Digital experience inhabits a realm packed with similar terms. You have digital experience management (DXM), customer experience (CX), customer experience management (CXM or CEM), digital customer experience, digital citizen experience, B2B digital experience and digital brand experience, to name a few. If you ask 100 people to define digital experience, you can expect 100 different (thematically connected) answers. So let’s unpack the meaning of digital experience and look at its benefits.
Defining digital experience
A digital experience is an interaction between a person and an organization, either B2B or B2C, made possible via digital technologies. Digital experience design should be intelligent, relevant, personalized, and omnichannel.
You can think of digital experience as having two, inter-related elements to it:
1) Delivering the experience: This revolves around the tools and technologies needed to deliver relevant and personalized digital experience to the person on the right digital channel at the right time.
2) The ability to deliver the experience: This entails having all the tools and technologies you need to empower your employees and staff to manage, analyze and improve these highly engaging and personalized digital experiences.
Why is it a priority?
Customer experience has never been a more important acquisition and retention tool. Today switching from one supplier or service provider to another has become very easy, with customers being encouraged to shop around as competitors fight for their business. High quality customer experience is a major competitive advantage, driving revenue growth and securing customer loyalty.
Key to providing a modern customer experience is omnichannel – where customers move from one point of engagement (web, contact-center, social, or real-world) to another, based on their need and preference. It sounds like table stakes. However, orchestrating a cohesive, contextual experience that meets brand standards, achieves business goals across all channels and touchpoints, while it delights customers, is extremely challenging. Digital customer experience management has now become a massively difficult task but one that will differentiate your company when done well.
Fortunately, technology exists to make it easier. Increasingly, customer-centric businesses are investing in digital experience platforms (aka DXPs) to help their marketing, operations and customer service teams.
What is a DXP?
According to Gartner, “A digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated and cohesive piece of technology designed to enable the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys.”
Within the market there are many schools of thought on what constitutes a DXP. Whether you believe the functionality can be delivered by a single solution, or needs a best-of-breed approach, there are a few core fundamental elements that a DXP must provide to allow businesses to deliver content to touchpoints everywhere – digitally or in print.
What to look for in a DXP
DXPs provide an enterprise architecture for organizations to digitize business operations, deliver contextualized and personalized digital customer experiences, and gather actionable customer insights. They deliver a 360-degree customer view, let you listen to the voice of the customer and then empower your organization to develop experiences, products, and services that your customers really want.
The composition of DXPs varies from provider to provider, but typically includes elements such as a Content Management System (CMS) for managing websites. Digital Asset Management (DAM) can be a powerful asset for handling the creation and distribution of images and video across multiple channels. AI-assisted analytics are a major capability of the top digital experience platforms. For example, the OpenText DXP can utilize AI to collect, define, track, and visualize customer data to drive better insight.
While many providers come at digital experience management with a CMS focus, at OpenText we believe that digital experience platforms should cast a wider net by also addressing Line of Business and customer services. After customers are acquired, the servicing and support phases build customer value, retention, and loyalty. According to PWC, one in three customers will leave a brand they love after one bad experience. Research from Bain & Co. suggests a 5% boost in customer retention improves revenue by 25-95%. As a result, OpenText includes Customer Communication Management (CCM) and Call Center Solutions in our definition of DXP.
Beyond asking what it can do, another key consideration is deciding how you’re going to get your DXP. Top digital experience platforms should support any cloud strategy with flexibility, so they can deliver the value your organization needs when and where you need it.
Where to start – connecting the digital experience pieces to build a platform
The good news is that most companies already have some digital experience solutions in place. In fact, they often have multiple siloed solutions serving the same purpose. That means you likely not only already have a foundation to build upon, but also low-hanging fruit to cull for early optimization wins and cost-savings.
Building a digital experience platform to implement a customer-centric culture has a lot to do with integration. Done right, the leading DXPs bridge the gap between service, sales, marketing, and commerce tools to support long term customer relationships, brand loyalty, and increasing customer value.One vendor can’t offer the full DXP spectrum, but must instead offer integration capabilities with existing best-in-breed systems: ERP, e-commerce, CRM, etc. Solution replacements or upgrades should be considered through the lens of that cohesive ideal.
The benefits of digital experience platforms
To sum up, an enterprise-wide digital experience platform can allow organizations to:
- Focus and accelerate digital transformation initiatives
- Provide a rich, personalized and omnichannel digital experience
- Increase operational effectiveness and boost productivity
- Increase customer loyalty and long-term customer value
- Listen and respond to real-time customer feedback across channels
- Extract greater insight and understanding from customer data
Why choose OpenText?
OpenText™ Digital Experience delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end digital experience platform that enables the integration with best-of-breed digital experience products and other key enterprise applications, such as ERP, CRM and marketing automation.
When naming OpenText as the leader in its ‘Selecting a Digital Experience Management Solution, 2020-2021’ report, OMDIA states:
“OpenText is a market leader because of its comprehensive DXM capabilities and its headless and decoupled architecture, which allows it to be used alongside existing technologies.”
