Digital Experience Platforms: Myths and Realities Behind the Hype
Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) play an integral role in the digital transformation journey of any company. In this article, Shashin Shah, CEO of Pimcore, outlines the myths surrounding these solutions, as well as realities of how the tech can transform businesses.
Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) play an integral role in the digital transformation journey of any company. DXPs not only help in aggregating information, but also provide a gateway platform for enterprises, thereby facilitating unified, personalized, and highly contextualized user experiences.
Although DXPs do provide an architecture to digitize operations, deliver consistent cross-channel experiences, and gather actionable user insight, there are many myths associated with the platform. CXO’s are often skeptical about deploying a completely new system into their traditional setups. To many, it is just an added cost that may or may not meet their goals.
The risk of business failure, unsuccessful implementation, talent gap, high cost, and ripple effects across the organization’s ecosystem are always associated with any budding technology. But apart from the usual ‘buy or build’ conundrum, pricing complexities, and utility doubts, there is an entire stratum of ambiguity hovering around DXP implementation.
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The DXP Myths You Should Steer Clear From
According to Gartner by 2021, maximum effort and cost in a DXP initiative will be spent on integrations including the ones with built-in capabilities. Additionally, almost all global organizations are likely to rely on system integrators (SIs), agencies, and channel partners to design and implement their digital experience strategies. But today, organizations are struggling to understand which technologies and products should be deployed to solve their specific needs. In the Magic Quadrant announced by Gartner in early 2019 – the Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) market was analyzed to be still evolving and relatively immature. There are many versions of offerings, definitions, and vendor approaches.
Many organizations do not even know which components of DXP they already have and which ones they need, to meet their goals. Furthermore, the overlapping DXP capabilities with existing products lead to unwanted complications and fear of high TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). Myths continue even after successful deployment as vendors incessantly introduce innovative additions of technologies and products.
In such a scenario demystifying rudimentary concepts can be useful beyond comprehension. Here are a few DXP myths that we’ve tried to debunk for you to dwell upon.
Myth # 1: DXP is a fusion of existing and new technologies. It is a bouquet of products clustered together.
Reality: DXP is a central technological foundation to support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across all digital channels. It is built upon and supports the entire, continuous customer life cycle.
It may seem that DXPs have evolved from legacy horizontal portals. DXPs overlap with other adjacent technologies, including Customer Management Systems (CMS), Customer Communications Management (CCM), marketing automation, Web Content Management (WCM), etc. But they take a different approach to support the traditional features of eCommerce products, meeting new customer expectations and taking advantage of advanced technologies. However, a DXP platform goes beyond all these to deliver engaging and contextualized digital experiences, emphasizing on interoperability and cross-channel continuity across the customer journey.
Myth # 2: DXP is just another word for a channel such as a website, a mobile app, or a responsive/mobile website. There is nothing new to it.
Reality: DXP is a platform that can communicate with multiple channels through APIs. It can seamlessly integrate all these channels for transparency and consistency, supporting digital interactions across touchpoints like IoT and AR/VR devices, digital assistants, kiosks, web, mobile apps, and likewise.
Myth # 3: A DXP is a configuration tool. It is a development platform like an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), Application Platform as a Service (APaaS), or Multi Experience Development Platform (MXDP).
Reality: DXP is an entirely API-driven platform. It supports headless, hybrid, and other options for delivering personalized digital experiences, DevOps, and microservices. It facilitates the creation of single-page applications and progressive web apps.
It is a unified and integrated platform where businesses can work collaboratively with IT teams toward the common goal of customer experience improvement. Employee experience can also be enhanced by deploying a DXP.
Myth # 4: A DXP is a monolithic system incapable of modifications once implemented.
Reality: DXPs undergo constant evolution, optimization, and refinement as per the market demand. A DXP can be easily changed as a response to demand fluctuations. The platforms are designed to be dynamic, flexible, agile, and scalable for the long term.
Myth # 5: Having a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the same as having a DXP.
Reality: MAP and related technologies are restricted to marketing capabilities on channels such as social media, emails, and websites. That is achieved by automating task repetition. Whereas, CRM software aims to enhance business relationships and interactions with existing and prospective customers.
A DXP, on the other hand, works as an experience and interaction layer in a comprehensive, complicated, and interconnected technology terrain. It enables businesses to seamlessly connect people, data, and technology unleashing newer digital possibilities.
Having an attractive website or mobile app does not always result in substantial gains in customer experience. It requires processes to be re-optimized with a customer-centric mindset. DXPs help achieve that in combination with an overall architecture for integration and modular services.
To Summarize
Many factors have led companies to radically reengineer their business practices and become extremely digitized and customer-oriented. That includes capabilities like UX (presentation layer, personalization, and omnichannel enablement), customer insights (behavior monitoring, reporting, targeted content delivery, campaign management), and business agility (faster time to market, business autonomy, agility to change). To be at par with the competition, business leaders have to implement innovative strategies and swiftly adopt the technologies most suitable to them.
In doing so, leaders are bombarded with new terms and jargon daily owing to the abundance of digital channels, the impact of brand interactions through social media, the higher customer experience benchmarking, or the mere burgeoning of data capabilities. On the one hand, they have to be pragmatic and cautious not to jump on every new trend, avoiding useless tools, methods, and systems. Yet, on the other hand, they have to swiftly adopt and scale innovative technologies, building the ground for growth.
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In all this mystery, DXPs might seem like an unnecessary investment to an overcautious eye. With all the ambiguity related to its adoption, implementation, and scalability, one can easily lag behind the competition believing in the prevalent myths around it. But entrepreneurs must not fall for the baseless myths that revolve around DXPs and weigh their possibilities intelligently. They should begin by comparing potential DXP solutions, based on the integrations, omnichannel support, interaction layers, as well as the personalization and contextualization provided.
