What is a digital experience platform?

A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a platform that allows companies to provide outstanding experience to their users, whether they are a customer, an employee or a partner. It combines various features such as a CMS, document sharing or personalization tools to provide customized content to the user and help them find information that’s relevant to them quickly and seamlessly, creating positive experiences.

Let’s explore what a Digital Experience Platform is, what it can do for your organization and how it can ultimately benefit your business using the right features.

The importance of improving experience

A DXP is about improving the experience for every type of stakeholder, including employees, partners and customers, to provide outstanding experiences seamlessly across the board.

Innovative business to consumer (B2C) experiences

In the last year there has been a noticeable shift in how companies need to interact with customers. It has become increasingly important for businesses to put their customer first to maintain an advantage over their competitors. It’s predicted that by the year 2020, customer experience (CX) will be more important as a brand differentiator than price and product.

Businesses that fail to take customer experience seriously can quickly lose customer engagement and loyalty that may have taken months or even years to build.

Putting customer experience first is vital as it will help to drive business growth and an effective digital experience platform can be a great tool to help to achieve this. It gives a business the ability to provide customers with instant access to the information they want.

Enhance business to business (B2B) experiences

Digital experience also has a part to play in B2B. An effective digital experience platform can be tailored to fulfil the specific needs of the partners engaging with your enterprise. People want a more convenient, quick and easy experience. Provide a winning B2B experience and your business will set itself apart from other businesses who are slower to adopt digital experience technology.

Don’t forget business to employee (B2E) experiences

Company success often depends on its employees feeling engaged and motivated. The world has become digital and the modern workforce is very comfortable with digital technology because they engage with it every day in their own time. Embracing this familiarity in the workplace too, via a digital experience platform, will not only support employees in their roles but can also help improve their efficiency and productivity.

Capabilities of a digital experience platform

Some have seen the DXP as being like an evolution of the CMS  - in terms of offering capabilities above and beyond a traditional CMS.

Reduce silos

A content management system helps enterprises to produce and upload content easily on any platform such as their website or intranet. However, the use of a CMS by employees also brings challenges by creating silos in organizations. Different departments and management groups don’t share information with other departments, which results in reduced efficiency and duplication of work.

A digital experience platform offers a fully integrated digital experience that prevents silos within the workplace and fosters easy information sharing between different stakeholders. It can do so by offering a smart CMS combined with intuitive knowledge management tools to improve collaboration, internal communications and efficiency in the workplace.

Be user friendly

A Digital Experience Platform should be user friendly and reduce the need for extra IT support, empowering employees to build a unique platform that corresponds to their organization. This is exactly what the Unily digital experience platform does, creating a connected and consistent digital experience both internally for your employees and for your customers.

Allow flexibility

The number of digital touchpoints that need to be controlled has increased and they will only continue to do so. Every new touchpoint needs to be addressed to continue to deliver an exceptional digital experience for your users, which is easier said than done. Every new touchpoint has to integrate effectively with your existing platform, which means it has to be flexible. The powerful, yet user friendly, Hendrix Engine gives you the flexibility to build the components you need and make them look the way you want, no matter which device you’re using.

Personalize your content

Customers are increasingly expecting a personalized experience, which requires bespoke capabilities by user. A digital experience platform allows you to show the right content at the right time to the right user. This means your customers get to see what they want faster and more easily. The result for your business is increased customer satisfaction. Happy customers will continue to engage with your company and could even become vocal advocates for your business.

Analyze the data

Good decisions are made when data is available to inform them. A good DXP will provide in-depth analytics data to help your business make well-informed decisions to drive future growth.

This powerful analytics platform allows you to dig down deeper into all aspects of your data to gain meaningful insight to improve your business performance.

Must-have digital experience platform features

An effective digital experience platform needs specific features to support your business’ digital activities. Core components include content management, personalization and omnichannel marketing, but there are a number of additional features that you should look out for.

These features include:

• Digital asset management
• Ecommerce
• Multilingual capabilities
• CRM
• Marketing automation
• Analytics data
• Social media
• Video management

Benefits of a digital experience platform

We dig deeper to uncover the benefits that a digital experience offers for both customers and employees.

For customers

Deploying an effective digital experience platform can differentiate your company from its competitors by providing a better user experience that drives engagement and increases revenue. If you want your business to remain competitive then it should really be a case of ‘how soon’ rather than ‘if’ when it comes to considering adopting a digital experience platform.

Research from Salesforce reinforces this. Their report found that 52% of consumers indicated that they would probably switch brands if the company they were currently engaging with didn’t personalize communications to them. This demonstrates the importance of customer experience and a digital experience platform can be the best solution for providing a great experience to your customers.

A DXP helps your business to build relationships, organize omnichannel experiences, enhance integrations and address customers’ needs across multiple touchpoints. 2019 is going to be all about delivering an exceptional customer experience. A DXP will allow you to scale and personalize your business’ customer experience across different channels, devices and even countries.

For employees

A DXP can also have a number of benefits for your employees. It will provide your team with quick and easy access to communication tools, which will allow for better collaboration and increased engagement with each other through social and messaging functions. In turn this will help to save time and improve productivity amongst your staff.

In addition, a digital platform removes silos in your business, as it provides a simple and effective way for departments to share relevant information with their colleagues. The silo mentality can be an issue for a number of companies, especially as they grow. A digital workplace platform helps to breakdown silo barriers strengthening collaboration.

DXP - an exciting future awaits

Digital experience platforms will undoubtedly continue to develop and evolve as the needs of customers and companies continue to change. The success of your business relies on improving digital experience and putting the user front of mind. It’s important to choose an effective digital experience platform that responds to the users’ needs by personalizing their experience.

Unily provides one platform that integrates technologies into a central control center allowing you to expand digital experiences across various touchpoints. If you would like to find out more about our digital experience platform, then please contact the Unily team who will be happy to help discuss your needs and provide appropriate advice to fit your organization.