Advanced experience portal solutions are gaining traction in a variety of industries, including finance, telecommunications, and healthcare. These organizations implement so-called Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) to build, deploy and improve their websites, portals, mobile apps, and other digital experiences. DXP is an emerging type of enterprise software that aims to address the demand for digital transformation firms to provide a better customer experience. This post discusses the definition, use cases, and benefits of DXPs.

Gartner defines a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) as 'an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.' DXP can be a single product, but it is more commonly a suite of products functioning together. It helps you create a variety of customized experiences for your users from a single platform. DXP provides your company with an architecture for digitizing business operations, delivering connected customer experience, and gathering actionable customer insight.

The most advanced solutions can serve as personalized websites, microsites, intranet, and extranet systems. You can change the look and feel with only a few clicks. You can add and reposition applications, tools, and other portal items with a simple drag-and-drop. They evolve together with your organization and for your organization according to your specific business needs.

Uses of DXPs

Most products positioned as DXPs have their roots in one of these three categories: Content Management Systems (CMS), Portal Servers, and Commerce Servers. Let's have a quick look at these use cases:

1. CMS DXPs
   

CMS DXPs focus on the needs of marketing departments and creative agencies. Customer data they collect tend to be anonymous and generalized into audience segments. Most business problems solved by these products are related to acquiring customers: generating awareness, targeting offers, and accelerating purchases. They perform exceptionally well in B2C (retail, fashion) scenarios where the sales cycle is short and transactional, and the audience is large.

These DXPs offer web-based analytics, user segmentation, advertising, and campaigns. With this kind of DXPs, you can add portal-like features, including logged-in experiences, commerce capabilities, and so on.

2. Portal DXPs‍

Portal DXPs are particularly suited for nurturing long-term customer relationships after the sale. Customer data is specific to each individual and is handled securely. These DXPs help companies understand the factors that lead to customer loyalty, retention, and renewal. They may help calculate well-known metrics like Net Promoter Score. They can provide customer service, including both self-service and human-assisted issue resolution.

Portal DXPs offer various features, including content management, targeting, mobile support, workflow, and forms.

3. Commerce DXPs 
   

Commerce DXPs are used in online shopping scenarios in retail and related industries. In addition to product-related content delivery, these products usually provide capabilities around inventory management, shopping cart, payment integration, check-out and fulfillment. 

An excellent digital retail experience requires seamless integration to these functions, which come naturally to commerce DXPs. Many commerce products require the addition of content management capabilities to boost the product promotion in the catalog.

DXP Advantages

A digital experience platform can be highly beneficial to a company's bottom line. By improving the digital experience, it can drive customer engagement, conversion, and advocacy. Streamlining the digital transformation process accelerates time to market, lowers costs, and boosts team productivity. Automating many processes involved in the creation, management, and delivery of digital experiences reduces risk. Furthermore, it increases brand equity by improving consistency.

With this in mind, we can list seven benefits of using a DXP:

1. Improved touchpoints: Companies that use an omnichannel strategy have substantially higher customer retention rates. Brands can use DXPs to offer and personalize content across many platforms and touchpoints.
   

While you must respond to each touchpoint as rapidly as your customers anticipate, you must also ensure that everything is consistent in terms of content, feel, and logic. This is where microservice design comes in handy. For example, you only need to create one FAQ document that can be utilized across online, mobile, customer portals, kiosks, chatbots, voice assistants, and any other digital touchpoints. If you change that FAQ doc once, it will be updated everywhere.

2. Smart architecture: DXPs are flexible and agile. Thanks to the microservice architecture, the back-end logic is separated from the front-end, so developers and marketers can make changes quickly and independently from each other. It also means that platform improvements can be made modularly, implementing changes in one area without affecting the rest of the site. This is especially important when deploying custom components or integrating with third-party systems.
   

3. Greater business control: DXPs are designed to interact with marketing, e-commerce, and customer support systems, resulting in a one-stop-shop that is easier to manage and more budget-friendly.
   

DXPs, which sit at the top of these platforms, leverage APIs to aggregate and orchestrate data to decide and deliver the optimal experience to customers every time they walk through the door. If your business already has a preferred tool, you may link it to the DXP via APIs or easily remove it, making experimentation less overwhelming.

4. AI accelerates time-to-market: Gaining a more in-depth understanding of your customer's attitude is priceless. AI incorporated in DXPs simplifies the job by collecting essential information from the mass of customer-related data.
   

5. Personalization: Personalization strengthens customer relationships. This can increase customer loyalty by providing each user with an experience that is tailored specifically to them.
   

6. Make the complex website manageable: A modern DXP with a robust content repository organized in content trees can be a significant advantage in creating and operating complex websites.
   

7. Security: Platforms must have robust security solutions in place, especially for enterprise customers. Unlike open-source solutions, enterprise DXPs can be built on a solid framework ensuring that core security principles are in place and being followed.
   

Conclusion

DXP is designed to help any business achieve digital transformation. Indeed, the power of DXP lies in its flexibility: it can be used by businesses of all sizes. Not only large corporations but also small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from it. There are no restrictions on customizability; these platforms can be completely tailored to your needs. Because you're using a microservice architecture, you don't have to worry about compatibility or integration issues. Finally, you will always have a community advocate for your business who will help you grow and thrive through collaboration with other platform members.
If you want to learn more about how DXPs could help your company, register for our webinar.