Authored by: Abhijit Pal, Business Head, India, and South Asia, Liferay India
Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an emerging category of enterprise software seeking to meet the needs of companies undergoing digital transformation, with the ultimate goal of providing better customer experiences. DXPs can be a single product, but are often a suite of products that work together. DXPs provide an architecture for companies to digitize business operations, deliver connected customer experiences, and gather actionable customer insight.
Gartner defines the DXP as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimisation of contextualised digital experiences. DXPs entail a high degree of emphasis on interoperability and cross-channel continuity across the entire customer journey.”
A confluence of factors has led many companies to start radically reengineering their business practices to be extremely experience oriented:
- Digital channels (web, mobile, and social media) have become the dominant ways customers interact with companies.
- Customers expect great experiences like Google, Apple, and Facebook.
- Social media
in particular provides unstructured ways for customers to engage with and influence public sentiment for companies.
- Mobile devices provide location and immediacy, giving companies more ways to keep in touch with customers.
- Data insight is making it possible to target an audience segment of one person with a highly personalized experience.
- Digital technology makes it possible for startups to disrupt traditional industries: For example WealthFront for wealth management, LendingClub for financial products, and the oft-cited Uber and Airbnb in transportation and lodging—and all deliver a much better customer experience.
However, in this journey of experience led transformation, most companies are faced with hurdles like:
- Existing organizational systems are incapable of scaling on demand.
- Existing applications are tightly coupled restricting ability to enhance their capabilities quickly
- Data normalization across multiple sources is a huge challenge in delivering seamless customer experience.
- Organizations have low visibility of their customer behaviours across touchpoints.
- Real-time insights and mashup of data &
behaviours across channels are necessary to deliver personalized experiences.
· There is lack of automation and outdated processes
· There is very low visibility of content across the organisation
· Inability to understand customers preferences and interests
To address these challenges, companies typically rely on various digital products: portals for content aggregation and personalisation, CMS for content management, search for information discovery, analytics for tracking, campaign management for targeted campaigns, and so on.
Digital experience platforms (DXP) combine all these core digital technologies into a single unified platform, that can be the foundation for building omni-channel experience rich applications. A DXP provides a platform to develop and manage personalised user experiences across all channels, devices, and touchpoints throughout the user journey. It provides an integrated and unified view to all its users across various applications and enables a seamless flow of business processes for its users. It enables developers to use modern web technologies to develop rich, interactive, and responsive web experiences.
Key transitions made possible by DXP:
Product to platform
In traditional digital scenarios, multiple digital products would be needed to build a digital solution, whereas DXP provides ready-to-use capabilities out of the box.
Heavyweight solutions to lean model
DXPs provide lightweight portals, which are based on lean models. Lean architecture is one of the core themes of DXP solutions. A lean model is used in presentation and integration.
Information silos to unified experience
DXP aims to unify customer data, use experience, and business data. This is achieved through a pre-integrated stack, seamless integration adaptor with all business systems, analytics, and monitoring components.
Short-term transactions to long-term relationships
Generally, traditional digital applications aim to fulfil the customer’s immediate needs. DXP aims to go many steps ahead in anticipating customer needs, recommending relevant content, personalising the experience, and rewarding loyalty to create long-term relationships. Accordingly, the tracked and monitored metrics would vary. For instance, a customer’s lifetime value would be a more important metric as against the average order value.
Rich experience with touchpoint optimization
DXP provides end to end touchpoint optimization and personalised experience across all customer interactions.
Holistic visibility of customer data
DXP breaks the barriers created by application and unit silos, and provides insights on customer behaviour, activities, and actions across all devices.
Modular structure
DXP offers plug-and-play modular components that can be used as needed. The integration too is based on modular services.
Platform approach for solutions
DXP enables developers to create a modular and flexible platform for future needs. It enhances platform extension and reusability.
Agile approach
DXP leverages lean architecture with pluggable and modular components to develop an extensible platform. Leveraging DevOps best practices such as iterative delivery further improves the time to market.
Digital experiences define the way customers view brands, and the companies that have superior experiences will retain more and gain new customers faster. Digital experience platforms enable companies to conquer the challenge of managing these touchpoints and the data they bring in, resulting in more agile and streamlined business processes. They are a unified way to manage the customer lifecycle across all channels.
We’ve grown accustomed to hyper-personalized experience in our personal lives via our smartphones, which allow us to contact friends, work, play games, shop, complete errands, record video, take photos, watch movies, order food, read a book… everything, all in one, customized to our needs as we add and remove tools as we see fit. Now digital experience platforms aspire to achieve this for businesses.
