The role of DXP in the digital transformation of your business

The last few years have shown that companies unwilling to adapt their strategies will struggle to survive in the new digital ecosystem. Before the global disruptions, more than 60% of organizations’ digital transformation initiatives had stalled due to a range of issues. 

Many of these organizations relied heavily on a digital experience platform (DXP) in digital transformation to deploy new strategies and experiment with different personalized journeys when it came to ecommerce. This allowed them to optimize their customer journey experiences and maintain growth while limiting disruptions.  

For organizations that want to jump-start their digital transformation efforts, this blog will show you why a DXP should play a central role in the process. 

Key takeaways:

• Digital transformation isn’t easy, and today’s organizations need to take a realistic approach to ensure their initiatives succeed

• With customer expectations constantly evolving, any digital transformation initiative needs to be agile enough to ensure customer satisfaction

• A digital experience platform makes it possible to deploy new experiences quickly across all digital touchpoints and experiment with different designs to find an optimized customer experience

Understanding a DXP 

Any digital transformation initiative requires regular experimentation backed up with data-driven decisions. Gartner describes a DXP as a set of core technologies used to compose, manage, deliver and optimize contextual experiences across omnichannel digital touchpoints. A DXP is the latest iteration of technology used to listen and communicate with your customers. 

A quick history of a DXP’s evolution

Historically, there were three major advances in how organizations communicate with customers digitally. 

These were:

• Content management systems (CMS) – Already present in the 1980s and provided static content in brochure-like formats. By the 1990s, organizations could start delivering dynamic content using a CMS, giving rise to the social web. 

• Web experience management (WEM) solutions – The social web and mobile connectivity required new approaches to managing experiences across digital touchpoints. Organizations could gather customer data and deliver personalized experiences, but WEM solutions mainly supported marketing departments. 

• Digital experience platforms (DXP) – Radical changes to architecture design (such as headless CMS and microservices) enabled organizations to integrate and expand their experience management technology stack across all digital touchpoints. DXPs ushered in the age of customer-centric experience creation, experimentation and optimization. 

Image Source: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/from-web-cms-to-dx-platforms-the-evolution-of-content-management/

6 reasons to implement a DXP in your digital transformation

Today, consumers expect immediate gratification and highly personalized experiences across all digital channels. For companies that think investing in a DXP to support digital transformation requires a certain level of maturity, the reality is you can achieve your goals by growing into one.

With this approach, organizations can deploy only the portions of the platform that support their strategy and evolve their solution over time to meet their goals. Below, we look at six reasons you should consider implementing a DXP to accelerate your digital transformation. 

1. Omnichannel content management and delivery

A major challenge for organizations is delivering consistent, personalized experiences across all potential digital touchpoints. A rapid increase in connectivity means organizations now have to optimize their content management and delivery for omnichannel ecosystems. 

Each potential customer may have a different combination of hardware and software that they use to access content and interact with the business. A DXP makes it possible to deliver rich and engaging customer experiences that cover social media, phones or tablets and PCs or even IoT devices. 

2. Data-driven decision-making with experimentation

With a centralized management solution for experience delivery, organizations can gather analytics about personalized experiences and customer expectations across all digital touchpoints. Experimenting with different experiences and gathering the right data will quickly highlight which experience designs aren’t passing the test with customers. 

With the analytical tools available in a DXP, organizations can move away from a trial-and-error approach to experience design and let the data drive their decisions. By continuously optimizing experiences using data-driven decision-making, customer satisfaction becomes a certainty instead of a guessing game. 

Image Source: https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/role/it-data-analytics-leaders

3. Unification of brand identity across digital touchpoints

Managing your brand identity in different content management systems becomes a full-time job. This approach also reduces your ability to apply changes based on analytics consistently across all digital touchpoints. Your media assets need to remain unified regardless of the platform or device preferred by your customers. 

When you move to a DXP, you can unify your brand identity in a non-siloed system for easy updates, rapid changes and personalized experience delivery. 

4. Build personalization at scale

A unified experience management solution lets organizations connect all personalization data across business functions and departments. Interactions between the organization and customer can inform other processes where usually there was little collaboration between departments. A customer service request may not reach a sales agent and that would limit the organization’s ability to foster meaningful relationships. 

DXPs can integrate with back-office applications and customer-facing portals, empowering your resources with detailed profiles for each customer during an interaction. 

5. Streamlined experience design and optimization

Whether you’re designing experiences for other departments in the company or external customers, a DXP makes it possible to build workflows quickly and deploy the required forms easily. Each journey can go through an experimentation phase to find the optimal design before releasing it to a wider audience. 

With optimized journeys, adoption becomes a breeze and if you discover any new friction points, it’s much easier to update and release a new experience than with traditional systems. 

6. Set your own digital transformation pace

Organizations often have an urge to sprint through the entire digital transformation process and become discouraged if they don’t see the results immediately. When results aren’t coming fast enough, some of the enthusiasm may also dissipate. Taking a systematic approach to digital transformation using a DXP helps organizations to set a reasonable pace for the initiative and see the benefits of the process incrementally. 

You can manage your customers’ expectations while iterating different experiences and continue to improve your designs over time.