With the recent challenges brought about the COVID-19 pandemic, companies have been forced to adapt in order to thrive. This has resulted in a growing digital divide between businesses but how can you set yourself up for success?

Companies with a mature digital presence are generally better equipped to meet expectations of the modern online customer, highlighting the importance of having the right tools in place. DXPs help to deliver positive customer experiences and play a crucial role in the digital transformation process.

What is a DXP?

A digital experience platform (DXP) is enterprise software that provides the foundation for companies to deliver connected, contextualised digital experiences across multiple touchpoints for the entire customer journey.

A DXP's real strength lies in being able to integrate with multiple existing, legacy, and adjacent technologies to deliver a unified, continuous, and optimised experience. Examples of how organisations use DXPs including building self-service portals, B2B e-commerce websites, and intranets.

Let’s focus on some of the advantages offered by DXPs to organisations and how they help to build strong relationships with customers.

Why are DXPs Essential for Digital Transformation?

1. Provides Omnichannel Content Management

The digital marketplace is incredibly diverse when it comes to touchpoints with potential customers. Social media platforms, search engines, apps, mobile devices, PCs, IoT devices – the range of options run a wide gamut of both software and hardware platforms and combinations.

In fact, the need for DXPs as a software solution was acutely felt due to the rise of such a complex digital marketing ecosystem. Its predecessors like legacy Content Management Systems (CMS) and Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions proved inadequate in effectively covering all these touchpoints.

A DXP is a fully integrated software platform that promises (and delivers) seamless access to digital experiences across multiple channels and devices. Firms don’t have to rely on separate tools for managing content – the integrated control centre handles everything.

2. Removes Silos for Improved Efficiency

With the rise of multi-channel digital marketing, enterprises often find their processes caught up in disconnected vertical silos of information and databases. As these siloed systems grow, it becomes harder for teams to collaborate, creating highly inefficient business processes within an organisation.

A modern DXP solution helps solve this problem by providing a wide array of integration options. Any legacy systems and applications based on SOAP, RSS, and REST protocols can be integrated into the newer DXP front-end with ease. Other proprietary APIs are also supported, as are popular javascript frameworks like Angular, React, Vaadin, JSF and many more.

3. Helps Maintain a Cohesive Digital Identity

The use of siloed systems for content management can lead to a lack of overall cohesion and coordination among various teams within a business organisation. From a digital marketing perspective, this is highly undesirable as it can affect the firm’s online identity across touchpoints.

Regardless of the target audience – prospective customers, existing clients, vendors, or partner organisations – maintaining a coherent brand identity is important. It helps develop and maintain a connection with the audience. Legacy content management systems are not well equipped to make this happen as teams find it hard to access, share, and collaborate content.

It calls for a central repository of guidelines, images and other media assets, with convenient sharing and collaboration tools. With structured content management capabilities and other advanced features, DXPs help organisations maintain a cohesive digital identity across multiple channels and media.

4. Enables a Positive User Experience

A cohesive digital identity enables businesses to deliver a smooth and familiar user experience to their target audience. DXPs, particularly those that have a portal-heritage like Liferay, are supremely well-equipped to deliver a memorable digital experience to business clients.

Be it navigating a business website or e-commerce store, ordering on a mobile app, or contacting the organisation through social media, consumers these days expect a smooth and hassle-free online experience. Even the tiniest errors or shortest delays can result in an unfulfilled sale.

DXPs have all the tools necessary to create and maintain positive digital experiences. They provide analytical tools that deliver deep insights into user behaviour, expectations, and preferences. Combining these insights with experience management tools demonstrates the value of DXPs in helping to improve the overall digital UX.

5. Enables Delivery of Personalised Customer Experiences

Legacy Content Management Systems often leave User Experience and Customer Experience management as distinct silos. With a modern DXP, everything is unified on a single platform which helps to deliver a more cohesive and convincing user experience.

A unified database means efficient access to user data from all stages of the digital experience. It allows businesses to get the full picture of their customers’ journeys – their search data, preferred channels, convenient payment methods, products/services of interest and so on.

With these insights, a DXP allows businesses to deploy smart product suggestions, self-service portals, and highly personalised online experiences across multiple channels.

6. Creates Streamlined Workflows and Form Automation

Forms are an unavoidable aspect of business workflows. Manual form processing takes up valuable time and work hours which could be better utilised elsewhere. Form automation is a major advantage of digital transformation in business.

DXPs are excellent for the automation of workflows. For instance, Liferay DXP enables quick and easy electronic form creation, authentication and validation within an office. Advanced tools allow users to create and personalise forms, customise fields, add predefined rules, change localisation features, and more.

7. Enables Easy Adoption

DXPs are incredibly flexible, with an open-ended architecture that enables high levels of integration of third-party tools/APIs. This approach has a lot of benefits when compared to legacy systems with monolithic features.

For instance, the ability to incorporate compatible legacy systems ensures that an organisation has to spend less time training staff to handle specific aspects of the DXP platform. They can continue using familiar tools and APIs in many instances.

On top of that, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) based front-end enables users to manage advanced content management and publishing tasks without deep knowledge of coding. Moving to novel software and tools can result in an awkward transitional phase. DXPs are designed to minimise this period, allowing businesses to quickly get up to speed.

8. Allows Dynamic Scaling and Evolution

Further, a modular approach also offers long-term benefits. Platforms like Liferay use independent modules that specialise in specific tasks. In the early stages of digital transformation, this allows the organisation to enable and utilise only relevant tools.

But as the business expands and grows, users can add new modules and combine them with existing ones to handle more complex tasks. Unlike legacy systems, DXPs are supremely capable of scaling with a growing business.

A DXP allows businesses to do two things at once – run a stable platform that handles all the existing digital experience/content management needs, while at the same time experimenting with modules for future use.

9. Ideal for Remote Work Optimisation and Security

With the pandemic expected to last at least for a few years, if not the foreseeable future, many organisations are considering a switch from traditional offices to remote workspaces. A unified platform is essential to keep all remote workers on the same page.

Cloud-based DXP platforms are perfect for this kind of work arrangement. Liferay DXP has a host of useful features, like real time alerts, high-level access control features, automatic backups, real time monitoring of live sessions, user and password management, and service access policies for more secure remote work environments.

Why is Digital Transformation Crucial Now? 

Before 2020, firms had some leeway in determining the pace at which they adopted new technologies. Many executives preferred a cautious approach, involving carefully planned experimental yet highly scalable pilots. That would seem like a long-lost luxury in 2021, with COVID-19 accelerating the switch to digital solutions at unprecedented rates, leaving businesses with no other option than to follow suit. 

But even in the face of such challenges, many organisations are successfully adapting and undergoing digital transformation. This fundamentally alters the way a business organisation functions and interacts with its customers. Although the very act of embracing technology is a highly disruptive process, the benefits of DXPs are far-reaching and they play an essential role in digital transformation.