DXP vs. CMS Explained
What Is A Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
You don’t have a DXP?
Man, how in the world are you going to manage your CX to improve your one-on-one UX for each customer and increase ROI?
DXP? CX? UX? Yeah, we’re making a point with all those acronyms. Teaser, everything in your website strategy is tied together and it can be overwhelming. Wouldn’t it be nice if more systems were really tied together though? That’s why we’re talking about DXPs more as of recently. So let’s start at the top and learn what a DXP can do, why you’d need one for a business and what to do if it’s time to transition. Let’s get started.
What is a Digital Experience Platform?
Many of us, if not all of us, have employed a CMS for our digital marketing in some shape or form. Depending on your roles and needs, you may have used anywhere from a free open-source CMS to manage blogging, to an enterprise level solution to manage and govern content across any number of robust sites, blogs and resources.
The next step for marketers after managing CMS platforms is the DXP. A DXP (digital experience platform) is the tool (really a set of tools) that powers personalized, cross-channel digital experiences. The needs and demands of marketers today require a platform that can enable intricate, intensely strategic and data-driven solutions that are not only joyously personalized to customers, but also to the marketers managing them.
The core functions of digital experience platforms include:
- Granting individuals personalized information based on their user credentials/settings
- Streamlining customer interactions across mediums to provide a consistent experience
- Coordinating and collecting customer data across all touch points using APIs
- Providing predictive analytics and machine learning for customer customization
- Securing and storing customer data collected across multiple digital channels
One-size fits all is not the name of the game here. These functions can be a part of one tools or several, customized based on business needs and growth.However, there are some additional notable needs for today’s DXPs that we should quickly list for consideration before moving on.
- Horizontal Portals — More and more B2B industrial, manufacturing and professional service brands understand the risk of not providing a cleaner, updated and relationship-building digital experience with their customers and partners. Portals can solve a lot of these troubles and DXP is another way the best experience can be implemented for both parties.
- E-commerce — Being able to provide simple to complex pricing and marketplaces for customers is becoming table stakes with any digital presence. Having tools that allow for flexible business decisions and marketing efforts is in the realm of a DXP.
- Flexible APIs — By now, we all should know and understand the applicability and benefits of good service-based architectures and opening up data to adjacent systems. Managing APIs and the related data and sources can be too big to manage without the right platform support.
Why a DXP?
We doubt you’ve missed the whole Amazon thing over the last few years in the way of customer experience and expectations. The fact is that it's becoming increasingly harder and harder to innovate and provide a digital experience for ever-hungry omnichannel customers. We're all trying to live up to the expectations set by Amazon when it comes to customer service and personalization.
Middle-market companies don’t have the R&D budgets that Amazon, Walmart and Facebook do, yet their brand, products and services need to be just as easy to find, assess and purchase. We see some teams (intentionally or accidentally over time) create their own DXP Instead of investing in a cohesive suite at the right stage of growth. Endless budget and manpower is put into a proprietary DXP when developing tools piece by piece. A forward-thinking team would see that there are many platforms that have continually evolved to fit their needs and could be the better investment for the long term.
Which DXP is right for you?
Look, we’ll be honest, there are not many true DXPs that offer everything we just talked about. But there are certainly those vendors and platforms that offer the path to everything. Kentico is one of those platforms. We have seen many RFPs and solution requirements that match very well against Kentico’s out-of-box solution. B2B Industrial & Manufacturing verticals and brands match very well with Kentico’s offering.
In this organization example, Kentico could serve as the DXP managing the different tools within the platform.
In this organization example, Kentico could serve as the DXP managing the different tools within the platform.
Read more on the features and flexibilities that Kentico provides here before making your future DXP decision. Kentico should be in your consideration set if you are going to do a full and fair analysis for your brand. Their core product and platform with its all-in-one solution set can be combined to become even more powerful with smart integrations and smart, competent marketers administering it.
Ready to learn more about this acronym and others? Reach out to our team for support when sorting out the features and functions you’ll need for your DXP.
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