital Experience Platform with marketing automation tools, it becomes way easier for you to promote your products and services to customers without the need for constant moderation.
Customer privacy
Since the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is established there is a drastic change in the way the companies ensure customer privacy. It’s no longer an issue related to the marketing department. All the departments of the organization including customer support, sales, lead generation, and human resources need to change the data policy.
These days, it is very important for brands to protect and respect customer data privacy to win the customers’ trust. By ensuring customer data privacy, you can gain a huge competitive advantage.
Artificial Intelligence
Undoubtedly, AI contains so many amazing capabilities within it including highly effective data analytics. It enables companies with detailed insights into customer behavior and provides accurate predictions about the buyers.
AI helps brands in a smarter way by processing and analyzing the data and identifying the required actions. Algorithm dominating search engine optimization is one of the most common examples.
Voice assistance
Consumers are looking for voice-based assistance these days to simplify their searches. However, make sure, it provides the best values.
Integrate a voice assistance solution that allows you to create content that serves the human speech pattern. This type of interactivity will impact the UI design specifically to the web-based systems and mobile apps.
Be open for new tech trend adoption
To keep the business up and running smoothly, companies need to adopt the changes that occurred in the business world to be future-proof and run the business constantly.
The largest and latest change that has impacted the business world significantly is the adoption of microservices and cloud platforms. Both the tech inventions enable the brands and tech world with scalability and agility for processes and systems.
Adopting the latest technologies, you can address many business necessities such as voice technologies, data analytics, AI, ML, and more.
Top 5 Digital Experience Platforms that you should consider for your business
There are many Digital Experience Platforms available in the market. More options, more confusion. Here’s the list of some so the most popular and reliable Digital Experience platforms that you can consider for your business.
Pimcore
Pimcore allows you to create and deliver a seamless and unified digital experience. It manages, optimizes, and delivers contextualized and personalized experiences to each target audience across every customer touchpoint.
It enables you with a decoupled web content management strategy and headless content delivery approach. Pimcore allows you to build hybrid DXP systems to gain the benefits of both worlds.
With Pimcore DXP, you can ensure cross-channel continuity throughout the whole digital experience and customer journey. It contains customer journey analytics and customer data management as complementary systems.
It also allows you to integrate and scale any of your existing enterprise system and third-party application and software or marketing software stake.
Key features of Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform
- Web content management
- Headless content management
- Multi-channel delivery
- Personalization and analytics
- Web2Print
- Integrated PIM module, and more…
Benefits offered by Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform
- Leverage perfect amalgamation of content, commerce, and contextualization
- Create extremely customized, relevant and personalized experiences to improve your behavioral targeting
- Advanced marketing technologies streamline data, processes, and operations to address the needs of your target audience
- DXP can be connected with eCommerce systems seamlessly to improve the ROI of B2C or B2B businesses
- Leverage single source and multi-channel publishing
Adobe Experience Management
Leverage Adobe Experience Platform to bring your data into action. It’s an open-source system that transforms all your Abode and non-Adobe data and creates robust customer profiles. You can update these profiles in real-time and also utilize AI-driven insights to deliver the right experience across multiple channels.
Key features of Adobe Experience Platform
- Behavior-driven insights
- Intelligent optimization
- Real-time personalization
- Customer journeys at scale
- Real-time customer profile
- Data science workshop
- Query service, and more…
Benefits offered by Adobe Experience Management
- Maintain and update the customer data in real-time
- Deliver a unified cross-device and cross-channel experience
- Create and deliver improved tailored experiences to boost customer satisfaction
- Deliver personalized experiences through mobile apps
- Seamless integration with other customer experience management capabilities and technologies
- Store information in a centralized repository and eliminate data silos
Acquia
Acquia enables brands with a robust Digital Experience Platform that helps companies to engage customers, improve conversions, and stand out your business from competitors. They offer products like Marketing Cloud and Drupal Cloud that allow companies to create and deliver cutting-edge digital experiences across multiple channels, at any scale quickly.
Key features of Acquia Digital Experience Platform
- Autoscaling
- CMS integration
- Multi-site management
- Custom access management
- Workflow automation
- Multilingual content management
- Performance monitoring and reporting
- Integration of a variety of tools and systems, and more…
Benefits of Acquia Digital Experience Platform
- Drive tremendous traffic on your website
- Improve customer engagement and conversation
- Empower your marketing efforts by harnessing the potential of Machine Learning
- Grow your business by automating and organizing the customer journey
Sitecore
It provides a powerful Content Management System for small-scale businesses to start with. Sitecore enables you with advanced features like marketing automation, customer data, AI, analytics, and many other capabilities to define customer journey along with the personalized content across any channel, in real-time.
Key features of Sitecore Experience Platform
- Conquer omnichannel delivery
- Cross channels campaigns
- Experience editor
- Marketing automation
- Personalization with AI
- Seamless integration
- Omnichannel distribution, and more…
Benefits of Sitecore Experience Platform
- Best in class content personalization
- Powerful cloud
- AI powered marketing automation
- Holistic end-to-end ecosystem
- Unparalleled content management
- Insight-driven online storefront
- Omnichannel content delivery
- Single platform management
Liferay
Liferay allows you to build a solution that delivers fast, secure, and connected digital experiences to your target audience. It allows companies to enable the customers with personalized experiences throughout their buying journey.
It is designed in such a way that it works seamlessly within your existing business processes and technologies. Using the Liferay platform, you can develop intranets, websites, partner portals, integration platforms, and customer portals.
Key features of Liferay Digital Experience Platform
- Identity management
- Personal data management
- User management
- Content modeling
- Enterprise DAM
- Online document editing
- Automatic versioning
- Auto-tagging, and more…
Benefits of Liferay Digital Experience Platform
- Create unified customer experiences
- Streamline varied business processes
- Empower your digital strategy
How to get started with Digital Experience Platform Str
ategy?
If you think your organization is ready to leverage digital transformation by adopting a robust Digital Experience Platform, then you need to develop a content-driven website or an eCommerce platform.
A website and commerce solution is the customer touchpoints where your target audience interacts frequently. Thus, it will work as the strongest foundation of the Digital Experience Platform.
The next thing that you need to take care of while choosing a DXP is who your target audience is. You need to define whether you need a commercial, portal, or CMS DXP (as listed in this post only).
Selecting the right DXP is a critical job as you need to consider more criteria such as your business size, specific business needs, and customer touchpoints.
How is Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform the right choice for you?
Pimcore is an open-source Digital Experience Platform that is built on using a modular set of technologies. It ensures delivering personalized and targeted experiences to an edge variety of target audiences. It contains advanced functionality such as multichannel publishing and user-friendly single source.
It offers Web Content Management that allows you to manage and compose the content as well as deliver multifaceted and complex digital experiences across different digital channels such as web, mobile apps, social media, IoT, AI-powered conversational interfaces, digital marketplaces, and in-store experience, and more.
Pimcore’s Digital Experience Platform allows you to integrate different systems and equipped you with a consolidated platform for Product Information Management (PIM), eCommerce, Web Content Management (WCM), and Digital Asset Management (DAM).
The Digital Experience Platform of Pimcore comes with some amazing inherent capabilities like creating a tailored design for each of your websites while ensuring their control through a single interface in order to deliver compelling content and commerce experiences.
Leveraging the analytical capabilities of Pimcore’s DXP, you can create a unified customer profile based on third-party or first-party data streams such as CRM data, on-site user behavior, conversions, and more.
Tags: