A digital experience platform, or DXP, is a set of technologies that allow the design, control, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital backgrounds across different user journeys. Digital experience platforms can provide different digital experiences to customers, employees, business partners, residents, students, etc. The reason why digital experience platforms support all these types of customers is to ensure the progression of operations throughout the customer’s lifetime journey.
Dxp delivers presentation orchestration to combine the capabilities of applications together and create a powerful digital solution. Dxp creates its digital ecosystem with API-based integration and technologies. You can apply the XP to the business-to-consumer business model, business-to-business business model, and business-to-employee business model.
In simple words, your business operations will be more effective when you create effective communication with your customers or employees. Building communication is about speaking and listening, and companies often use content and data to connect with their customers. Using digital experience platforms will provide you with different tools under one umbrella that will help you create relationships with your customers. Your relationship prospects might also be partners, employees, or your target audience.
How does a Digital Experience Platform work? When Do You Need One?
While we are talking about digital experience platforms, it is important to know where this concept came from.
Where Did Digital Experience Platforms Come From?
Communicating with your business partners sounds like an easy job, but it might not always be true. To communicate with your customers only, you will have to provide them with website content, emails, software applications, IoT devices, customer portals, VR devices, POS systems, social media posts, digital signage, and so on. Everyone uses smartphones and smart gadgets these days to make purchases of the products they like.
That’s why it is not enough to show them content on one channel and ignore the others. To get your customers’ attention, you will have to build a brand. You will have to keep their attention by delivering consistent content across multiple channels. That’s why you need DXP tools to help you figure out how to meet the communication challenges that occur in today’s world.
Most products that are known as DXP come under three categories. There is a content management system, portal servers, and commerce servers. These categories give every type of communication room for improvement.
1. CMS-heritage DXPs: Marketing departments and creative departments collect user data that is anonymous and categorized into segments. This digital experience platform delivers solutions that create awareness and interest among the users, target offerings, and enhances the conversion process. This model is most effective in business-to-customer businesses or anywhere where the audiences are larger than the sales cycles.
2. Portal-heritage DXPs: In the portal heritage digital experience platform, you get to understand the factors that create loyalty, retention, and renewal among customers. With this model, you can provide customer services such as customer care representative-assisted solutions or self-service solutions to your customers.
3. Commerce-heritage DXPs: This model is used by retail companies to deliver content related to e-commerce. These products include inventory management, shopping cart, check-out options, payment integration, etc. Even though these features are not directly related to digital experience, an online retail platform still requires these features to ensure flawless interaction.
Using a digital experience suite for your business has numerous benefits. Let’s talk about some of them.
What are the Advantages of Digital Experience Platforms?
Here are some of the features that you can avail of from DXP that would benefit your business as well as your customers.
1. Integrated Control Center
It provides multi-channel content management and allows you to gather customer data. It also comes with an analytics tool that enhances your customer retention. Your customers get to experience a consistent and seamless purchase journey.
2. Content flexibility
There are hybrid headless as well as microservice architectures that allow you to distribute content on multiple channels. It also encourages you to create more unique content to provide a better customer experience on the preferred channels of your customers.
3. Improved personalization
The digital experience platform suite creates integration with other systems, including CRMs, social media platforms, contact centers, etc. Therefore, you can get every detail about every client that comes to your website. It also comes with intuitive dashboards where you can manage those customer data.
4. Future-proof adaptability
It gives you the ability to integrate the latest technologies, apply them to your business infrastructure, and communicate with your customers. It also gives your consumers the elasticity to connect with your business whenever and however they want.
However, there are some disadvantages to the digital experience platform that you also have to consider.
What are the Disadvantages of DXP?
After learning about the usefulness of digital experience platforms, here are the disadvantages that you must know.
1. It has a fixed set of functions.
There are not many extensions and templates in DXP if you compare it with content management systems like WordPress. However, still, digital experience platforms can help the customer with the overall digital journey.
2. It is Difficult to Learn
Digital experience platforms are not as easy to learn as CMSs such as WordPress or Typo3. However, DXP offers 24/7 customer support for all those new users so that you don’t have any difficulties following their use methods.
3. Complex
Digital experience platforms are more complex than any simple content management system. That’s why whenever you are investing in DXP, you will have to ask yourself if your company needs one to operate.
Before you implement a digital experiment platform for your business, you need to know if you really need one.
When Should you Implement DXP?
- The simple answer to this question is that you should immediately implement DXP in your business. The reason is that it will help your organization get wisdom into your shoppers’ expedition. Your customers’ journey is dependent on the progress of your organization. Since digitalization has taken our world by storm, it is high time that you implement a digital experience in your business as well. The organizations in your industry are improving at a rapid pace, and if you are not ready to prepare for the same, then you will miss out on opportunities.
- If you have experience with CMS, then you can easily implement DXP. However, please note that not all CMS are suitable for DXP. You should jump to a CMS that you can scale easily. Scalable CMSs will help you integrate with your digital experience platform and you can deploy it on the cloud. It might as well also have a wide range of APIs so that it supports seamless integration with DXP.
- However, many small companies are confused about how to create digital transformation for improved customer engagement. Dxp can also help you or your company implement artificial intelligence. DXP has various benefits, such as an automatic language detector, automatically identifying social media trends, dividing your customers into segments, making modifications to the content or web pages, etc. All these features increase the productivity of your team and boost ROI, along with giving you customer insights. However, before you implement a digital experience platform in your business, here are some of the things you should ask yourself:
- Does your business receive a high volume of traffic? Are there different touch points in your company? Do you have a diverse target audience? Is your company ready and willing to move into the digital world? Will your company benefit from delivering a fully digital experience to your customers? Will your marketers and developers team will be able to meet the requirements of your customers by following digital experience platforms?
- If you have a ‘yes’ answer for most of these questions then you should definitely consider implementing a digital experience platform for your business. In general, a digital experience platform approach is beneficial especially if you have already recognized the structure areas for CMS, ERP, and CRM. So that you can allow the most seamless solutions available to your work environment.
Conclusion
Before you select a DXP, you should understand if your company is looking for digitalization. Perhaps you are simply trying to increase your brand’s awareness. Once you have considered your motives, you will have to select a DXP vendor that fits your needs. Adobe Experience Manager, Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, Sitecore Experience Platform (XP), Liferay Digital Experience Platform, and others are some of the best DXP products on the market. These products are all pretty popular and have some good reviews from clients. You have to decide which one is more suitable for your business operations.
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Simran works as a technical writer. The graduate in MS Computer Science from the well known CS hub, aka Silicon Valley, is also an editor of the website. She enjoys writing about any tech topic, including programming, algorithms, cloud, data science, and AI. Traveling, sketching, and gardening are the hobbies that interest her.
