Digital experience platforms(DXPs) are vital for any business that wants to establish themselves in the digital age. They enable organizations to meet ever-changing customer expectations and provide the foundation for delivering engaging and personalized experiences.
Let’s explain what a DXP is, break down the evolution of DXPs, the benefits, and capabilities, and explain how to select the best one for your needs.
#What is a DXP?
A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a set of tools that combine together to help organizations create, manage, and deliver digital experiences. It provides a central hub where brands can manage their entire digital ecosystem. This can be accomplished using a single platform or a suite of products that are integrated together.
In the vast digital ecosystem, customer interactions happen across multiple touchpoints, including websites, social media platforms, email, digital portals, in-store kiosks, and more. With a DXP, teams can manage these interactions and the data gathered from them much more easily.
DXPs enable businesses to build and manage not only websites but also mobile applications, eCommerce shops, and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In bringing all these services together under one roof, companies can benefit from a continuous stream of content and more efficient workflows.
Origins of the DXP
Gartner originally coined the term DXP to define a movement occurring within technology platforms where architectures were becoming more complex and tools like Content Management Systems (CMSs) began integrating a broader range of tools to satisfy consumer needs.
They decided on this definition:
“An integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.”
Since then, the definition of the DXP has been adapted by other analysts and vendors. However, at its core, the purpose remains to provide the best digital experience for the customer.
As customer expectations rose around receiving high-quality, engaging digital experiences across multiple channels and creating an omnichannel experience, companies adapted by gathering more data on customer needs and wants and integrating them into their existing systems and workflows.
In the initial iterations of DXPs, businesses purchased a single platform and received access to all of the functionalities provided by a single provider. Over time, however, there has been a rise in the best-of-breed approach to DXP architecture building, where companies start with one piece, like a CMS, and then add other products around it. This has led to a rise in platforms that allow integrations with external services to provide a flexible, composable DXP.
#The evolution of DXPs
The goal of a DXP is to bring unified, engaging, customer-centric experiences to the end user built on data and understanding. We’ve touched on the origins of the DXP, but we also need to address how it evolved to become what it is today.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
The first iteration of what we know today as the DXP was the content management system (CMS). These platforms enable teams to create, organize, store, and deliver the content that is critical to a digital product. This content can be anything from marketing copy to metadata to product information.
Instead of content being hard-coded for a website, CMSs allow editors to create, edit, and format content before it is published to a frontend like a website. Making this simple workflow was the foundation of the desire to create more content that required less work from the development team to push live. This type of CMS is known today as a traditional CMS.
Traditional CMS
A traditional CMS, also known as a monolithic CMS, is a content management system that tightly couples the frontend presentation layer and the backend content repository. It dictates the presentation layer of the end user and often provides templates in order to provide a custom look and feel. WordPress is the best example of a traditional CMS and highlights the best use cases, blogs, and simple websites.
Web Experience Management (WEM)
Next came Web Experience Management, which grew from the traditional CMS approach of creating a central content hub. Web Experience Management, however, keeps the customer at the center of its mission.
It considers all online customer touchpoints and enables content to be delivered to various channels, from websites and mobile apps to digital kiosks and IoT devices. WEM also ensures that content distributed across multiple channels remains aligned and consistent.
By having a single content repository, teams could ensure that the branding and messaging were aligned across channels. These platforms consider all customer data gathered to help build personalized, custom-feeling experiences. WEM also gave rise to another type of CMS, the headless CMS, to make delivering those experiences possible.
Headless CMS
A Headless CMS removes the frontend presentation layer, aka “The Head,” and leaves only a backend content repository with an API that can be connected to the frontend of their choice. Instead of relying on the system-provided templates and having to build workarounds, project leaders can choose which of the many frontend technologies is relevant to their use case. This allows them to create frontends for any device and deliver content to the various customer touchpoints.
Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
Out of the desire to build more data-rich user experiences and the foundations of the CMS and WEM systems came the digital experience platform. Content remains a critical part of any marketing technology stack. Still, other tools, such as personalization engines, search tools, and analytics systems, play a role in shaping the digital customer experience.
DXPs are the evolution of the CMS, connecting the various parts of a martech stack and enabling companies to manage the entire customer journey from end to end.
Typically, DXPs were housed in a single, monolithic platform, tying a company to a particular vendor. These were a vast improvement to previous systems because they removed the issue of data silos between different systems and optimized workflows to empower more creativity and agility. However, the issues of vendor lock-in and the challenges of integrating third-party systems meant that the traditional DXP needed to evolve again.
Composable DXPs
Composable DXPs take the same basic principles of a DXP and apply a modern, best-of-breed approach to architecture building. With traditional DXPs, all of the functionality typically comes from a single vendor, an integration built by that vendor, or a custom integration from the team itself. This can lead to cost-intensive workarounds or roadblocks.
With composable DXPs, teams choose the tooling that they would like based on their use case and connect them together via API. Data flows seamlessly between the systems, and there is a custom feel of a DXP without reinventing the wheel.
Composable DXPs typically have a headless CMS at their core with additional best-of-breed solutions such as eCommerce platforms, CRMs, analytics solutions, and marketing automation systems added around the CMS to round out the architecture.
As business needs change over time, it is easy to continue to refine the DXP stack by adding or removing pieces. This provides the benefits of a DXP in terms of having content readily available and not building a reliance on a single vendor for all functionality.
Digital Experience Composition
While composable DXPs offer companies the ability to combine various best-of-breed tools into an integrated solution, they require extensive development work to manage integrations and create those experiences. As such, the next evolution of the DXP is digital experience composition (DXC).
Another term coined by Gartner, DXC tools enable developers to create digital experiences and hand them to business users for day-to-day management in no-code environments.
First, developers build experiences using the same headless or composable approach as a composable DXP. They combine a headless CMS with eCommerce tools, search capabilities, analytics tools, and other solutions using APIs.
Then, business users can manage experiences independently using no-code tools. So they can pull data from one system and share it with another, preview content on multiple devices, and more.
#Benefits of DXPs
Let’s look at the benefits to both the companies and the end user.
Holistic visibility of customer data
With a DXP, data flows seamlessly through a single system. Customer information is housed in a single place rather than spread across multiple systems, thus eliminating silos. This enables teams to power their customer interactions with data and create memorable digital experiences.
Removing data silos also ensures that data remains accurate and up-to-date. It becomes easier to automate changes to data and ensure that those changes are reflected across systems. In the past, this was dependent on manual work applied across multiple systems, which could lead to data not being updated as often, human errors, and less readily available data.
DXPs ensure that customer interactions are driven with data, providing a complete view of the customer journey from end to end that can help level up the experience and that no customer is left by the wayside.
Increased operational efficiency
Teams can live mainly within a single system after implementing a DXP, whether a composable or traditional DXP. In creating a seamless flow of content between various elements of the architecture, from CMS to data analytics, it is easy to create new interactions without the need for time-consuming data migrations.
Individual stakeholders have access to the most current information and are sure that the data is consistent across all of the systems without the need for manual work. In reducing the manual work needed to ensure data is accurate and available at all points of creating a digital experience, workflows are more efficient, and the amount of tedious data entry is reduced. This increases productivity and allows more room for creativity and experimentation in creating new digital experiences.
Rich and personalized digital experience
Because of the better availability of data and systems such as A/B testing and data analytics being in one place, teams are able to deliver a personalized digital experience with ease.
Today’s consumers expect a high degree of personalization and want digital interactions to be smooth and straightforward. DXPs make this possible by creating a single content repository where data can easily be harnessed for various purposes.
Instead of needing to migrate data from one system to another to add functionality, with a DXP, the data is available from the get-go, and it is consistent throughout the system. It is easy to take advantage of a more efficient workflow, which enables them to be more experimental with their approach to providing new and engaging digital experiences.
If they prove successful, it is easy to expand this approach. If not, it can be helpful to use the data gathered from unsuccessful campaigns to provide a clear starting point for the next experiment without migrating data from one system to another.
Accelerated digital transformation initiatives
In creating a single place where all content lives, it is easy to distribute this data between multiple presentation layers depending on the use case. As teams want to experiment with new channels, they can rely on the existing structured content in the backend and provide supplemental information relevant to the particular use case.
This expedited workflow enables more agility and can accelerate digital transformation for companies relying on legacy systems that aren’t ready to overhaul their entire infrastructure in a big-bang approach.
Instead of taking time to migrate data between systems and evaluating whether the extensive time investment is worth accessing the new channel, project leaders can create a simple proof of concept (POC) with existing data and functionality within the DXP.
Digital transformation has changed customer expectations around many interactions, from eCommerce to customer support. This will only continue to grow, so having a central repository of the data gathered from all customer interactions helps ensure that information is not lost due to data silos. DXPs help teams create a future-oriented approach when it comes to digital transformation while creating workflows that are efficient for existing use cases as well.
Customer-centric approach
At the heart of providing more data-centric approaches is providing more interactions that bring the most value to customers. In keeping customers at the core, teams are able to build more meaningful interactions and use the data gathered to continue to improve in further experiments.
While it is expected to claim that putting customers first is a goal of a business, by implementing a DXP, companies put this into action. Building more engaging interactions, becoming more experimental, and retaining data around all of these approaches help ensure that companies are delivering the most attractive customer experiences possible.
#Composable DXP benefits
Traditional and composable DXPs share many of the same benefits. However, there are some benefits the composable DXP offers that a traditional DXP does not.
Best-of-breed products
A composable DXP allows teams to select the best tools on the market and the best tools for their specific needs. If a company wants to choose a better analytics platform to pair with their CMS, they can choose one that has the best reviews on the market if they wish. If that product isn’t a fit for them, they can also select the one that fits their budget and capability requirements. The freedom of choice increases with a composable DXP.
Increased adaptability and flexibility
Whether a company is undergoing a digital transformation today or wants to change its strategy to launch new products or enter new markets, being adaptable is a requirement. They also need to adapt to changing market and customer needs.
Accomplishing these tasks is easier with a composable DXP as it enables companies to select best-of-breed products to serve their needs. In contrast, a traditional DXP can restrict businesses to the tools in the suite, which limits flexibility.
#Digital experience platform examples
Below are examples of digital experience platforms. These solutions vary from headless CMSs like Hygraph, which can be the centerpiece that you build your composable DXP around, to platforms like Adobe that offer a traditional suite DXP.
- Hygraph
- Sitecore
- Adobe Experience Manager
- Optimizely
- Magnolia
- Bloomreach
- Kentico
#Digital experience platform capabilities
There are different categories of DXP, and organizations will be better suited to adopting one over the other depending on a number of factors. However, there are some core capabilities every DXP should provide businesses either natively or through an integration. Here are some of the key capabilities:
Content management: A DXP must allow teams to create, edit, and manage content like a typical CMS. This should include scheduling for various content types.
Personalization: A DXP should enable teams to tailor content to different audiences based on available data, including user behavior, preferences, and demographics.
Analytics and optimization: The ability to track and analyze user data and other metrics to improve the digital experience is essential.
Customer journey mapping: DXPs should enable teams to visualize and map the entire customer journey to see their paths through the different touchpoints and identify the opportunities to engage.
Presentation, delivery, and orchestration: A DXP must offer headless functionality, which gives users control over how content is displayed and delivered across multiple channels, devices, and customer touchpoints.
Search, navigation, and insight: Organizations need search capabilities in their DXP to find relevant content and enable users and visitors to navigate the digital experience.
Collaboration and knowledge sharing: Individual users and teams must be able to communicate and share information easily using a DXP.
Security and access control: DXPs must provide robust security features that protect against unauthorized access, including providing custom roles and permissions for users.
Cloud capabilities: A DXP must be able to leverage cloud infrastructure for scalability, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness, as well as easy deployment.
Integration, interoperability, and extensibility: DXPs must allow seamless integration with third-party systems and platforms via APIs.
Multiexperience support: DXPs should cater to websites and multiple use cases, ensuring that digital experiences are optimized for various devices and touchpoints.
Additionally, there are other capabilities that some DXPs will offer, including digital commerce, digital asset management (DAM), low-code/no-code development, and others.
Digital experience platform use cases
DXPs can be helpful across a broad set of use cases. Those who want to deliver powerful digital experiences that can implement DXPs when they want to make their workflows more efficient, use best-of-breed tooling, or when they want to rid their stacks of data silos. Let’s look at some of these use cases to better understand how implementing a DXP is helpful.
Portals
Portals are sophisticated content repositories that can be used to neatly organize large amounts of content, such as employee intranets or content hubs. Portals often require multiple sources of content and stakeholders to be able to reuse content in multiple contexts. These requirements make them strong candidates for a DXP use case. Learn how BioCentury built a content hub portal using Hygraph as a composable DXP.
eCommerce Sites
eCommerce sites are the new standard for purchasing items beyond a brick-and-mortar store. Delivering high-powered, performant eCommerce experiences at scale is a clear case for DXPs where consistency and accuracy of data are paramount. Learn how Burrow built their eCommerce site with Hygraph as a DXP.
Marketing websites
Marketing websites are still the central way that brands interact with their customers; however, the customer experience of these websites can be enriched using personalization features or A/B testing to ensure that only the most engaging content is used. DXPs are appropriate where teams want to build a data-oriented, future-proof stack. Learn how Travel Weekly used Hygraph as their DXP to build their performance marketing site.
Federated content applications
Federated Content applications bring data together from multiple external services to create an engaging end-user experience. Because content is being fed from multiple sources, implementing a DXP is a must to ensure that data is consistent across the platform. Learn how Telenor built a federated content application using Hygraph as their DXP.
#Where does CMS fit into the DXP approach?
Having CMS functionality within a DXP is the primary component of a DXP. Depending on the DXP, the system may have begun as a CMS and grown into an all-encompassing DXP.
A CMS ensures that data is well organized and offers essential functionality to the teams building digital experiences. It also allows them to model structured content in a flexible way that can be used in a broad set of contexts to enrich content with information from other elements of the architecture, such as CRM or Data Analytics tools.
The CMS component of a DXP should have enough flexibility to explore new channels easily. Data should be stored as structured content to stream data between different elements of the DXP easily, and this data should be reusable without any additional manual work.
Choosing DXPs that integrate well with additional systems can be critical to ensuring that the architecture scales and ages well. A composable DXP can be a great choice in this context because it can integrate with external systems via API and gives more room to build a custom stack while still benefiting from the DXP approach.
What is the difference between a CMS and a DXP?
The best answer here is it depends.
In many circumstances, the CMS is a critical element of a broader DXP system if it offers headless functionality. Organizing and managing structured content within a DXP ensures that the data can be easily distributed between the various elements of the DXP.
The biggest difference is that while all DXPs will have a CMS element, not every CMS will have all other functionality inherent to a DXP. Some CMSs will be extensible enough to integrate external systems as a composable DXP.
In a composable DXP, various services are connected via API to create a customizable DXP. Teams can choose the best-of-breed technologies that are most relevant to their use case and integrate them together to build a DXP. The CMS, in this circumstance, becomes the central content repository.
If the CMS in question is a headless CMS and federated content platform like Hygraph, it can also offer Content Federation. This enables teams to bring in data from remote sources and provide an up-to-date, consistent picture of the content used throughout the DXP.
#How to choose a digital experience platform
In order to select the right DXP for your business, there are several steps to consider.
Evaluate your needs and goals
The DXP landscape is vast, and each system or approach has various pros and cons. The most important things to understand are how this new approach will affect your team, the digital experiences you can create, and how the architecture will grow with you in the long term. The first step is to have a good understanding of what kind of digital products you would like to produce with your DXP.
Considering questions like these will help you get a better sense of your needs:
- What are the competencies of my team?
- How will this architecture scale?
- How many channels should I consider with a DXP?
- Do I want the ability to experiment with new technologies as they arise?
- Do I want to be tied to a single vendor?
- How much of my tech stack should carry over into a new approach?
Answering these questions will help teams bring together a better understanding of what kind of system or approach is best for your project. It will also make it clear how large of a migration is needed to this new approach and may help give a sense of the timeline required.
Choose between the composable and monolithic DXP approaches
Once you have a sense of what you want to achieve by migrating to a DXP approach, it can be easy to understand whether or not a traditional or composable approach is best. There are tradeoffs with each approach, so it is essential to evaluate which will make your projects more productive in the long run.
Monolithic systems offer the ability to have DXP functionality out of the box; however, teams will be limited by the availability of specific features depending on the vendor. Composable DXPs require more time in the initial configuration of the architecture; however, they enable more flexibility to build a wide range of digital experiences and are largely extensible. The inherent extensibility makes it easy to add and remove functionality as it is relevant to their use case.
Evaluate your toolsets
Evaluating the landscape of tools can be overwhelming due to the crowded DXP markets. Considering your goals and capabilities will help you determine the correct tooling. You must also consider the existing tools in the technology stack to determine if the DXP you want to select is the right fit for your organization.
#What’s next
Digital experience platforms are becoming fundamental to creating the best customer experience. In our digitally focused world, the ability to build and orchestrate experiences across the entire customer journey is essential, and a DXP allows companies to accomplish that.
Hygraph offers a next-generation GraphQL headless CMS that can provide the foundation for your DXP. Through a modular, API-first approach and Hygraph’s content federation capabilities, it is possible to integrate various tools and pull data from multiple sources to orchestrate the best digital experience for your customers.
Learn more about modernizing your approach by embracing modular Digital Experience Platforms (DXP) and Composable Architectures by reading our report: The Emergence of Composable DXPs.
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