DXP: Your gateway to seamless customer journeys in the digital age

Highlights

You’ll learn how a DXP supports customer journey optimization through:

• Personalization: Tailors the experience to customer’s individual preferences
• Analytics: Provides insights that allow you to optimize customer interaction
• Integration: Connects multiple channels for seamless and consistent interactions
• Efficiency: Streamlines workflow to enhance customer satisfaction

Transform your customer journey strategy today with the powerful capabilities of a digital experience platform (DXP).

Often, and especially in sectors with long sales cycles, people take their time to decide whether to buy a product or service. A lot of emotions and processes go into making a purchase or otherwise.

The potential buyer questions their needs, obtains more information about the brand and product, compares alternatives, etc. Your goal as a business is to ease that process, and a DXP offers the tools that enable you to track relevant customer interactions to achieve that.

What is a customer journey?

It is the road a person travels through to convert. When a person gets that first knowledge of a brand, they want to know more. They analyze product features and prices and compare the product to other similar ones. 

The customer journey is a series of stages that includes awareness, consideration, purchase, retention and advocacy. Tracking customer journeys allows businesses to;

• Identify the right touchpoints to connect with customers.
• Identify and address customer pain points.
• Find opportunities to improve the customer experience.
• Create targeted campaigns that resonate with customers.

So, what is the place of a digital experience platform (DXP) in all of that?

What is a digital experience platform?

A DXP software solution allows you to create, manage and deliver contextual digital experiences. It integrates tools like content management systems, CRM systems, personalization solutions and analytics tools. These tools allow you to track and optimize customer journeys.

Benefits of implementing a DXP for customer journeys

A DXP (digital experience platform) offers a unified platform that allows you to organize digital solutions that cater to each stage of the journey. Other benefits include. 

• Enhanced customer experience: With DXPs, marketers can access data to personalize the customer experience—a strategy that delivers 89% ROI in marketing campaigns.
• Streamlined operations: It creates a unified hub to manage content. You create better workflows and automate tasks to manage customer interactions.
• Data-driven decision-making: Analytics tools collect data from customer interactions, enabling you to create personalized content, offers, and experiences that ease the customer journey.
• Accelerated digital transformation: DXPs offer the right tools to improve your business processes so that they create more value for your customers.

Leveraging DXPs for seamless customer journeys

At each stage, businesses should address customer questions, get them familiar with the brand, and ultimately nudge them towards a purchase. Here are the ways you can leverage a DXP to deliver seamless journeys.

• Mapping the customer journeys: DXP offers a single source of truth. That way, you can visualize customer interactions and note their needs, emotions, pains, and processes.
• Personalized experiences at scale: When there is a clear visual of customer journeys, you can then target them with tailored content and offers to nudge them further down the marketing funnel.
• Consistent cross-channel experiences: A customer can move from mobile to web in an instant. DXP allows you to maintain a consistent experience on all channels.
• Real-time optimization: Analytics and AI tools turn customer data into actionable insights. That enables you to integrate customer feedback and keep up with their changing needs.

Role of DXPs in optimizing touchpoints

Touchpoints are the various interactions that people have with a business on multiple channels at various stages of their journey. So, think of interactions on a website’s blog, social media, search ads, email, etc.

A DXP (digital experience platform) gives you a central view of interactions. For instance, you can use a customer data platform to aggregate customer interactions and make the data available for other systems. That enables you to send targeted ads or emails or to deliver gated content to a customer who needs more details about your product.

Strategies for integrating omnichannel engagement

An omnichannel strategy enables you to link relevant customer touchpoints, creating a unified customer journey across all platforms. It has to be customer-focused. Here are other strategies to integrate omnichannel engagement.

• Eliminate silos and allow your teams and business units to work in tandem.
• Segment customer data to develop accurate personas.
• Use marketing automation tools to scale your customer engagements.
• Set up a mechanism to optimize omnichannel customer journeys using feedback loops.
• Create a unified brand strategy to ensure consistent messaging on all platforms.

Case studies

GetYourGuide

GetYourGuide struggled with limited website bandwidth, leading to a workflow bottleneck. It also struggled to adapt to new travel trends and, worse still, was unable to optimize the customer journey for its travel customers.

GetYourGuide switched to Contentstack and relied on its headless CMS to deliver seamless content. They also delivered personalized experiences for their over 500,000 unique website visitors.

Hear from Pedro Torres, the product manager. "With Contentstack, we can deliver on -- and exceed -- what customers are expecting, regardless of device, and consistently deliver those experiences as soon as new travel opportunities become available."

Keep reading to see how GetYourGuide used Contentstack to personalize customer journeys and enrich travel experiences.

Leesa

Leesa struggled with brand alignment across its many products. They also found it hard to publish directly, as everything had to go through developers. As a result, delivering dynamic content was impossible, leading to a subpar customer experience.

Switching to Contentstack DXP enabled them to track customer interactions, log topics of interest, and target them with tailored offers. They are also able to direct customers to personalized product pages and show them content from users of similar products. All these are made possible by the personalization feature and the headless CMS.

Hear from Richard Bilton, the Director of Technology. “Thanks to Contentstack’s Modular Blocks, we’ve really upped our game when it comes to personalization.” 

Keep reading to see how Leesa delivered tailored and seamless customer journeys.

Ease of use and ROI of DXPs

Switching to a digital experience platform has helped many businesses fix issues relating to process bottlenecks, technical debt, and the slow pace of work. Companies like;

• Elastic improved development speed by up to 500%
• The Milligan Foundation grew its web traffic by up to 400%

Ease of use of digital experience platforms

DXPs typically offer intuitive interfaces so that you can drag and drop features. This makes them attractive to business users, as they do not need to rely on developers for simple tasks. Composable DXPs like Contentstack also offer preview features that allow editors to make in-line editing and see how content appears in real time.

The developers also offer DevOps integration for easy deployment, robust SDKs, extensible frameworks, documentation, and community support. It also offers developer-friendly APIs, so when marketers define end-use cases, the developers can create the APIs to integrate the modules. 

ROI benefits

Implementing a DXP improves operational efficiency, which can manifest in various ways. For instance, it can lead to;

• Better content authoring and faster publishing
• Higher website traffic, as seen in the case of The Milligan Foundation
• Higher conversion rates when applied to e-commerce
• Cost savings as a result of fewer IT resources, automation, and content reuse
• Workflow improvements, which lead to faster time-to-market

When put together, these gains move an organization’s bottom line in the right direction, leading to revenue gains

Implementing DXPs: Best practices

Here is a guide on setting up a DXP. Although it involves many small steps, here is a summary of what it entails.

1. Assess organizational needs: Before you implement a DXP, assess your business needs. Be sure that relevant stakeholders are aligned on what the business needs and the solutions to address them.
2. Choose the right DXP solution: The right DXP offers features that enable you to track and optimize customer journeys. Opt for a DXP that offers adequate security and support. Ensure it can manage multiple websites, centralize content creation, connect your workflows, and offer flexibility to make future changes.
3. Integrate with existing systems: Ensure that the chosen DXP can integrate with your existing tech stack. You can deploy APIs or middleware for seamless integration.
4. Train your team: Ensure the team gets proper training to allow for effective use of the DXP. Also, set up adequate frameworks for ongoing support, and document processes and API usage for future needs.

Overcoming challenges in DXP implementation

• Integration complexity: Integrating a DXP with existing systems can be complex. Plan for potential issues, consider an API-first approach and work with experienced DXP partners to support your integration.
• Data privacy and security concerns: A DXP manages sensitive customer data. Without proper care, an attack may lead to a data breach. So, opt for a DXP vendor that offers enterprise-grade security and complies with regulatory requirements like the GDPR. 
• Organizational alignment: Before you set up a DXP, ensure that key stakeholders are aligned. Consider the needs of various departments, communicate the needed changes, and collaborate to obtain buy-in at all levels.
• ROI measurement: Businesses may not be certain what or how to track progress. Address clear metrics and KPIs based on business goals. So, if you aim to improve time-to-market, track the time from ideation to product launch. For customer experience, track metrics like CSAT score and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

FAQ section

What is DXP?

A digital experience platform (DXP) is a software solution that integrates various digital tools to create unified and contextual customer experiences.

What is a seamless customer journey?

A seamless journey is a smooth and consistent experience that a person goes through from the time they know about a product or service until eventual purchase and thereafter.

What are the benefits of DXP?

A DXP streamlines operation. It also improves time-to-market and supports customer journey mapping and optimization. It is also easy to use and accelerates innovation.

Learn more

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) offer core tools with which you can track, optimize, and ease customer journeys. Its analytics and personalization features really come to the fore, tracking customer touchpoints and providing valuable data. With that, they can tailor offers based on the needs of customers at every point of their interaction with the brand.

A DXP is easy for business users to use. It also enhances customer satisfaction, drives revenue growth, and supports innovation. While you will find various kinds of DXP, a composable DXP offers a better choice. It allows you to integrate only features that matter to your business. You build it from the ground up, leveraging the benefits of microservices, APIs, cloud, and a headless CMS (MACH).

Contentstack offers the best composable DXP in the industry, with AI and personalization solutions to deliver seamless customer journeys. Talk to us today to get started.