What is a DXP (Digital Experience Platform)?
A DXP is a platform that integrates multiple technologies to manage the complete customer experience across all your digital channels. This type of tool allows you to create new content, manage user accounts, generate site analytics, and design the customer journey from start to finish.
One of the biggest challenges for companies at a technological level is managing their digital experience across all channels.
To address this problem, companies install dozens of technologies such as CMS, DAM, PIM, CRM, Databases, Analytics Platforms, Search Engines, Personalization Engines, Email Marketing Tools, and many more to maintain total control of their digital experience.
This can be a major headache in the long run.
Maintaining multiple technologies from different providers involves great technical complexity. This is not to mention all the time it consumes from your systems team. And let's not talk about the effort and time it takes to develop in-house solutions.
If you don't have the right tools to manage your digital experience, you will reduce the speed and flexibility of your marketing team to generate new user acquisition campaigns and sales generation.
This is where a DXP can be a possible all-in-one solution for your company.
¿What is a DXP?
DXP stands for Digital Experience Platform.
According to Gartner, a DXP is "an integrated and cohesive piece of technology designed to enable the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences through multiple customer journey touchpoints."
In simpler terms, a DXP is a platform that combines multiple technologies and tools to help companies manage their customers' digital experience across all channels.
DXPs are comprehensive tools that allow you to create new content, manage user accounts, personalize the experience, and design your customer journey from start to finish.
The evolution of DXPs
Before DXPs, companies used CMSs to manage the experience of their websites.
However, CMSs had several limitations, only allowing for the creation, editing, and deletion of content within the site. This fell short of the needs of digitally mature companies, which required advanced capabilities to send emails to their customers, obtain relevant analytics from their website, sell online, or manage the mobile experience.
This led to the creation of more sophisticated platforms such as DXPs, which encompass a wider range of capabilities such as personalization, marketing automation, omnichannel commerce, and customer experience management.
Today, DXPs help organizations improve the overall digital experience of their customers, offering a unique and integrated solution to manage all aspects of their digital presence.
To understand how a DXP works and how it can help you manage your digital channels, we need to review its capabilities.
Let's start by looking at the basic and minimum capabilities that this type of technology should include.
Basic capabilities of a DXP
Create new content on your website quickly and easily
Among the most basic tools that a DXP must offer is a content management system (CMS). A CMS is a tool that allows companies to create, edit, and publish content directly on their site without writing any programming code. In this way, your marketing team can create new pages, edit text, change images, and optimize the site's SEO.
Manage all user information in one place
Account services allow users to create an account within your platform, edit their profile, authenticate with their credentials (email and password), save notification preferences, modify their address, or add new credit cards.
Personalize the experience of your customers by showing them content and products of their own interest
A DXP should have its own personalization engine. A personalization engine uses artificial intelligence to analyze user behavior and show content based on their interests.
For example, if a user has viewed and purchased running shoes, gym pants, gym shirts, and sports accessories multiple times, your DXP should be able to understand that this user has a preference for sports clothing and therefore should show them articles of the same category repeatedly.
Review the analytics of your web platform to optimize the user experience
Analytics is a key tool for any online site. The data of your users and their behaviors within your platform are key to improving the experience of your customers, optimizing the user journey, and of course, increasing conversion rates. What is not measured, cannot be improved!
Allow simple and fast navigation through a good search engine
A DXP must have its own search engine that allows customers to search for content or products within your website.
You might think that the search engine on your site is just a box within your website's design, but it is not! In fact, 43% of users immediately use the search bar when entering an eCommerce site. And 12% of users go to your competitor's site after not finding what they were looking for.
Deliver a good experience on your website, mobile app, and in-store screens
DXPs are designed to handle the experience of all your digital channels. You can manage the content, messages, and images that appear on your website, mobile app, smart TV app, and even on in-store screens . Making your business truly omnichannel.
Now that we know the minimum expected capabilities of a digital experience platform, let's review those advanced capabilities that would be a plus for your DXP.
Advanced capabilities of a DXP
Send emails, SMS and mobile notifications to your users
To drive your users to action and generate more sales, your marketing team must be able to send messages through email, SMS and mobile notifications to your customers. Through these means, your marketing team can send announcements to all your customers about new promotions, new products in stock or limited-time discounts.
Sell online through your own e-commerce
An advanced DXP can have e-commerce functions. In this case, it should allow you to upload your product catalog, enable shopping carts for users and manage customer orders.
Manage all your digital assets such as images, videos, presentations or documents through a DAM
A high-end DXP should have a DAM (Digital Asset Management). These tools are capable of managing thousands of files from your business, such as images, videos, presentations or documents. The DAM is a repository of digital assets where you can store all your company's documents so they can be reused in your digital channels, or accessed by your collaborators.
Create a digital catalog of all your products through a PIM
A PIM (Product Information Management) is software for managing a company's product information, such as the product name, description, features, price, images or videos. In simple terms, a PIM is a digital catalog of all your products.
Receive support tickets and customer service
An advanced DXP can also provide tools for managing customer service. These types of tools have a panel to receive reports or errors from users through email, chat, WhatsApp or social media.
Manage your sales processes from a CRM
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is software that allows salespeople to manage their sales processes from start to finish.
It offers functionalities to record new deals, create new contacts and view all the contacts you have had with your customers (calls or emails).
It also generates analytics to know how many deals you have won, how many businesses you have lost and the total sales you have generated. A CRM is an excellent tool to have complete control over your sales.
The 4 best DXPs for your company according to Gartner
Gartner is a leading research and advisory company that provides information and advice on technology and software to help companies make informed decisions. Below are the 4 leading DXPs in the market according to this consulting firm.
Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe Experience Cloud is widely used and well-known, and has been recognized by Gartner as a reliable and mature digital experience platform (DXP). The market analyst also praised its diverse range of capabilities in the digital space, including content management, analytics, and personalization.
Adobe provides an ecosystem of creative, marketing, and advertising agencies that can help improve the online customer experience.
ACQUIA
Acquia is a suitable solution for both B2B and B2C applications, similar to Adobe. However, it also offers a more user-friendly environment for site administrators to enhance the experience of those designing and managing customer digital journeys. This advantage sets it apart from others.
Gartner also recognizes Acquia for its open-source capability and Site Studio, which is a low-code/no-code experience builder.
Optimizely
Optimizely acquired Zaius in 2021, which enabled it to improve its ability to track customer journeys, uncover important customer insights, and deliver personalized and targeted digital experiences.
Gartner sees this as a positive development for the company and also praised its focus on digital experience optimization and multivariate testing.
Sitecore
Sitecore has made several acquisitions of SaaS companies that enhance customer data management, marketing resource management, and personalization tactics, and as a result, is building a promising vision. Utilizing new artificial intelligence and data capabilities, the company can address various "customer-centric scenarios" and B2B applications.
Gartner also recognizes Sitecore's global partnership network as a standout feature, providing substantial support to clients in the midst of a digital transformation process.
How can a DXP help me improve my digital experience?
Companies that need a DXP are those looking to improve their customers' digital experience across multiple channels, devices, and touchpoints.
Some examples of industries that could benefit from a DXP include:
Retail: to improve the online and in-store shopping experience. Banking and finance: to provide a more personalized and secure customer service experience. Insurance: to automate sales and customer service processes. Travel and tourism: to enhance the travel booking and planning experience. Manufacturing: to optimize the online purchasing and tracking experience of products. Professional services: to improve marketing experience and increase sales.
Any company looking for an effective digital presence and a better experience for its customers and employees could benefit from a DXP.
