What is a digital experience platform?

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." 

It’s a good definition. But grasping its significance requires moving a step back. 

In today’s digital world, organizations stay competitive by building relationships through communication, which requires speaking and listening. 

Organizations use content to speak and data to listen, both of which are used to build relationships with consumers.

Digital experience platforms offer organizations an integrated suite of tools to foster meaningful relationships by speaking and listening to customers, prospects, partners, employees, and other audiences. 

Having conversations might sound easy. But in today’s complex world, it’s anything but. It requires not only delivering content to websites, email, mobile apps, customer portals, social platforms, IoT devices, virtual and augmented reality devices, in-store kiosks, digital signage, POS systems, and more; but also connecting the experiences on them.

The average number of devices and connections per person globally is 3.6, and most people use multiple devices on their path to purchase. It’s not enough to simply deliver content to each channel – they must coalesce into a consistent, connected, and continuous experience that nurtures people toward a clear outcome, especially when Google reports that there can be anywhere between 20-500 touchpoints in a customer's path to purchase.

For example, no one wants to get an email advertising a product they just purchased on Instagram. Or to click a link in a promotional email, only to be taken to the company’s homepage instead of the page for the product they’re considering. 

Digital experience platforms evolved to meet the challenges of today. 

CMS to WEM to DXP

The first content management systems (CMSs) appeared in the late 1980s and early ‘90s. These CMSs enabled brochure-like static content. By the late ‘90s, organizations were beginning to serve up the dynamic content that would give rise to the social web. 

As the social web expanded with user-generated content and the rise of mobile, the need for more personalized engagement and deeper business integration led to web experience management (WEM) solutions. With WEM, organizations began gathering engagement data, building out personas, and using both to serve up more personalized experiences. 

The problem with WEM systems, however, was that they were designed solely for marketing departments — and thus were hard to connect to the rest of the organization’s technology stack, such as their CRM or ERP. 

Take an insurance company, for example. After being marketed to, some targeted prospects would come to the company’s website and apply for a quote. But because the site was on a WEM, there was no easy way to pass on these leads and their information to a salesperson. Closing the sales loop was neither efficient nor fluid, which meant a lot of leads were lost. 

As digital experiences became more and more important to organizations of all types and sizes and technology solutions proliferated, the need for deeper integrations grew, leading to the rise of headless, microservices architecture. 

This architectural innovation offered two things:

First, it enabled integrations with other systems — such as CRMs, commerce systems, and call centers — to better connect the experiences on each. Finally, the insurance company above could track leads, get them to sales, and close the sales loop with ease.

Second, it empowered marketers and brands to become more customer-centric than ever before and embrace a more omnichannel way of thinking.

Together, these two capabilities paved the way for digital experience platforms (DXPs) to provide a fully integrated customer experience flowing seamlessly across channels and devices, throughout the entire journey.

Consumers take the reins

During this time, another phenomenon was developing: the age of the consumer. 

With each Google search, consumers’ knowledge grew. With each new option to buy online, their power increased. With each transaction on Amazon, their expectations expanded. 

And they brought their expectations to every interaction — whether purchasing products for their business, shopping for themselves, or communicating with the company they work for. 

As early as 2016, McKinsey highlighted that, according to research, three-fourths of customers “expect ‘now’ service within five minutes of making contact online.” In 2018, Salesforce research found that 76% of customers today expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. It’s often neither the product nor the price that’s the main competitive advantage today but the customer experience.

Since the pandemic, studies show that personalization matters even more. Over three-quarters of consumers (76%) say that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in prompting their consideration of a brand, while 78% say such content makes them more likely to repurchase.

On top of heightened expectations, consumers’ behavior changed as they took the reins digital provided. Instead of a linear flow from search to website to transaction, consumers now step in and out of their journeys, often using different devices for different phases. 

To meet the heightened expectations and divergent behavior of audiences today, organizations need a way to provide the right content, at the right time — no matter the device or reason for engagement. To do this, they need to align teams, streamline processes, connect systems, and often transform workflows to provide the customer experiences we have all come to expect. 

In addition to providing the connected tools organizations need to speak and listen to their audience, digital experience platforms provide the technology that supports the organizational transformation needed to improve customer experiences. 

While a digital experience platform is necessary for most organizations’ digital transformation, it isn’t as simple as just purchasing a new solution. 

You can begin by tracking experiences across your site, for example, but true digital transformation requires an organizational shift in thinking and doing — connecting silos, building out teams, moving to agile workflows, creating feedback loops to continuously evaluate and respond to customer data cues, and more. 

Composable digital experience platforms allow for flexibility and business agility. Instead of having a complete, all-in-one digital experience platform, composable DXP components operate as packaged business capabilities (PBCs) that can function independently and communicate with one another through APIs, facilitating omnichannel experiences and even accommodating yet to be defined points of interaction.  

To fully embrace a composable future, a cloud-native CMS is critical. It serves as the core of martech ecosystems. Content experience is customer experience - without content, brands cannot leverage data for personalization. Content is essential for creating experiences tailored to individuals – from emails, to product information.

For businesses starting out on their digital transformation journey, a cloud-native, SaaS CMS with embedded personalization and analytics provides a strong foundation for building out a DXP.  

But for many organizations looking to embark on the next stage of growth, a digital experience platform is now a necessary piece of the puzzle. 

Many teams are also realizing that it’s not only downstream needs — such as experience delivery and data collection — that are needed but also upstream needs — such as digital asset management and collaborative content creation. Digital experience platforms should connect fluidly with other systems to offer end-to-end content management. 

Digital has transformed everything today. It creates both risk (disruption) and opportunity (customer-obsessed engagement) for organizations across industries and sizes. To meet the constant evolution of our digital age, your digital experience platform must be capable of adapting to change.

Learn about Sitecore’s digital experience platform here.