What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?

In today’s digital world, organisations stay competitive through constant communication with their consumers and building relationships with them. They speak with content and listen to data. The Digital Experience Platform provides businesses with a comprehensive set of tools to help them build lasting relationships with their targeted audiences.

Gartner defines the Digital Experience Platform as an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimisation of contextualised digital experiences. You can explore more about the software platform in the article, which will help you create the best digital experiences for your customers.

Main Components of DXPs

Although the term “platform” suggests that a DXP is a single product that has all the capabilities required to design and oversee digital experiences, this is not always the case. While there are a few stand-alone DXP suites, it is challenging to identify a single platform that can adequately serve the requirements of the majority of organisations.

Thus, by assembling the necessary technology tools, the majority of businesses create their digital experience platforms. Examples of digital experience platforms include Optimizely CMS, Acquia, Sitecore, Salesforce, Bloomreach, Oracle, SAP, Liferay, OpenText and Adobe Experience Manager. Generally speaking, a digital experience platform will have the following components:

Content Management
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
eCommerce
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Analytics and Content Intelligence
Automated Personalisation
Experimentation
APIs and Integrations

1. Content Management

The first and foremost component will be the Content Management System (CMS) capabilities because content is considered the core of digital experiences. Customers also anticipate seamless content experiences across multiple channels on all of their devices. DXP acts as a single location for all of the content produced by an organisation, allowing it to be shared through a variety of omnichannel channels, such as social media posts, blogs, websites, mobile apps, and even IOT devices.

2. Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital asset management is a related functionality related to content management. It acts as the central repository for digital assets like photos, videos, and audio files that can be used in a variety of contexts, much like DXPs do for content.

The software makes it simple to find, manage, and share all of your digital assets across platforms and with your partners by integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. Additionally, by leveraging cloud infrastructure, it offers scalability to accommodate user demands.

3. eCommerce

The ability to provide customers with a quick, simple, and painless transaction process has a significant impact on the customer experience. Another feature of DXP that makes it simple for businesses to transact online is eCommerce functionality. It is capable of managing all the backend tasks required to set up an online store, take payments, and monitor orders.

4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

E-commerce and customer relationship management (CRM) go hand in hand. In order to create a customised experience for each customer and cultivate long-term relationships with them, a DXP will maintain track of customer data. DXP will also be able to analyse customer data to create targeted marketing campaigns and provide valuable insights into customer behaviour. It will also provide a platform for customers to manage their accounts and access services.

5. Analytics and Content Intelligence

Another tool that will let you monitor the performance of your website is analytics. Today, a DXP needs to offer analytics and insight into user behaviour workflows in addition to content hosting. With the help of technologies such as big data analytics and content intelligence, digital experience platforms can provide real-time insight into user behaviour and provide proactive recommendations for improving it.

6. Automated Personalisation

Personalisation is another relevant DXP capability. The DXP serves as the primary repository for user data, so DXPs can analyse first-party and behavioural data to tailor experiences to individual users. Marketers can expand their experiences by automating a large number of these customised interactions. It helps to create a more engaging user experience as well as a more efficient workflow for marketers. Additionally, automated personalisation can help reduce the cost of delivering these experiences.

7. Experimentation

The most cutting-edge digital experience platforms have digital experimentation features that enable users to efficiently conduct A/B tests on their experiences and content to improve them and lower the risk of making new changes. Data-driven decisions are made through statistical analysis. This data can also be used to create personalised offers, discounts, and loyalty rewards, further enhancing the customer experience. The DXP will also provide a platform for customer feedback and reviews, allowing businesses to understand their customers better.

8. APIs and Integrations

As of now, no single software platform can do it all. Not even the most progressive solutions can foresee every modification that will be required in the future. As the tech landscape evolves, a good platform will always run on an architecture that is easily integrated and has flexible APIs to make it easier to incorporate new technologies and channels.

In order to easily integrate with best-of-breed solutions for various DXP technology stack components and create the most comprehensive digital experience platform that meets their needs, the leading DXPs offer open architecture and flexible APIs.

So, you read about the Digital Experience Platform, or DXPs and its components in this article. As you know, focusing on the customer experience is always a winning strategy. Investing in DXPs is thus a wise decision, but only some companies require one. Building a basic catalogue website or e-commerce store is a sufficient achievement for some companies.

Recall that not everything has to be invested in at once. Start with something simple and quick to implement, like a homepage, product pages, search, and maybe even a checkout process if you are entirely new to the digital experience space. As you go, features can be added. However, if you are looking for a way to tie everything together, customise interactions, and use digital as the backbone of your company, you might be prepared for a DXP.