Seamless customer experience with a digital experience platform
Digital experience platform (DXP) – this new term is finding favour among marketers. DXP is on everyone's lips, especially when it comes to optimising the customer experience. But what makes a DXP? And why should companies use one?
How the customer journey is designed is extremely important to strengthening the customer experience and optimising customer satisfaction. Yet it’s no easy task to align marketing to the new needs of customers. With increasing digitalisation, the number of touch points with customers also grows. For companies, that means consistently steering new channels quickly and flexibly. Omnichannel marketing is key. Plus, creating new touch points is becoming more and more significant to the success of a company. Most important of all though is the aspect of efficiency. In this context, the term “digital experience platform (DXP)” has arrived at management level.
What is a DXP?
A simple content management system (CMS) used to manage the content in the marketing department of a company. With a growing number of channels needing to be fed, headless CMS solutions then took a foothold.
A DXP is the next, decisive step to further simplifying content management.
The DXP connects the CMS with other components of the marketing technology stack. Alongside the CMS, tools for data analysis, creating customer profiles, data management, marketing automation, personalisation, and much more are integrated in one platform. The goal is to make the digital customer experience as consistent as possible.
Customer experience with growing requirements
Optimising the customer experience is something that companies often find challenging. They have to increasingly digitalise themselves and their products while still remaining flexible. Customer expectations change fast. Customers use more channels and switch dynamically between the very different touch points. In e-commerce especially, customers demand tailored content at every stage of the customer journey – irrespective of the channel they use.
To make sure that the customer experience doesn't suffer with all these channels, a DXP is a must for companies, particularly in e-commerce.
Yet companies should consider a DXP in other situations, too, particularly if they
- want to achieve better omnichannel reach
- need greater flexibility in terms of content management
- want to improve their productivity and reduce the time-to-market
- want to keep development costs as low as possible for their martech stack
CMS have their limits
Smaller companies usually manage with a headless CMS, but only up to a certain point. If the number of customers and touch points grows, even headless CMS solutions soon reach their limits. In the end, this impacts the customer experience and with it, customer satisfaction. So any firm experiencing growing requirements for content and touch points should seriously consider implementing a DXP solution.
Martech tools in a DXP
It goes without saying that an optimum DXP solution always caters to the needs of the company. However, there are components without which a DXP is unable to perform its tasks. As such, a martech stack in a DXP always includes:
- a headless CMS – the heart of content management
- tools for personalisation and omnichannel marketing
- a digital asset management (DAM) tool
- a client relationship management (CRM) system
- data analytics functions and marketing automation tools
- the integration of social media and tools for interaction with the customer
- translation functions and e-commerce applications
In addition, a DXP should follow the API-first approach.
Stable programming interfaces (APIs) are essential for seamlessly linking the different martech tools with one another. Just as important is an open system structure for flexibly expanding the DXP.
How to implement a DXP
A DXP can be implemented as a best-of-breed solution or it can be fully implemented by a provider. As a general rule, a best-of-breed DXP makes it possible to build an ecosystem to perfectly suit your own needs. However, it does require more work in terms of composition and implementation. A solution from a single provider has the advantage of quick and simple implementation, but this does make you very dependent on one provider and the features supplied. In practice, a hybrid form of the DXP is popular. It can provide a solid infrastructure (such as a high-performance CMS) and makes it possible to expand the DX ecosystem with other tools.
Do you want to find out more about the digital experience platform to optimise your customers’ experience? Discover more in our masterclass with our Platinum Partner Aperto – part of IBM IX – on the topic of “DXP – the latest martech trend explained in practice”.
