Digital experience platform or DXP is an emerging software innovation that helps companies embrace digital transformation with the ultimate goal of providing better customer experiences. While there are a variety of vendors for this product, they all share the same goals: digitizing business operations, delivering connected customer experiences, and gathering actionable data about customers, among others. As the interactions with customers become increasingly digitized with industry leaders such as Google, Facebook, and Apple providing a quality standard, it is vital to explore what DXPs can do for your company and how you can get started with one today.
What can DXP do for my company?
One way a DXP can help improve customer experience is through predictive analytics. Using machine learning algorithms, the system analyzes past data from customers and presents actionable recommendations for how to engage with them in the future. For example, suppose a company that sells a certain product tracked its most successful marketing campaigns. In that case, it could use a DXP to predict what kinds of customers will be most receptive to future marketing campaigns and what those campaigns might say.
Another common goal of a DXP is to improve the customer’s digital experience across different channels. For example, using a DXP platform can help companies ensure all information on their website or app is up-to-date and accurate. These platforms may also work across multiple languages, which is especially useful for global customers.
Perhaps one of the most critical goals of a DXP is to improve customer data collection. Using AI technology, companies using DXPs can gather more accurate information about customers than they could through their current data collection systems. This is crucial in helping successful businesses decide where to focus their efforts and resources to improve customer experiences.
What is driving the move to DXP?
Already a $9.2 billion industry in 2020, DXPs are expected to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 12.3% from 2022-2028. This immense size and growth rate for a relatively new innovation seems to be unlikely; however, when you look at how many factors are driving the adoption of Digital Experience Platforms, the massive numbers start to make sense.
Numerous factors have led to the move towards digital experience platforms. The overarching and most prominent trend is being driven by the domination of digital channels as a method of customer interaction. Digitization affects every aspect of communication between businesses and customers or other businesses more than ever before. This has forced companies to focus more on customer engagement to keep up with the competition.
One reason why DXP utilization is so invaluable to companies is the ability to track customer behavior in real-time. This allows businesses to improve their understanding of their target audience and deliver a more personalized experience to each individual. When industry leaders implement these tactics into every aspect of their business process, it becomes an expectation for all companies to follow suit.
However, DXP is not always trickle-down; these innovations have made it possible for upstarts to disrupt traditional industries by allowing them to provide a much better customer experience. WealthFront, LendingClub, Uber, and Airbnb are examples of companies that have utilized digital technology to deliver a better customer experience than their competitors, allowing them to gain a sizable market advantage and firmly establish themselves even when most or all other factors were out of their favor.
What are the three key advantages of DXP usage?
DXP platforms allow businesses to control every touchpoint with their customers. This gives them the ability to ensure that all customer interactions are consistent in terms of content, feel, and logic. There has been a drastic increase in the number of interaction points which a company must manage and maintain. The API-first design of DXP allows businesses to present raw data in a standardized way, and every touchpoint can provide its own presentation of it. By utilizing the DXP platform as the backbone for customer interactions, companies are able to create a method of efficiently ensuring fluidity and consistency between various interaction points.
With DXP, businesses can connect all of their best-of-breed tools to create a seamless customer experience through the usage of APIs. This allows departments to use their own preferred tools and makes experimentation much less daunting. In doing this, DXP will enable businesses to orchestrate data and determine the right experience for customers every time they interact with the company digitally.
Digital experience platforms have a flexible architecture that allows for back-end logic to be decoupled from the front-end presentation. This means that both developers and marketers can make changes quickly and independently of each other. It also means that improvements to the platform can be made modularly, enabling the formation and deployment of changes in one area without disrupting the rest of the system. This flexibility is essential because it ensures that companies can keep up with the ever-changing digital landscape. As customer behavior changes, businesses need to adapt quickly, and DXPs allow them to do so.
What are some examples of DXP vendors?
Possibly the best example of a digital experience platform that is creating value for its clients is Adobe’s Experience Cloud. This platform provides businesses with the tools to create a personalized customer experience across all digital channels. For instance, the Adobe Marketing Cloud enables marketers to manage their marketing campaigns and customer data. The Adobe Analytics Cloud helps them optimize their website and other digital assets for increased revenue.
Sitecore has branded itself as the market leader in DXP management software, largely due to its collaborations with large brands like American Express, L’Oréal, and Volvo Cars. It prides itself on bringing together various business platforms to deliver high-quality digital experiences for customers. In an increasingly digital age where 63% of Gen Z users are impatient with slow websites, and 37% abandon a purchase or post negative reviews after a poor online experience, content management has become increasingly valuable. Sitecore is just one company offering DXP management solutions.
Another example is the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, which integrates all of a company’s marketing, sales, service, and commerce efforts into a single platform. This ensures that a company has a cohesive view of its customers and provides a seamless service. The platform also makes it easy to identify and communicate with customers across multiple devices, such as mobile apps or social media.
These are just some of the many examples of how DXP can bring real value to clients. In future articles, we will explore some of the most prominent DXP vendors in-depth to see how their products could apply themselves to your company and break down some numbers in the market to get an idea of how these companies have found success through this innovation.
FAQ
What is an example of a digital experience platform?
One of the three DXP platforms discussed above is Adobe Analytics Cloud. The other two are Sitecore and Salesforce.
