These software solutions empower you with rich insights that you can use to shape your content strategy and provide better experiences that the users will adore. That said, offering a better customer experience is a need for modern businesses since users’ demands are changing. They expect relevant, consistent digital experiences at each touchpoint, whether it’s your site, social media page, or other platforms. This explains why the demand for DXPs is increasing. It helps streamline your content and fosters meaningful interactions, customer retention, growth, and ROI. In this article, I’ll explain what a DXP platform is and list the best DXP solutions for your business.
What Is a Digital Experience Platform?
Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a software solution with a rich set of tools and technologies to create, optimize, manage, and deliver improved digital experiences to customers, employees, and partners. DXPs provide a base where the capabilities of different applications bind together to form coherent digital experiences. They also help meet the business requirements of organizations embracing digital transformation. In addition, DXPs can digitize your business operations so you can accelerate your processes and achieve your goals faster. Furthermore, DXPs offer tools to collect actionable user insights that help you understand them better. This way, you can use these lessons to create relevant content and offer improved experiences. It consolidates all the digital touchpoints of users, such as their interactions on a site, application, social media platform, chatbot, customer portal, kiosk, etc., into a more informed ecosystem to view and manage. Looking at the capabilities of DXPs, many confuse it with CMS. However, they aren’t the same. A CMS generally focuses on managing content for sites like eCommerce websites, blogs, etc. But a DXP offers much more functionality than CMS. It takes care of the complete user experience journey, from the first interaction to after-sales, support, and retention. This happens not only at your brand’s site but across all your digital channels. DXPs aim to enable you to connect well to your customers, partners, and other users effectively and deliver high-quality experiences to them.
Types of DXPs
DXPs are of different types – open and closed DXPs. Open DXP: It integrates different products from multiple third-party vendors to make it a single, centralized system. It can offer you the flexibility to connect products of your preference, like your favorite CRM and other tools you already use or some new technologies you want to introduce to meet your needs. Closed DXP: This self-contained platform has all the products built into it. Hence, you don’t need other third-party tools; all the DXP components come pre-built by the DXP provider. However, it can also integrate with other products but works best within its product ecosystem. If you want to choose one of them, you can go for anyone based on your preference. Nevertheless, most people choose an open model due to more flexibility and freedom. You can also go for a closed DXP if you don’t have many technology resources for integrations or just prefer to have a single vendor.
What Are the Advantages of Using a Digital Experience Platform?
Data-Driven Business Decisions
With DXPs, you will get an intuitive platform where you can coordinate data from different teams, such as content marketing, customer support, sales, etc., in real-time in one place using APIs. DXPs can also combine this data with analytics to provide actionable insights that you can use to make informed, data-driven business decisions. Thus, you can create better quality content, marketing campaigns and offer outstanding digital experiences.
Multi-Channel Content Deployment
DXPs allow you to create and deploy marketing campaigns and content across different channels. This helps you maintain your online presence everywhere and connect with your audience no matter where they are, whether it’s apps, browsers, IoT devices, smartwatches, kiosks, voice assistants, etc.
Personalization
Personalization is key in today’s business in order to make your users feel valued and deliver great experiences. Modern DXPs can integrate advanced analytics, AI, and ML capabilities to help you create tailored, highly personalized content for your users, whether they are customers, partners, or employees. This fosters customer loyalty and lets you propagate the right message at the right time to drive conversions.
Seamless Integrations
You will get seamless integration power so that you can extend the functionality of your platform with the tools you love and use. It will prevent you from getting annoyed with using lots of tools in various windows; instead, you can get everything under one roof. To ease and accelerate your business operations, you can connect different platforms, tools, software, microservices, etc.
Scalability
DXPs can leverage microservices to build cloud-based digital experiences. This will offer more reliable performance, uptime, and performance for your technology stack. As a result, you can scale your servers anytime on customer demands or if your plans change. In addition, greater uptime will translate into a better user experience as your server will always be available to the users wherever they need it. Apart from the above, there are other benefits of using a DXP, such as:
Effective collaboration between backend and frontend, designers and developers, and others in the team, since each data will be known to the entire team by having a look at the DXP toolBrand consistency, as the DXP will help you organize and manage your content properly and edit them seamlessly. This will ease your marketing team’s work to develop and deliver relevant content while maintaining a unified brand voice at each touchpoint.
So, here are some of the best DXPs you can try out.
Bloomreach
One of the best digital experience platforms, Bloomreach, helps you provide powerful content, product delivery, and customer engagement to achieve unparalleled growth. It offers true personalization to make your customers feel valued and will keep coming back to you. The platform will help marketers understand their customers, display relevant content, and keep their customers connected with the help of rich product information and user preferences. It will connect all the dots by aggregating all the crucial commerce functionalities in one place and helps you focus on your goal and delight customers. Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud offers three key products:
Engagement: Uncover the real magic of customer information via delivering consistent, tailor-made, and engaging experiences throughout your digital touchpoints.Discovery: You can match customers with perfect products quickly using AI-powered website search, recommendations, product merchandising, and SEO.Content: Achieve greater revenue and real personalization using an API-first and headless content solution that’s flexible enough to power your frontend.
As a result of these capabilities, you can deliver scalable personalization in real-time and make your customers smile to create a forever brand loyalty.
SiteGlide
Use SiteGlide’s DXP platform to offer your customers a data-driven, limitless digital experience. It has been awarded various accolades by G2 as the number one DXP platform for small businesses. This platform allows you to leverage the true power of data to create and manage sites, marketplaces, customer portals, and membership sites. It offers OpenSource-like flexibility for SaaS tools, an enterprise-grade infrastructure, and developers. It enables:
Developers to meet the project brief irrespective of its complexity by offering complete control of their data and code via API, UI, or CLI.Agencies to generate quick and easy ROI with enterprise-grade security, performance, scalability, reliability, and flexibility.Businesses manage their processes, data, and customer experiences by accessing and managing data in a single system and using a built-in CMS, CRM, reporting, and eCommerce.
SiteGlide lets you create a fully-customized experience, solve business demands, maximize efficiency, and increase conversions. You can use customer data strategically to automate and personalize user experience leveraging Liquid logic. In addition, capture, output, access, share and query any kind of data anywhere in the customer experience journey to solve your business problems. Furthermore, SiteGlide offers a powerful UI to work harmoniously. Avoid siloed information and costly integrations; you will get 6+ useful tools in the single platform. It also offers scalable pricing options so that you can start small, paying for your exact requirements, and then gradually go big. The platform will allow you to focus on what’s important while it takes care of everything else – maintenance, improvements, and security. It also partners with top providers such as AWS, Sendgrid, Stripe, and platformOS.
Xperience
Xperience by Kentico offers next-generation content and site management to deliver excellent customer experiences and accelerate growth using a unified DXP platform. This platform has been featured in Gartner Magic Quadrant and other reports, including one by G2. It has already covered 35k+ successful projects and 1000+ partner agencies and has completed 18 years in the industry. You can utilize unique capabilities along with a headless platform that can empower marketers to conduct campaigns at high speed with low code or no-code technology. It offers powerful features to let you embrace your content modeling and improve customer experiences, drive revenue, and boost engagement. Leverage automation, email marketing, and personalization to connect with your visitors using relevant content throughout your devices and channels. You can power your eCommerce store using capabilities to drive conversion rates, basket sizes, and customer retention. Unite your tech stack with unique integrations and a headless API that Xperience supports.
Sitecore
Offer unforgettable experiences to your visitors with Sitecore that helps you create connections, foster loyalty, and drive conversions. It offers deep dive into customer data, AI, marketing automation, analytics, and more. Sitecore can easily integrate with your tech stack and provide comprehensive digital marketing capability. It simplifies content strategy by letting you create content and edit it with its WYSIWYG editor. You can also use its drag and drop interface and reduce your reliance on the IT team by using this intuitive yet simple platform. You can aggregate information from different profiles, behaviors, interactions, and activities to gain 360-degree visibility into each customer and offer cross-channel personalization for them at scale. In addition, its ML-based analytics, optimization, and testing offer wonderful benefits. It can collect valuable data and create actionable insights out of it so you can make informed business decisions. Use intuitive campaign and marketing automation to increase engagement and conversions, reduce customer acquisition costs, and accelerate time to market. You can also deliver personalized digital experiences across different sites, languages, and locations on any touchpoint, channel, or device. Sitecore’s Path Analyzer helps you deliver perfect customer journeys by letting you visualize their paths, drawing them to valuable interactions. In addition, the Path Analyzer can map the optimal journey and content components and shows where to optimize, test, and adjust. Gain a complete view of your customer interactions with intuitive dashboards, graphs, reports, and drill-down insights. You will also get Sitecore Email Experience Manager and other marketing automation tools to target customers and create segmented lists. Determine best digital experiences by testing components, page versions, page layouts, etc., with multivariate tests and A/B testing.
Progress
Transform your overall business using adaptive and compelling digital experiences with Progress that helps you lower overhead and deliver top-class results. No matter what your goal is – customer retention, acquisition, or growth, it can help you everywhere. By helping you effectively manage your online brand presence, from first visitor interactions to conversions, support, and retention, Progress can positively impact your business. As a result, your time to market and operational efficiency improves, marketing campaign performance boosts, and total ownership costs reduce. Progress supports multi-channel deployments on mobile apps, the web, and different UIs, so you can target a wider audience and offer them tailored experiences. This composable, cloud-enabled DX platform offers high scalability, global coverage, a value-driven approach, and low complexity. You will also get a fully-managed infrastructure optimized for performance, scalability, and security. Furthermore, it offers DAM, data-driven marketing, personalization, SEO, adaptive UX, premium search, and other advanced tools for better productivity and agility. It connects easily with various tools using flexible APIs, connectors, and low-code integration tools. In addition, Progress offers security and compliance features along with customer data management, digital commerce, AI-powered content analytics, secure file storage and transfers, and chatbots.
Core dna
Core dna is a modern eCommerce and hybrid CMS platform that lets you build applications and sites in a single place. Its DXP platform will help you scale your digital presence and provide outstanding customer experiences. This DXP platform simplifies your online presence by acting as a common place for your CMS, marketing, and commerce, all patched, secure, and hosted. They also release new features and updates every two weeks. Deliver faster and more with less effort if you have Core dna. It offers complete control of your content creation process and helps you design, deploy, and collaborate with speed using one single dashboard. Core dna is useful for:
Technical teams to simplify their site stack and create modern solutionsPartners to offer more to your customers and drive data-driven resultsExecutives to rationalize technology spending and grow business instead of software licensingContent teams to control customer journeys and create solutions without involving deeper technicalities.
Its features include easy-to-use headless CMS to help your business grow, manage and grow your B2C and B2B commerce in a single platform. It also offers brilliant automation tools that you can integrate with your workflows and applications. In addition, you get customer segmentation to identify, interact and retain potential customers.
Acquia
Acquia is considered a leader in DXPs since it offers awesome features, support, and flexibility to offer unrivaled customer experiences. It combines Drupal’s flexibility with the only Open Marketing Cloud platform in the world for the best experiences. Using one single platform will enable you to do much more and clock endless ROI. Its features are designed to reveal the true power of your database and build amazing Drupal experiences with more engaged customers and conversions. It helps you drive your site drive with relevant content and simplifies your multi-channel delivery. You can also make actionable information a reality with the help of Acquia and deliver content that can actually convert. As a result, you can dominate and drive digital expansion.
Liferay
Liferay is a flexible DXP solution built to work seamlessly with your business requirements, technologies, and processes in order to create a custom solution to fit your business needs. It helps you deliver experiences to engage your audience and keep them hooked with your brand. You can build customized and personalized experiences to empower your users. You can also support them with self-service and reduce customer support costs. In addition, this platform helps enhance operational efficiency by helping customers find what they are looking for and optimizing your business processes. Furthermore, Liferay helps increase your online revenue by offering a streamlined DXP solution. It also simplifies ordering, encourages repeat purchases, and helps grow your average order size so your customers can easily do transactions. Liferay offers partner portals to build a center for support, growth, and collaboration with your business partners without complexity. In addition, its customer portals let you personalize content and simplify processes. Similarly, employee portals boost the productivity of your employees, connect them seamlessly, and make them self-reliant. You also get supplier portals to simplify purchasing, increase profits, and support vendors using a centralized marketplace. Meanwhile, Liferay Experience Cloud offers multiple cloud deployments from fully-hosted experience to self-hosted to enable you to make the current choice for your IT ecosystem.
Zesty
Maximize your outputs with Zesty, a powerful DXP that can empower your team to build, optimize, and distribute web content. It enables you to spend more time on creation and less time on development and maintenance, which is a gift for non-techies. Don’t let your CMS tool decelerate your process; use Zesty to do the best you do – that’s creating content. It’s a CMS that can grow with you, making it best for growing businesses. It also reduces complexities so you can concentrate on your goal. It offers SEO and automated code to do all the hard work while you focus on creating content and connecting with customers to have meaningful relations and boost brand loyalty. Zesty also has a user-friendly platform and offers excellent customer service.
Neptune
Neptune DXP is a fantastic platform for building custom applications based on reusable, modular app building blocks. It commits to making enterprise-grade app development 10x faster by utilizing your current developer skills and working with no intensive upskilling or training. It offers a unified and intuitive user interface for all your applications and sites across your mobile, voice, AR, desktop, and offline touchpoints. This DXP can uniquely bridge low-code, no-code, and pro-code to increase your team’s performance without restricting them to a single, bring a model. You can even connect and create APIs and pixel-perfect, responsive UX. This platform is useful for various use cases, including manufacturing, HR, retail, healthcare, utilities, and more.
Conclusion 👩💻
Delivering excellent digital experiences to all the users is the need of the hour for modern businesses. Using a digital experience platform (DXP) can help you achieve that by enabling you to understand your users better and create relevant and tailored content for them. Hence, use any of the digital experience platforms (DXPs) mentioned above to keep your customers engaged with powerful interactions and content to boost your ROI and business growth.
