Maxim Ivanov, Co-Founder, and CEO of Aimprosoft compares the modern digital business ecosystem to that of a biological one. He emphasizes the need for constant collaborative efforts between different business departments, starting from production to sales.
He believes a digitally-backed business ecosystem influences and is impacted by all its components, resulting in an evolving collaborative effort where every unit has to pull its weight by displaying adaptability for the business to function effectively.
This is where a Digital Experience Platform comes in.
A DXP is implemented to encourage an optimum collaborative atmosphere. According to IBM research, enterprises who have prioritized the digital transformation of their customer experience have generated thrice the revenue of those that haven’t. These companies were often termed "Experience Leaders."
According to that same report, business leaders attributed a 22% revenue growth to DXP investments. DXP transformation itself contributed to another 23%. Moreover, 20% of that growth came from customer personalization changes using DXP.
The new generation of entrepreneurs and company owners believe in the potential of collaboration. DXP intends to harness this interconnectivity and collaboration to power a business to maximize profitability, scale quickly, and gain significant differentiation.
Why build a connective ecosystem?
Every company has several internal and external stakeholders. This poses a challenge when engaging and integrating all parties, each with their own set of goals and interests.
Having a solid ecosystem enables firms to adjust and grow in an increasingly complex digital environment. It also helps avoid communication problems with these stakeholders. Collaboration becomes far less complicated, too.
Not having a connective ecosystem can also be a cause for fragmentation of information exchange within globally spread out businesses.
The information gap can be addressed with a portal that delivers a sophisticated and collaborative environment. The portal would allow all company partners to share and view relevant information at the right time, execute their responsibilities, and subsequently meet their goals.
A brief introduction to DXP
A digital experience ecosystem is a comprehensive collection of business software solutions necessary to satisfy the whole digital journey of a customer. To explain it in simple terms, a DXP is what forms the core of any DX ecosystem, thereby providing a company with a wealth of advantages. These include:
- Content management for building websites, mobile apps, and forms
- Digital asset management
- Marketing campaign management
- Marketing automation
- Marketing workflow management
- Marketing analytics
- Marketing targeting
- Data management to create audiences and export segments
- Creating customer data platforms
Hence, the DXP is essentially a collection of software tools that allow for the design, distribution, and optimization of a unique digital experience that would encourage customers to perform the desired action, therefore driving a company's revenues.
Components of a DXP
The DXP consists of three primary elements and an additional extension that helps create the DXP ecosystem.
- WCM (Web Content Management) or CMS (Content Management System)- A content management system (CMS) is a software application that allows numerous users in a networked environment to create and manage digital material. WCM, on the other hand, is often used to refer to a CMS that has the ability to manage content across web pages, including pictures, photographs, video, audio, and more.
- An AI-powered content personalization engine- Personalization engines tailor the user experience for micro-segments of users based on behavioral, contextual, and user-specific data.
- Omnichannel content delivery- Omnichannel is a cross-channel content strategy in which channels and associated customer interactions are handled to provide a unified customer experience. It helps provide a cohesive consumer experience allowing a company to create a seamless consumer experience.
Aside from these three essential components that comprise the primary DXP, there are a variety of technological packages and platforms that enhance the DXP. A company can choose from a range of these based on their requirements. These include:
- A Digital Asset Management (DAM) platform
- An e-commerce engine
- Analytics
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
- Data management platforms
- Marketing automation tools
- Social media platforms and tools
- Translation and localization software
- Video management solutions
Connecting your organization to a Digital Experience Platform
As mentioned earlier, a DXP helps improve the ease of business and creates a space where the customer, partners, and business owners can seek refuge. As a multichannel, multipurpose, customizable, expandable software, the DXP can be made fit to serve any business regardless of their business domain.
These characteristics help firms with designing digital solutions for users across the company. In particular, customers, partners, and company staff who work from different locations benefit greatly from these solutions.
Examples include websites, mobile applications, intranets, and portals like customer self-service.
Furthermore, it is an excellent way to create and deliver content to the customer base while only requiring minor one-time investments. In addition, its flexibility and expandability allow for a unified experience for all.
Advantages of connecting a DXP to a business
DXP offer completely tailor-made solutions that help in the following:
- Accelerates time to market
- Boosts consumer loyalty
- Enhances the consumer experience through personalization and high-value content delivery
- Increases company efficiency
- Increases revenue
- Maximizes profit
- Obtains a competitive advantage
- Reduces expenses
- Refocuses staff on core competencies
- Scales quickly using add-on tools suited to the business
To understand its perks better, let’s look into some of these in detail:
Enhances the consumer experience across all digital touchpoints
With the emergence of the different types of content sharing and digital platforms, it is becoming even more critical to ensure unification across the board.
The Digital Experience Platform assists businesses in maintaining strong brand consistency across all digital touchpoints such as video, audio, social media, etc. Additionally, it enables businesses to use personalization features to increase client engagement.
Not to forget, the DXP systems have built-in data, and trend analytics features to assist businesses with consumer behavior tracking.
A unified system for companies
For years, companies have needed to build and deploy various software to manage varied business processes. Not only is it inconvenient, but it requires significant investments.
This is where the Digital Experience Platform proves helpful.
It facilitates the integration of many software and applications into a single platform and lets businesses have constant access to the complete data across all systems, thereby simplifying and streamlining all the digital processes.
AI that can reduce time-to-market
Organizations must understand their consumers' mindsets to match their evolving expectations. In order to gain insight into the clients' demands, businesses must examine relevant data. Monitoring social media engagements, interests, past purchases, browsing data, and other information provides businesses with practical insights that bring tremendous value to their operations.
Businesses can execute this analysis more effectively by incorporating Artificial Intelligence into the DXP. This aids in the identification of critical client information from a vast volume of customer-related data more quickly and accurately.
Increases business productivity
Businesses hope to generate income. This can only be accomplished by expanding their clientele and retaining them thereafter. When it comes to producing captivating consumer experiences, the Digital Experience Platform is critical. Furthermore, DXP is a versatile solution that enables businesses to link their current enterprise systems and third-party apps via APIs.
Thus, when businesses hope to integrate new services in the future, combining them into the platform becomes easier, therefore, simplifying business operations. Moreover, brands can enhance conversion rate, increase revenues, and decrease operating costs by leveraging the Digital Experience Platform's content, commerce, and integration capabilities. All of this together adds to an increase in the overall productivity of the business.
Successfully addresses all of the customer's key concerns
Creating a successful marketing plan requires organizations to monitor client interactions across all sales and marketing channels throughout the various stages. DXP gives businesses total control over the monitoring of the channels through which target audiences engage with the brand. This assists firms in understanding the requirements and challenges of their consumers.
Moreover, it delivers quantitative data that businesses may use to develop a more effective marketing plan. Furthermore, companies can recommend suitable items and services depending on these pain points.
Connects all business components
Although DXP is a highly advanced technology, it has some inevitable shortcomings as a standalone. Hence, it necessitates using additional programs relevant to certain activities. E.g., an eCommerce solution to monitor transactions and inventories and customer support solutions to provide immediate assistance to current customers.
This is where the additional packages and platforms come in to provide a truly centralized solution to a business.
Organizations can integrate DXP with any number of business solutions. It uses APIs to organize and aggregate data to define and offer the best possible experience to customers when they connect with a brand.
Drupal DXP
Drupal is an open-source platform for developing Digital Experience Platforms for e-commerce businesses. Thanks to its API-first strategy and modular architecture, Drupal has emerged as a credible option for an e-commerce DXP.
Since Drupal is open source, it is far less expensive than other DXPs on the market.
To personalize the DXP, users can choose from a variety of modules. Given its API-first architecture, it also connects effortlessly and seamlessly integrates everything to provide an effective DXP for an e-commerce platform.
Stanford Graduate School of Business: Redefining the Digital Experience
The Stanford Graduate School of Business is a premier business school in the world. However, they were holding on to an outdated Drupal 7 website that served them adversely. The shortcomings included:
- A complex content authoring experience
- A scattered ecosystem with no central hub for the creation and management of experiences and assets
- An out-of-sync design
Why Drupal
The Stanford Graduate School of Business's website was built on Drupal 7. They decided to migrate to Drupal 8 because of its content moderation and authoring features.
Furthermore, they wanted to use a component-based architecture that would allow site admins to easily build content pages. Drupal's component-based UI, a set of configurable components, could be used to swiftly create pages using drag and drop.
Outcomes
Using Drupal contributed to the following:
- Digitally enhanced experiences for GSB's prospective and present students, lifelong learners, graduates, and staff.
- With updated platforms, students' course selection journey was elevated and streamlined.
- A new information architecture redefined the mobile experience for learners and educators.
- GSB's non-technical workforce was able to independently build, deploy, and maintain pages and content.
Barriers to DXP implementation and how Drupal DXP overcomes them
While a DXP is probably only one component of an organization's digital transformation, it is undeniably an essential technological tool that performs many critical functions to improve customer experience.
However, like any other tool, there may be barriers to implementing the system. Drupal DXP aims to eliminate these barriers for a less complicated, and comprehensive implementation of DXP.
Data barriers
When it comes to improving their DXPs, enterprises struggle due to the predominance of unusable data formats. Not to forget, apprehensions regarding regulatory constraints on collecting data and usage are also massive concerns.
Hence, organizations seek solutions that increase data accessibility, make sense of unorganized siloed data, and turn data into useful information that they can harness to propel real-time AI-enabled interactions so as to remove data barriers.
With fully customizable forms, Drupal DXP can accommodate an infinite number of content categories, including text and audiovisual information. This helps to declutter data and make it usable.
Further, system and process integration is imperative here. Drupal facilitates extended functionality and complete control over the design due to a collection of add-ons in the form of themes and modules.
Implementation barriers
According to IBM, most executives list integration as one of their top implementation issues, with more than half citing integration with other cloud-based apps as a barrier.
Ironically, it is the integration of platforms throughout the company and the data from old infrastructure that enables better insights and enhanced procedures that boost customer interaction.
Drupal DXP Modules provide all administrative and end-user-facing functionality. These include basic capabilities like logging in or generating content to dynamic image galleries and intricate voting systems.
Moreover, it utilizes the latest and best web technologies making it that much more reliable.
Organization barriers
Conflicting goals, branding, and a lack of openness and sharing within business divisions are typically the root causes of integration, data, and workflow problems. Often, depending on their involvement with a business, these organizational conflicts may prove to be tougher to solve than technological issues.
Not to forget, business units with varying platform requirements tend to have the most complex organizational problem. Additionally, platform solutions designed to meet the needs and requirements of specific business units might cause significant integration challenges and hinder data exchange.
These are hindrances to productivity that Drupal DXP’s open-source initiative can easily solve.
It comes with all of the most frequently used modules for building a site. Additionally, there is a vast array of contributed modules accessible for free on Drupal.org as well, which is made available by other developers.
Workflow barriers
The most significant workflow obstacles are caused by AI bottlenecks and segregated divisions, which can sap productivity and cause data accessibility concerns.
Artificial intelligence constraints develop for several causes, such as a lack of defined use cases or an inability to get the correct data in the correct format.
Drupal uses sophisticated but simple features to dynamically extract, filter, and present content.
Additional features of Drupal DXP
Drupal DXP is easy on the pockets of the organization that chooses to employ it to build their DXP. It possesses several other advantages contributing to its utility as a reliable DXP. These include:
- Easy-to-use Interface: Drupal is an exceptional CMS that provides an easy-to-use user interface for content generation and distribution.
- A wide array of content creation tools: Not just that, It includes simple content creation tools and robust in-place editing tools that help to create and customize content.
- Ensures security by restricting access: Drupal's complex permission system and user role classification restrict access to its content and features, ensuring security.
- Website development: Drupal is also a sophisticated website development platform.
The future of digitization
As the world embraces digitization, DXP can be an excellent investment. Not only is it a great customer retention tool, but it also helps streamline and unify work procedures and contributes to increasing productivity and revenue.
Suppose a company has already integrated certain aspects of digitization. In that case, it is time for them to invest in software that can simplify life by unifying all the different company divisions.
Furthermore, using an open-source DXP like Drupal is a cost-free investment that will streamline all your business processes. They make operations a lot easier and assist in developing effective strategies. Not to forget, they also prove highly effective in triggering business expansion.
However, hindrances arise in the effective implementation of DXP, given its sensitivity to data, organizational hindrances, and workflow. Nevertheless, organizations can resolve these minor setbacks by integrating relevant modules to have a seamless work process.
So go on and find the perfect DXP solution for your business today!