Firms new to the digital transformation imperative thrust upon them may find a digital experience platform useful to smoothen the journey.

Digital transformation is offering organizations of every size the promise of a new way of doing business, delivering efficiency, cost-savings and the opportunity to enhance customer relations.

However, there are so many aspects to the changes that digitalization brings, that business leaders can feel overwhelmed. One tool that can help is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that enable brands to create personalized digital journeys for their customers.

DXP is described by Gartner as “a well-integrated and cohesive set of technologies designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys.”

Such a platform can provide optimal digital experiences to multiple stakeholders, helping to ensure continuity across the full customer lifetime journey.

The right DXP fit

DXP offers both short-term and long-term benefits, and organizations adopting the platform should balance the two, with the practical need for prudence in capital expenditure weighed against the training of employees to use such platforms.

To do this, organizations need to find a DXP solution that offers the right set of capabilities to maximize long-term success. Ease of use, ease of implementation and flexibility, hybrid content management and cloud support, should be at the top of organizations’ list of priorities.

These considerations are particularly important for companies still on their digital transformation journey—like those in the mid-market and in industries such as education, healthcare and financial services.

Key features and capabilities needed

The usability of a DXP solution is key to collaborative working across functions, in order to produce more impactful digital campaigns and programs, faster and on a larger scale. This will also free up the IT team from handling endless requests from marketers, and let them focus on more relevant projects.

  • If your organization is still wedded to on-prem IT systems, you need to bite the bullet and begin to make the shift to cloud. DXP requires the agility and flexibility of a cloud-based architecture.
  • Other factors to consider are flexibility and scalability. Some DXP platforms may not be able to evolve to meet changes in business strategies and workflows. Find a solution with the right level of customization and scalability, and ability to interoperate with third-party tools.
  • In the digital world, marketing success depends on precise campaign targeting. Therefore, ensure that the DXP has integrated analytics, personalization and optimization to help your marketing team gain full visibility of all the segments, prospects and touchpoints to target visitors with impactful content. 
  • Multi-language support is also important. English is the most widely understood language, but true personalization demands that users are able to access all the platform’s features in the language they feel most comfortable with. The DXP must be able to deliver content and handle analytics and optimization in a way that feels authentic to the customer.
  • Finally, security capabilities should be considered. Cybersecurity is an increasingly critical consideration for all software applications. As your DXP will interact with a huge variety of connections, including critical systems, it must offer the most robust levels of cybersecurity and compliance.

Pitfalls to avoid

For most organizations, the digital transformation journey is a gradual one, where they master each phase before moving on to the next. This calls for a DXP that can scale as the digital strategy evolves.

Teams should beware of investing too much in overly complex solutions, with capabilities beyond what is needed in the near term. Look for offerings that support businesses step-by-step as they reach each stage of digital maturity. Also, beware of vendor lock-downs where the use of third-party tools is not support, or where you are stuck with only the DXP vendor’s products.

Many organizations lack the in-house resources to create and manage consistently innovative and successful digital experiences. Make sure your DXP vendor has the strategic expertise and project management skills necessary to bring your vision to life and deliver the business value you expect.

A good DXP partnership will enable your organization to save costs, enhance efficiency and deliver digital experiences that will continuously delight your customers.