What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and why do you need one?

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Digital Experience Platform

(updated october 2022)

The best digital experiences have set the bar for all digital experiences:

When searching for a specific product, having an intuitive search experience with filters tailored to your needs and recommending exactly the results you were expecting to see. Booking a restaurant and it get's added automatically to your calendar with the right location. The ability to reach out to your city or municipality at any point during the day or night and being able to start an application or see the status of your request.

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) can help you offer your visitors a relevant, personal and compelling brand experience. Dropsolid makes this powerful technology accessible for any enterprise, government and organization.

 

In this post we explain:

Digital Experience Platform

What is a DXP?

Gartner defines a Digital Experience Platform or DXP as an integrated and cohesive piece of technology for engaging with multiple audiences across a broad array of digital touchpoints.

Organizations use DXPs to build, manage, deploy and continually optimize their contextualized digital experiences across multiple channels, such as websites, portals and mobile apps.

Still with us? Possibly not - and that’s perfectly understandable. It’s quite impossible to capture everything a brand needs to build its digital experience in two sentences.

We will elaborate on the benefits of a DXP and the difference with a CMS.

Benefits of a DXP

Control every touchpoint

The number of digital touchpoints is rapidly increasing. Not only do you have to manage all those different channels, you have to provide a consistent experience.

This is where API-first design shines. APIs hand out the raw content in a predefined way. Every touchpoint can present this raw content in its own structured way.

That FAQ document you once wrote? Using a DXP, you can use and publish it across multiple websites, mobile environments, customer portals, chatbots, voice assistants and any other digital touchpoints you choose. Update it once, and it’s updated everywhere.

CTA Dropsolid Experience Cloud 6
Integration Hub

DXP connects IT, Business and Marketing

A DXP is not the only tool you need to build cutting-edge, personalized digital experiences. You also require marketing tools, customer service solutions, a CRM, and the freedom to choose other point solutions (to address specific business issues) that fit your business needs.

The DXP sits at the center of these, using APIs to aggregate and orchestrate data to determine the best experience for every visitor.

Marketing, sales and service departments can benefit from the aggregated customer data in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) component of the DXP. They can manage and personalize content, forms and customer journeys from a central hub.

As your business digitally matures, you can gradually add new components, tools and features. A benefit of an Open (Source) DXP is that your IT team or integrator remains in control of the platform at all times, allowing them to easily create and connect new components.

 

Kings and queens of your data

A central hub for all content and customer data combined in your DXP puts you in the driving seat for a truly personalized digital experience.

You know who is consuming which content on your website. You know who is reading your emails and who isn’t. You know who is disengaging across any of your channels. You know exactly what is going on, and you have the right tools at your disposal to take action.

A DXP with integrated marketing and personalization components allows you to personalize content in a user-friendly and consistent way across your websites, portals, apps and even emails - in real time.
 

Customer Data Platform
Multi Market

Reliable, extensible and scalable at lower TCO

A central platform to manage all your digital channels will benefit security and performance. It will decrease technical debt. A DXP enables you to scale in multiple ways: adding new channels, markets, audiences and languages over time.

 

Discover Dropsolid Experience Cloud

A reliable, affordable and open solution for ambitious midmarket businesses and organizations who rely on Drupal and want to make their digital experiences more personal. 

Discover Dropsolid Experience Cloud
 

What is the difference between DXP and CMS?

You can see a DXP as a natural CMS (r)evolution.

People expect to interact with brands and organizations across any digital channel or device. To engage with all your stakeholders in the digital era, just a website is no longer enough. You might also need a portal, multiple websites or an app. Your visitors expect to reach out to you via email, whatsapp or chat at any time of day. They expect to find what they are looking for in a consistent experience, regardless of the channel they prefer to use.

Are you still convinced you can engage every visitor with a one-to-many website?

CMS vs. DXP

Create once, publish everywhere

A CMS is a basic system that allows businesses to manage and publish content on their websites or customer portals using different layout templates. With the mass proliferation of different digital devices, screen sizes and channels, content management across all these channels becomes increasingly complex. A DXP bypasses the inherent limitations of a CMS by enabling a brand to centrally produce digital content and publish it across a wide range of digital channels, including websites, customer portals, apps, in-store displays and IoT devices.

A DXP with headless capabilities even distributes content-as-a-service - typically over APIs -, making it even easier to reuse and publish content across different channels, using different front-end frameworks and formats.

From Content is King to Customer is King

Good content remains essential in any business, yet different stakeholders in different stages of their customer lifecycle expect tailored content. If you combine this need with today’s ever-increasing customer experience expectations, there are plenty of new challenges to be tackled.

Only if you know who your site visitors are, you will be able to offer them a personalized user experience. By combining customer data with content in a DXP, you can offer your visitors a consistent and personalized brand experience at any point in their customer journey.

Why DXPs are becoming more popular

DXP as an answer to Customer Obsession

Customers are expecting excellent digital experiences like they know from tech giants like Google, Apple and Spotify. That brings new challenges for the average business, but also opportunities.

Read more
customer lifetime

Customer experience spans the entire business

CX is not only a marketing concern - your entire business is responsible. Not only does acquisition happen digitally, but the digital customer journey continues post-acquisition in customer service, renewals and upsell. Satisfaction and loyalty become key metrics, and multiple parts of the business are involved.

Different systems are used by different departments. For the CX to remain consistent throughout the entire journey, these back-end systems need to integrate. This requires a robust framework.

Read more

Why should your DXP be open?

Just as every business needs a website, every organization now needs an Open DXP. This is the only way to facilitate seamless orchestration of digital experiences across all channels at scale.

But what does Open really mean?

Read more

Open Source

98% of developers use open-source software because it evolves faster and is more reliable.

Open Culture

An Open Culture thrives on collaboration, partnerships, shared innovation and contribution for mutual success.

Open Data

Overcome data silos and make all relevant data available where you need it.

Open Platform

An open platform is built for extensibility by using integrations and open APIs. 

Open Cloud

Hosted in the cloud, on premise or in a hybrid cloud model.

Do you need a DXP?

A DXP benefits your digital customer experience: more site visits and leads, longer time-on-site and increased customer satisfaction and loyalty. On top of this, you will improve operational efficiency: lower maintenance costs, increased website performance and less technical debt.

Deciding whether and when you need to take the step towards a DXP requires a critical look at your existing digital experience and the level you would like it to be at in the next five years.

Some questions to ask to decide if your company has the digital maturity to move to a DXP:  

  • Do you have good content and content management essentials in place?
  • Is there a certain complexity or differentiation layer present in your business that makes the right content available to the right audience: multiple audiences, markets, languages?
  • How many digital channels do you have today? And how many will you have in five years’ time?
  • How important is 'digital' for your business at this point? What is the potential?
  • Where are your customer data located today? Do you have a CRM in place?
  • How do you manage your mailing lists? Are you collecting behavioural data already?
  • What marketing tools are you using? How is your current tech stack integrated?

This will help you estimate whether you are ready for a DXP and which steps you need to take in your digital transformation. 

How to get started?

Compelling digital experiences are not built overnight. They require a company-wide digital (transformation) strategy. Here are the five steps any business needs to take:

1 - Touchpoints and content

Start from your existing digital touchpoints and create a content plan to drive more engagement from your visitors.

2 - Capture behavior

Start capturing behavioural data and get more insights into your visitors.
 

3 - Relevant segments

Bring all relevant audience data together to create valuable segments to target with different messages and content.

4 - Use the power of data

Use all that newly gained insights to run some experiments in content personalization and customer journeys.

5 - Analyse and enhance

Keep going. The best customer experiences are not built overnight. Learn from your experiments and continue to make things better. Gradually add more features and functions to your digital platforms.

Ready for some action?

Are you ready to get your digital experience to the next level? We can help you get started. 

 

Let's get going