Liferay DXP

Partner Pulse: TCS Interactive on AI, Headless CMS, and Personalization

2025-08-11T09:32:32Z

Welcome to this edition of “Partner Pulse”, where we sit down with leaders from our global partner network to explore the latest in digital transformation. For this interview, we’re joined by Sipin Verma, Head of the Liferay Center of Excellence and DXP Solutions Architect at TCS Interactive. With nearly two decades of IT experience, and 15 years working with Liferay, Sipin leads a cross-functional team that turns UX research into production-ready portals and platforms for clients across banking, telecom, manufacturing, and more.

Key Takeaways

1. Trending Drivers: AI & Data Insights

“Everyone’s talking about AI,” Sipin notes. Clients want that “AI flavor” baked into every portal, whether through recommendation engines or chatbots. Equally vital is business intelligence: capturing user behavior via a Customer Data Platform to deliver truly personalized experiences.

2. Busting AI Myths

Many expect AI to be magic, but Sipin emphasizes it’s “data-driven muscle,” not an instant fix. “Without quality data and the right skillsets, AI can’t perform,” he says.

3. Commerce & Beyond

From e-commerce marketplaces to public-sector intranets, Sipin’s team uses Liferay DXP to build everything from B2B/B2C stores to corporate dashboards. “We’ve delivered marketplace solutions that drove measurable business value,” he shares.

4. Headless CMS Freedom

Sipin calls headless CMS “one of the best recent introductions.” By decoupling front end from back end, clients can revamp legacy UIs without rebuilding entire systems, using Liferay’s headless APIs to seamlessly plug in new experiences.

5. Personalization at Scale

“Personalization isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s expected,” Sipin explains. Liferay’s segmentation and audience-targeting tools let organizations tailor both public websites and private intranets, so marketing, finance, and HR each see dashboards built just for them.

Watch the video for the full conversation and more of Sipin’s insights and congrats again to TCS Interactive on being named Liferay Partner of the Year for APAC!

Who Is TCS Interactive?

TCS Interactive is the design and experience division of Tata Consultancy Services. Through global studios in research, analytics, UX/UI design, engineering, and digital marketing, they craft immersive, user-centered journeys for sectors ranging from retail to healthcare. Backed by TCS’s scalable delivery model and co-innovation network, TCS Interactive transforms complex challenges into intuitive, high-impact digital solutions.

Our Partner Pulse blog series offers insights from technology partners around the world on the latest trends, implementation tips, industry information, and more.

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region
Hear from our partners about digital trends in Central and Eastern Europe.
Partner Pulse: Solteq on Digital Growth and DXP Strategy
We sat down with Sacha Helfenstein, the Head of Advisory at Liferay partner Solteq, and talked about trends like AI, organizational readiness for innovation, and the elements of a strong tech partnership.
Partner Pulse: Protiviti on Digital Transformation in the Middle East
Our partners share insights on their digital transformation work across the Middle East and offer their take on how AI and low-code development are shaping the future of digital experiences.
Partner Pulse: How Aggity Breaks Down Silos and Builds Smarter Experiences
Learn how our partner aggity transforms digital experiences by breaking down silos, driving AI-ready strategies, and delivering results across industries.
Partner Pulse: From Brazil to North America – Objective Group’s Journey to Rising Star
Discover how Objective Group became a Liferay Rising Star by driving fast, AI-powered digital transformation from Brazil to North America.
Partner Pulse: How Technopolis Embraces Digital Transformation with Liferay Technopolis has been driving digital transformation in Greece through customized solutions

Conquering Technical Debt & Legacy Systems: A Roadmap to Modernizing Your Digital Foundation

2025-08-07T17:50:42Z

The weight of technical debt and the challenge of modernizing legacy systems can feel like an insurmountable obstacle, but it doesn't have to be. Recently, Liferay and Veriday teamed up for a joint webinar, "Modernizing Your Digital Foundation: Conquering Technical Debt & Legacy Systems," to provide a roadmap for navigating these challenges.

The session featured two experts from the Liferay ecosystem: Erica Gnajek, a Senior Solution Architect at Liferay, and Sam Hyland, the Vice President of Professional Services at Veriday. The conversation was rich with insights, practical strategies, and real-world examples to help organizations transition from disparate systems to a unified, integrated digital foundation.

Understanding the Core Challenges

Sam Hyland kicked off the conversation by outlining the four most common challenges he observes when organizations begin their modernization journey.

Organizational inertia and risk aversion. Organizations often take an "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" approach to technical debt. Sam highlighted that although this mindset might seem safe, it puts companies at a competitive disadvantage, as more agile competitors will inevitably pull ahead. The risk of not modernizing—like facing higher costs or being forced into a hurried project due to a critical security issue—is often greater than the challenges associated with modernization.
Technical challenges and "unknown unknowns." Sam stressed the importance of organizations understanding their current technology landscape. He shared an example of a major insurance customer Veriday worked with who faced undocumented legacy integrations. The real risk, he noted, is not the known technical hurdles, but the "unknown unknowns" that can derail a project.
Resourcing and skill gaps. Sam noted that internal stakeholders sometimes push back on deploying newer technologies because of a fear that their teams lack the necessary skills. However, teams are often excited and interested in upskilling. Furthermore, this thinking is short-sighted, because over time niche technologies become more expensive and harder to find resources for, while newer skills become more readily available.
Aligning technical decisions with business goals. Sam emphasized that every technical decision must be tied to a business goal. This alignment ensures that modernization efforts are not just about refactoring code for its own sake, but about driving tangible value, whether it's through operational gains, faster time-to-market, or improved customer satisfaction.

Liferay's Architectural Approach to Modernization

Erica Gnajek, drawing on her experience as an enterprise architect, spoke about how Liferay's platform is specifically designed to address these challenges. She explained how Liferay DXP can act as a unified presentation layer, bringing together disparate systems and data, effectively acting as a central hub for a unified digital platform.

Modular and incremental modernization. Erica highlighted Liferay's modular and extensible architecture, which eliminates the need for organizations to "rip and replace" existing technology investments. By leveraging Liferay Objects and Client Extensions, companies can strategically decouple functionalities, build new experiences on top of existing data, and gradually retire legacy components. This minimizes risk and disruption, delivering a modern façade without needing to rebuild their entire backend.
Robust integration framework. To combat the "unknown unknowns" of legacy systems, Liferay provides a robust integration framework that supports a wide array of standards and protocols, including REST APIs, GraphQL, and even proprietary APIs. This flexibility is crucial because, as Erica noted, "legacy landscapes are rarely uniform."
Headless capabilities and APIs. Erica explained that Liferay's headless APIs are a significant advantage for organizations that need to rapidly deliver new digital experiences without getting bogged down in back-end complexities. This approach allows companies to modernize their front-end experiences while keeping core business logic in legacy systems, decoupling the presentation layer from the data source.

Veriday's Methodologies for Identifying and Prioritizing Technical Debt

Sam explained that, when it comes to tackling technical debt, the key is to show the value of addressing that debt, as "refactoring" can become a "dirty word" to business stakeholders. Veriday's methodology involves a repeatable process that prioritizes high-impact, low-effort areas.

Establishing a baseline. Veriday uses tools like Application Performance Management (APM) and static code analysis tools like SonarQube to establish a quality baseline. This provides a metric to track improvement and a number the client "never wants to go below again.”
Mapping business and technology. The next step is to understand the business workflows, where revenue is generated, and what areas are critical to customers. Veriday then overlays this with a technical architecture review, looking for single points of failure, outdated technology, and other risk factors.
Building a heat map. By combining the business and technical analysis, Veriday creates a "heat map" that shows hotspots where business value and technical risk overlap. This allows them to prioritize their work, addressing high-impact areas with low technical complexity first.

Strategies for a Unified Digital Foundation

Both Sam and Erica emphasized the importance of moving from fragmented systems to a unified digital foundation, often described as a "single pane of glass.” They provided specific strategies and best practices for achieving this.

Sam’s Strategies from Veriday's Perspective

A top-down and bottom-up approach. Sam described a two-pronged strategy. The "top-down" approach involves setting a strong architectural foundation and patterns for the organization, such as a "strong experience system" to hide back-end complexity from customers while modernization happens. The "bottom-up" approach is about progressive enhancement, where developers leave the code better than they found it and continuously build on the established quality baseline.
Decoupling customizations. Sam stressed the importance of moving customizations away from the core of platforms like Liferay DXP or ERP systems. This prevents challenges with future upgrades and maintenance.
API-first development. By building APIs with future use cases in mind, Veriday helps customers avoid major development efforts down the road, turning a major new project into a small enhancement.

Erica's Liferay Features for the "Single Pane of Glass"

Centralized content and digital asset management. Liferay's Asset Libraries allow organizations to centralize all content—documents, images, videos—regardless of its original source. This content can then be easily managed from a single interface and reused across various touchpoints.
Robust user and identity management. A frequent pain point for users is remembering multiple logins. Liferay's customizable Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities, which integrate with standards like LDAP and SAML, allow users to log in once and seamlessly access various applications.
Widgets and fragments architecture. This architecture, combined with headless APIs, enables companies to display information and functionality from disparate systems on a single Liferay page. Erica provided a powerful example of a financial institution pulling data from a legacy system for account balances, a newer CRM for customer service, and a third-party loan application into one unified dashboard.

Justifying ROI: The Stakeholder Perspective

The final segment of the webinar focused on the "elephant in the room": justifying ROI. Sam and Erica both spoke about how to demonstrate tangible value to different stakeholders within an organization.

Sam’s Approach to ROI

Different metrics for different stakeholders. Sam highlighted that a CFO looks at ROI from a cost perspective, a CTO focuses on risk mitigation, and a business leader is most interested in operational improvements. Veriday tailors its approach to each group. For business leaders, Veriday points to operational gains like streamlining inventory management for an electronics retailer. For CTOs, the focus is on mitigating risk and avoiding costs associated with downtime or security vulnerabilities. For CFOs, the conversation centers on long-term cost improvements, such as reduced time-to-market and increased customer satisfaction driving revenue.

Erica’s Perspective on ROI

Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Erica pointed out that Liferay's modularity and reusability reduces custom development costs and maintenance overhead. She shared that some customers have reported reductions in operational costs of up to 30% by consolidating their digital operations. She also cited the example of Klabin, who leveraged Liferay PaaS to handle maintenance and overhead, further reducing TCO.
Increased operational efficiencies. The "single pane of glass" experience directly translates to improved employee productivity. Erica shared the example of a regional development bank in Latin America that saw a 16% increase in user session times after consolidating their public portal and intranet onto a single platform.
Accelerated innovation and time-to-market. Erica cited Unilever, a company that achieved 133% faster go-to-market and could respond more quickly to market shifts and customer sentiment by leveraging Liferay DXP.

Conclusion: The Path Forward

The webinar concluded with a strong message: the risk of not modernizing is often greater than the challenges of modernization. By adopting a strategic approach that combines a flexible platform like Liferay DXP with a proven methodology from partners like Veriday, organizations can successfully conquer technical debt and build a unified, agile digital foundation that drives measurable business outcomes.

From a modular architecture and headless APIs to a focus on TCO and operational efficiency, the path to modernization is no longer about a risky "rip and replace" overhaul. It's a journey of continuous, incremental improvement that aligns technology with core business goals, ensuring that companies can not only compete but thrive in the digital age.

To access the complete discussion, and learn about the use cases cited, please visit HERE. To learn more about how Veriday and Liferay work together to deliver results for customers, please visit HERE.

Partner Pulse: How Technopolis Embraces Digital Transformation with Liferay

2025-08-04T13:38:01Z

Key Takeaways

15 Years of Experience: Technopolis has been working with Liferay since 2006, offering scalable solutions in the telecommunications, utilities, and other sectors.
Cloud Scalability: Thanks to Liferay's cloud capabilities, Technopolis has been able to seamlessly handle the most significant traffic spikes in its projects, improving performance and cost efficiency.
Customer Focus: Success is driven by listening closely to customers, setting realistic expectations, and delivering on promises.
All-in-one Flexibility: Liferay's headless CMS, integration, personalization, and workflow modules cover all of Technopolis' digital transformation needs.

Welcome to this edition of "Partner Pulse," where we dive into insights from key partners in the tech world. In this video interview, Trifon Sotiropoulos, Managing Director of Technopolis S.A., shares his journey with the company and his experiences as a long-time partner of Liferay. From the company’s humble beginnings as OPEN Services Ltd. in 1993 to its transformation into a leading provider of enterprise business solutions, Technopolis has been at the forefront of digital transformation in Greece.

Trifon discusses the company’s evolution, which saw it shift from providing internet consulting services to becoming a key player in delivering integrated web-based software solutions. With a focus on scalability and flexibility, Technopolis has built expertise in emerging technologies such as Java, XML, and enterprise website and portal technologies. Over the years, the company has successfully executed numerous Liferay projects for clients across various sectors, including telecommunications and energy and utilities, enhancing their digital capabilities.

In the interview, Trifon also reflects on Technopolis’s commitment to delivering tailored solutions and how their 15-year partnership with Liferay has contributed to their success. For Trifon and his team, the focus remains on listening to customer needs, managing expectations, and driving long-term digital transformation.

Watch the full interview to learn more about Technopolis's journey and future goals.

Our Partner Pulse blog series offers insights from technology partners around the world on the latest trends, implementation tips, industry information, and more.

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region
Hear from our partners about digital trends in Central and Eastern Europe.
Partner Pulse: Solteq on Digital Growth and DXP Strategy
We sat down with Sacha Helfenstein, the Head of Advisory at Liferay partner Solteq, and talked about trends like AI, organizational readiness for innovation, and the elements of a strong tech partnership.
Partner Pulse: Protiviti on Digital Transformation in the Middle East
Our partners share insights on their digital transformation work across the Middle East and offer their take on how AI and low-code development are shaping the future of digital experiences.
Partner Pulse: How Aggity Breaks Down Silos and Builds Smarter Experiences
Learn how our partner aggity transforms digital experiences by breaking down silos, driving AI-ready strategies, and delivering results across industries.
Partner Pulse: From Brazil to North America – Objective Group’s Journey to Rising Star
Discover how Objective Group became a Liferay Rising Star by driving fast, AI-powered digital transformation from Brazil to North America.

What Downtime Actually Costs and How to Avoid It

2025-07-24T23:15:03Z

Key Takeaways

Businesses need to be prepared in the face of network outages or risk financial consequences, reputational damages, and data loss.
Ensuring uptime and business continuity requires tackling legacy systems, keeping systems up to date, implementing strong security measures, and creating disaster recovery plans.
99.99% uptime, or “four-nines”, is possible with Liferay’s HA+ add-on subscription. This will help you reduce downtime to a maximum of 52.56 minutes per year through a higher SQL tier and dual-region set up for cloud storage.

Last July’s Crowdstrike global outage left many organizations scrambling to get their services back up and running. The largest IT outage in history has been said to cost Fortune 500 companies alone more than $5 billion in direct losses, and this doesn’t even include damage to brand reputation and customer trust.

And IT and business professionals believe it’s only a matter of time before another major incident. So how can you ensure that your business is prepared and can keep your applications up and running?

What Does Downtime Cost?

A study found that 91% of organizations experience at least one network outage per quarter, which can cause their online applications to go down. And according to recent research, the average cost of downtime has reached as high as $9,000 per minute for large organizations.

But monetary losses aren’t the only costs associated with downtime. Every second your website, portal, commerce site, or other business-critical application is down can contribute to lost revenue, damaged reputation, compromised data, and the erosion of customer trust. Downtime can even affect employee morale, as these incidents are disruptive to team productivity and often cause communication breakdowns.

But in a recent survey of 1,000 IT and business executives, 86% revealed that they’ve been prioritizing security at the expense of readiness for service disruptions. Although security is definitely critical to business continuity, these leaders have realized that they must also be proactive about disruption preparedness.

6 Best Practices to Strengthen Website Security

Looking to create a secure website? Learn how to safeguard your data and ensure business continuity against today's cyber threats in this whitepaper.

How to Keep Your Solutions Up and Running

Keeping your solutions operational is incredibly important. Here are four ways you can ensure the performance of your solutions:

Tackle the main causes of downtime. Perhaps one of the most common factors contributing to downtime is legacy systems. Because many legacy systems have outdated hardware and have reached their end of life, they’re often unable to keep up with the demands of modern business needs, especially around data. As data volumes grow, these legacy systems may experience performance bottlenecks that degrade system performance and availability, ultimately increasing the risk of your solutions going down.
Keep software and systems up to date. Along the same lines, keeping the systems you use updated is crucial for patching vulnerabilities, improving performance, and preventing unexpected failures. Monitor and maintain your systems to help identify and address potential issues before they cause downtime.
Implement strong security measures. Vulnerable systems can also be a reason for downtime. Prevent cyberthreats and attacks that could cause downtime with firewalls and intrusion detection systems. Regular testing for vulnerabilities and potential failure points also will help identify issues before they can become causes for downtime.
Create a disaster recovery and backup plan. If downtime does happen, developing a comprehensive plan that outlines the steps needed to recover systems and get them back online is essential. Additionally, implementing redundant systems, like a backup server, ensures that these can take over if necessary.

Is "Four Nines" Availability Really Achievable?

Although 100% uptime may not be possible, many organizations have aimed to hit a 99.99% uptime, also known as “four nines.” This translates to a maximum of 52.56 minutes of downtime per year.

But how can you reach “four nines”?

Liferay now offers an HA+ add-on subscription for our Liferay PaaS customers to receive 99.99% uptime, ensuring greater availability while also boosting application performance. This is possible through:

Higher CloudSQL Tier

Our HA+ add-on subscription runs on the highest tier of Google's CloudSQL service. This allows us to give customers access to higher availability, ensuring a 99.99% uptime. Additionally, customers get access to performance-optimized hardware that, on a standard size, comes with double the RAM (32GB) plus 375GB of ultra-fast data cache storage. The impact on response times is perceptible, with average query processing time 3x faster in a sample benchmark test.*

Dual-Region Setup for Cloud Storage

The Google Cloud Storage (GCS) underneath your solution will have a dual-region configuration, ensuring your backups and Documents & Media library files will have higher availability.

But if an issue arises or downtime ever exceeds the SLA, Liferay will offer credits based on how long applications are down.

With Liferay HA+, reaching “four nines” is not only possible, but the entire infrastructure management is handled by the Liferay team, so you can focus on managing your applications and depend on the experts to keep your infrastructure up and running for longer.

Protect Your Solutions with Liferay Premium Security

Liferay PaaS customers can further strengthen your solutions and offload routine tasks with Liferay Premium Security for PaaS. Learn more about what’s included here.

Ensuring Performance with Liferay HA+

Want to guarantee higher availability for your solutions? Visit liferay.com/contact-sales to get started!

*Benchmark test data available upon request. Contact sales@liferay.com for more information.

Partner Pulse: From Brazil to North America – Objective Group’s Journey to Rising Star

2025-07-22T08:13:38Z

In this edition of Partner Pulse, we speak with Ramon Tramontini, President of International Operations, and Rafael Gomes, Head of Business Development at Objective Group.

Objective Group was founded by a close-knit team of developers in Brazil, united by a mission to help organizations grow through practical technology and human insight. Today, the company builds and maintains digital platforms, offers hands-on consulting, and turns business challenges into working solutions using data, innovation, and a results-first mindset.

Ramon and Rafael share details about a particularly challenging migration project, where Objective Group helped a client move from Sitecore to Liferay DXP in record time. They highlight how they used Liferay accelerators to speed up development and explain how Objective Group leverages AI tools like GitHub Copilot to enhance development processes and deliver faster results for their clients. This innovation earned them the Rising Star Partner for North America award in recognition for outstanding growth, client service, and results within their first year as a Liferay partner.

The conversation also touches on trends in digital transformation, particularly within the financial sector, and the increasing importance of AI-driven solutions.

Check out the video below to learn more about Objective’s journey and where they’re headed next.

Our Partner Pulse blog series offers insights from technology partners around the world on the latest trends, implementation tips, industry information, and more.

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region
Hear from our partners about digital trends in Central and Eastern Europe.
Partner Pulse: Solteq on Digital Growth and DXP Strategy
We sat down with Sacha Helfenstein, the Head of Advisory at Liferay partner Solteq, and talked about trends like AI, organizational readiness for innovation, and the elements of a strong tech partnership.
Partner Pulse: Protiviti on Digital Transformation in the Middle East
Our partners share insights on their digital transformation work across the Middle East and offer their take on how AI and low-code development are shaping the future of digital experiences.
Partner Pulse: How Aggity Breaks Down Silos and Builds Smarter Experiences
Learn how our partner aggity transforms digital experiences by breaking down silos, driving AI-ready strategies, and delivering results across industries.

Navigating the Digital Experience Landscape: Liferay's Position in the 2025 Voice of the Customer for DXPs

2025-07-17T14:34:41Z

Helping organizations build better digital experiences is what we do at Liferay—whether that’s powering customer portals, intranets, or websites. But we also know that what matters most is how our technology works for the people who use it every day. That's why we're sharing insights from the recently published 2025 Gartner® Voice of the Customer for Digital Experience Platforms report. We’re proud to be one of just five vendors to meet the evaluation criteria.

The Voice of the Customer report synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights™ reviews to offer insights for technology and services buyers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with individual detailed reviews, complements Gartner expert research and can play a key role in the buying process. It provides a valuable snapshot of how customers perceive various Digital Experience Platform (DXP) vendors in the market. The report categorizes eligible vendors based on scores for "User Interest and Adoption" (x-axis) and "Overall Experience" (y-axis).

Liferay's Placement in the 2025 Report

Liferay Digital Experience Platform received an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5 stars based on 69 reviews as of April 2025. Furthermore, 83% of reviewers indicated a willingness to recommend Liferay DXP. These numbers reflect the direct experiences of our customers, and we greatly appreciate their feedback.

Understanding the Metrics

The "Voice of the Customer" methodology includes vendors with 20 or more eligible published reviews (and 15 or more ratings for "Capabilities" and "Support/Delivery") during the specified 18-month submission period ending April 30, 2025. Reviews from vendor partners or end users of companies with less than $50M in revenue are excluded from this methodology.

Within the report, Liferay's specific category ratings included:

Product Capabilities: 4.4/5.0 based on 67 reviews
Sales Experience: 4.3/5.0 based on 61 reviews
Deployment Experience: 4.4/5.0 based on 68 reviews
Support Experience: 4.4/5.0 based on 66 reviews

In our opinion, these ratings are a testament to our ongoing efforts to deliver powerful DXP capabilities and reliable support to our customers.

Our Commitment to You

We are continually innovating and refining our platform to meet the evolving needs of businesses worldwide. We believe the insights from reports like the Gartner Voice of the Customer are invaluable, as they help us understand areas where we excel and opportunities for further improvement from the perspective of those who use our platform daily. We remain committed to our customers, working closely with them to empower them to deliver powerful digital experiences.

A customer from an IT services organization praised Liferay DXP, stating that it’s “easy to understand the product. The product has multiple capabilities that will help with end-to-end DXP including marketplace and CMS. This will be key for many organizations that are looking for minimal development effort and quick GTM."

We encourage you to view all Gartner Peer Insights reviews of Liferay DXP HERE and access the full Voice of the Customer report HERE to gain a deeper understanding of the market landscape and Liferay's position within it.

About Gartner Voice of the Customer:

The “Voice of the Customer” is a document that synthesizes Gartner Peer Insights’ reviews into insights for IT decision makers. This aggregated peer perspective, along with the individual detailed reviews, is complementary to Gartner expert research and can play a key role in your buying process, as it focuses on direct peer experiences of implementing and operating a solution. In this document, only vendors with 20 or more eligible published reviews (and 15 or more ratings for “Capabilities” and “Support/Delivery”) during the specified 18-month submission period are included. Reviews from vendor partners or end users of companies with less than $50M in revenue are excluded from this methodology.

How a DXP Can Help You Ensure Compliance With the European Accessibility Act

2025-07-14T20:32:13Z

Key Takeaways

The European Accessibility Act (EAA) has officially gone into effect in June 2025.
In order to comply with the EAA, businesses need to ensure their solutions meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards, provide an accessibility statement, and implement accessibility training for their teams.
The EAA is also an opportunity for businesses to serve and reach those with accessibility needs.

Accessibility in the EU is no longer strongly recommended; it is now mandated by the European Accessibility Act (EAA).

What is the EAA?

The EAA, which was approved in 2019, came into effect June 2025 and mandates that a range of products and services must comply with accessibility requirements for persons with disabilities to ensure equal access to digital products and services throughout Europe. This includes consumer electronics like TVs, smartphones, and computers, ticketing and vending machines, and online solutions like websites, e-commerce sites, and more.

Previously, each member state in the EU had different accessibility standards for products and services. Under the EAA, the member states will have a set of common accessibility rules to follow. The EU Commission estimates that differing accessibility requirements cost companies and member states €20 billion in 2020. This act is estimated to reduce that by 45 to 50%.

The EAA will apply to private businesses and public-sector organizations that offer goods and services to EU customers, regardless of where they are based. Customers can file complaints before national courts and authorities if businesses and organizations are not abiding by the new act. Failure to comply with the law could result in penalties, including fines.

So what can you do to ensure you are compliant with the EAA?

How to Ensure Compliance with the EAA

According to a research study conducted in May of 2025, only 27% of the 120 European companies interviewed considered themselves prepared for the EAA.

Navigating the EAA can seem complicated and burdensome, but taking the necessary steps helps foster a more accessible and equitable society while allowing you to serve a wider range of people.

Use this quick checklist to determine whether you meet EAA standards.

Does your solution meet WCAG 2.1 AA standards? The EAA references EN 301 549, which incorporates WCAG 2.1 AA as the web standard. Additionally, WCAG 2.2 includes and builds upon WCAG 2.1. So although it’s not currently mandated by the EAA, it may be smart to work towards compliance for WCAG 2.2.
Are you implementing accessibility training for employees and monitoring accessibility on an ongoing basis? Accessibility is not a one and done scenario. It requires regular action; both to educate employees and to continuously monitor and improve your solutions.
Do you have an accessibility statement containing:
- Information about the functionality of your product or service, including documentation around technical accessibility specifications and design processes.
- A description of how your product or service meets the EAA’s accessibility requirements.

How to Create More Inclusive Website Experiences

If you want to create an accessible website, look for a platform that can:

Prioritize accessibility features. What tools and features does the platform provide to accelerate compliance with accessibility? Look for features such as color contrast, keyboard navigation support, screen reader compatibility, and resizable text.
Check and monitor accessibility for your website. See if the platform is able to verify your website’s compliance with different standards like WCAG and WAI-ARIA.
Help scale accessibility. How does the platform help you expand accessibility efforts more efficiently? Consider templates and components that can be created and reused to maintain consistency throughout your websites.
Meet accessibility standards itself. The platform itself must be accessible to use and accommodate developers and users with accessibility needs. After all, inclusion and accessibility should start within your own organization. If you don’t advocate for your own employees, how can you truly support customers who also need the same accessibility features?

Don’t miss these other key elements to build an enterprise website. Read the blog here.

Build Accessible Websites with Liferay DXP

Accessibility doesn’t need to be a journey you navigate on your own. You can accelerate compliance with accessibility guidelines with a product that has been tested for compliance and aims to satisfy global accessibility requirements: Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) have evolved from content-centric CMSes toward a more customer-centric approach. DXPs seek to unify the customer experience across multiple digital and physical touchpoints, retain continuity across interactions, and use data aggregated from those interactions to drive context-aware personalization. But each DXP vendor can have differing levels of investment in accessibility.

As one of the most flexible DXPs in the market, Liferay DXP gives you the tools you need to build the digital solutions you envision, including tools to support accessibility.

Accessibility is a strategic priority for Liferay. We aim to create products that are accessible to use but also empower you to build inclusive solutions like websites, commerce sites, and customer portals.

Liferay provides tools and features that facilitate the creation of accessible digital experiences. This includes built-in features like compliance checks for different accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG, WAI-ARIA), color contrast tools, keyboard navigation support, and alternative text generators for images. Our platform also enables developers to create accessible templates and components, ensuring consistency across the entire website.

In addition, Liferay DXP provides a Page Audit Tool to help evaluate your website against accessibility best practices to improve usability and ensure compliance with global regulations.

Want to see how Liferay DXP can not only help you build accessible websites, but also secure, personalized, and efficient websites? Request your demo at www.liferay.com/request-a-demo.

Partner Pulse: How Aggity Breaks Down Silos and Builds Smarter Experiences

2025-06-27T09:45:23Z

Welcome to another edition of Partner Pulse, our interview series spotlighting Liferay’s global partner community. This time, we sat down with Paola Sánchez, Director of Alliances at aggity.

Based in Spain, aggity is a technology company specializing in digital transformation, digital business management, and IT solutions. aggity offers comprehensive expertise in process improvement and systems integration. With their experience across different industries, aggity supports organizations in improving their operations and staying ahead in a fast-changing world.

In this interview, Paola shares insights into aggity’s approach to digital transformation, their close collaboration with Liferay, and how they help clients modernize digital experiences in industries like manufacturing and retail. In addition to reflecting on key successes from 2024 like building an employee portal for one of Spain’s largest mobility companies, Paola gives practical advice for organizations improving their digital strategy, with tips on how to approach AI wisely.

Watch the full conversation to learn how a strong partnership, industry-specific knowledge, and a strategic mindset are helping companies meet today’s ever-evolving digital demands.

Our Partner Pulse blog series offers insights from technology partners around the world on the latest trends, implementation tips, industry information, and more.

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region
Hear from our partners about digital trends in Central and Eastern Europe.
Partner Pulse: Solteq on Digital Growth and DXP Strategy
We sat down with Sacha Helfenstein, the Head of Advisory at Liferay partner Solteq, and talked about trends like AI, organizational readiness for innovation, and the elements of a strong tech partnership.
Partner Pulse: Protiviti on Digital Transformation in the Middle East
Our partners share insights on their digital transformation work across the Middle East and offer their take on how AI and low-code development are shaping the future of digital experiences.

6 Steps to Bridge Cultures and Code: How DXPs Smooth Post-M&A Integration

2025-07-03T08:06:48Z

Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) promise growth and opportunity — and major organizational change.

The real work usually begins after the deal closes. You’ve got two teams, two cultures – and a mishmash of legacy tools that can trip up even the most seasoned IT pros. Experience shows that bringing together cultures, departments, systems, and technologies is where most deals hit the biggest roadblocks. If left alone, these roadblocks can slow your timeline, drain productivity, and deflate team spirit, ultimately getting in the way of the very gains your M&A was meant to achieve.

Enter the digital experience platform (DXP): your secret weapon for turning post-M&A integration hurdles into a smooth, collaborative road. Below are six essential steps to guide your M&A IT integration journey and ensure both your systems and your people come together seamlessly.

1. Kick Off with an M&A Integration Playbook

Successful M&A integration starts long before the first line of code is merged. Assemble a cross-functional task force, including IT architects, HR leaders, and change-management champions to draft your M&A integration plan.

This playbook should include:

Governance and roles. Define clear ownership for each workstream (e.g., data migration, user training, security review.)
Timeline and milestones. Break down the project into phases (discovery, pilot, rollout, optimization) and assign target dates.
Risk registry. Identify potential “tech friction” hotspots (legacy mainframes, custom APIs, regulatory constraints) and plan mitigation strategies such as phased rollouts or dedicated integration sprints.
Regular communication. Set up weekly stand-ups, monthly steering committees, and an escalation path for blockers.

Keep your M&A integration checklist close at hand and confirm you’ve inventoried every system, documented all user needs, and secured necessary stakeholder buy-in. A great playbook will ensure you hit each milestone on schedule and adhere to M&A integration best practices.

2. Unify Technology and Teams with a Composable Platform

A DXP’s extensible architecture acts like digital glue. Instead of ripping out each legacy content management system (CMS) or custom portal, plug them into one central hub to transform a tangled web of separate sites or portals into a single, cohesive ecosystem:

Plug-and-play connectors and APIs. Quickly connect ERP, CRM, e-commerce, and legacy content management systems without custom middleware.
Modular microsites. Spin up dedicated sub-sites for sales, support, and HR – each with tailored navigation and branding – while using shared core services (like authentication, search, and analytics.)
Authenticated experiences. Leverage single sign-on (SSO) so that employees from both legacy companies access the same intranet with consistent permissions.
Enhanced security and compliance. Implement granular access control so each user only sees what they need, capture every interaction in an automatic audit trail, and enable preconfigured settings for GDPR, CCPA, or any industry-specific rule—so you’re secure and compliant from day one.

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By adopting a composable platform approach, you avoid monolithic rewrites and preserve existing investments. Your DXP becomes the orchestration layer that unites back-office systems and customer-facing channels alike, accelerating post-M&A integration.

3. Map Culture with Customer Experience Tools

M&As aren’t just IT projects; they’re people projects. And integrating people is as critical as integrating systems. A DXP equipped with digital asset management (DAM) and content management system (CMS) capabilities can deliver:

Efficient and automated onboarding. Create microsites that guide new teams through company history, values, org chart, and role-specific training.
Interactive FAQs & chatbots. Deploy an AI-powered virtual assistant trained on your combined knowledge base to field questions 24/7 (e.g., “How do I submit an expense report?”)
Shared success stories. Publish post-merger case studies – complete with video interviews, infographics, and client testimonials – to reinforce a unified vision.

By personalizing the experience and giving every employee a voice, you foster inclusion and build momentum behind your M&A integration playbook. When your people feel heard and equipped, they become advocates for moving forward instead of roadblocks.

4. Streamline M&A IT Integration

Don’t treat M&A IT integration as an afterthought. Leverage your DXP’s built-in connectors to ERP, CRM, and Supply Chain systems to give you a holistic view of data flows and systems architecture. A smooth integration process rests on three pillars: a clear data mapping worksheet, automated workflows, and real-time monitoring. Here’s a structured playbook you can follow:

Create a data mapping worksheet. Start by cataloging every system and its owner, then define your core entities (Customer, Order, Product) with key fields. In a simple table, map each source field to its target, note any transformation rules, flag duplicates, and validate everything with a sandbox import before going live.
Automate core workflows. Leverage your DXP’s low-code connectors to automate critical flows: trigger ERP invoices when DXP orders complete, route supplier approvals to Finance and Legal, and funnel support tickets to the right resolver group – eliminating manual handoffs.
Build a tech integration dashboard. This dashboard should track sync health (success vs. failure), fire alerts on API or validation errors, and monitor latency (API response times, queue backlogs.) This real-time visibility lets you catch and fix issues before they impact users.

By completing these steps – your built-in data mapping worksheet, workflow automations, and live monitoring – you’ll convert a complex M&A integration plan into a predictable, scalable process.

5. Use Digital Marketing for Internal Adoption

Your internal audience deserves the same attention you’d give to an external digital marketing campaign:

Targeted messaging. Segment employees by department and send customized newsletters – “IT tip of the week,” “HR spotlight,” or “Sales toolkit updates” – through your DXP’s marketing module.
Gamification and rewards. Host quizzes on the new portal’s features and reward top scorers with badges, shout-outs, or perks.
Micro-learning series. Embed short videos and tutorials directly within your DAM to reinforce key workflows (e.g., “How do I approve invoices?”)

By treating a new customer portal rollout like a product launch, you drive adoption, reduce support tickets, and build excitement around your digital business transformation.

6. Measure, Iterate, and Celebrate Wins

Use embedded analytics to monitor adoption rates, page visits, and common support queries. Tackle low-engagement areas by publishing quick “how-to” videos in your DXP’s DAM or rolling out a fresh set of micro-learning modules. Celebrate each milestone – first successful data sync, first thousand chatbot interactions, first joint team announcement. These quick wins keep momentum high during post-M&A integration.

Your DXP’s analytics are the compass for continuous improvement:

Engagement metrics. Track page views, time on task, and click-through rates for each portal section.
Support trends. Analyze chatbot logs and help-desk tickets to identify recurring pain points, then publish targeted how-to guides.
Performance dashboards. Monitor system health, API response times, and search query success rates.

Use these insights to refine your M&A integration plan, publish follow-up blog posts, and share quarterly “integration progress” reports. Ready to make your post-M&A integration seamless?

Use the step-by-step guidance in this article – your M&A integration checklist, data mapping worksheets, and governance tips are all here. With the right DXP strategy, anchored by integration, AI, and extensible architecture, you’ll transform cultural and technical friction into a unified digital experience that makes the journey ahead easier for everyone.

For more info on the comprehensive integration capabilities of Liferay DXP, grab your free fact sheet to learn how headless APIs, Client Extensions, and robust integration frameworks empower you to deliver cohesive digital experiences – across every device and channel.

Partner Pulse: Protiviti on Digital Transformation in the Middle East

2025-06-27T09:41:26Z

In this edition of our Partner Pulse interview series, we’re joined by Adib Ibrahim, Managing Director, and Saranga Pani, Director at Protiviti.

Protiviti is a global consulting firm and a wholly owned subsidiary of Robert Half Inc., with offices in over 25 countries. The company delivers tailored consulting and managed services to help businesses navigate complex challenges in finance, technology, operations, data, and risk. In the Middle East, Protiviti has carved out a strong presence in digital transformation, particularly in industries such as telecommunications, public services, and entertainment.

Adib and Saranga share insights on their digital transformation work across the Middle East and explore how digital experience platforms (DXPs) like Liferay are enabling scalable and future-ready solutions for public and private sector clients alike.

In the interview, Adib and Saranga highlight key success stories, including a major platform migration for a sports and entertainment client, and offer their take on how AI, low-code development, and headless CMS are shaping the future of digital experiences.

Watch the full conversation to learn more about their approach, lessons learned, and where the next wave of transformation is headed.

Our Partner Pulse blog series offers insights from technology partners around the world on the latest trends, implementation tips, industry information, and more.

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region
Hear from our partners about digital trends in Central and Eastern Europe.

6 Pillars for a Successful Citizen Relationship Management Platform

2025-06-06T11:01:17Z

Citizens today expect smoother, faster, and friendlier online experiences, just like when they shop online. They want to request a birth certificate from their smartphone, file their income tax return with a click, or check the status of their driver’s license renewal.

Digital technologies have transformed how we interact—and now public administrations are increasing their efforts to deliver agile, citizen-centered services within local government.

In this drive toward a truly citizen-focused administration, more and more public sector organizations are building out a Citizen Relationship Management Platform – a unified system, often powered by citizen relationship management software, designed to manage, track, and enhance every touchpoint between institutions and citizens, particularly streamlining citizen request management. Think of it like a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system from the business world, but tailored for public services.

By creating a 360 degree view of each person, pulling together their contact details, past service requests, and individual preferences, administrators can offer personalized, proactive solutions, boosting participation and trust along the way.

A Citizen Relationship Management Platform focuses on four strategic principles: efficiency, accessibility, interoperability, and data governance – to transform how citizens engage with government. These platforms go beyond merely responding to requests: they anticipate needs, provide “one-stop” portals, and make data-driven decision-making achievable.

Under the umbrella of these principles, there are six fundamental pillars that make a truly transformative Citizen Relationship Management Platform possible and successful. Let’s dive in.

1. A Unified, Rock-Solid Digital Identity

To deliver frictionless, personalized service, citizens need one set of credentials for everything. A unified digital identity means you log in once and immediately access all government services—no more juggling multiple user names and passwords. This single sign-on approach not only simplifies the user experience but also encourages broader adoption of digital channels. Of course, security remains paramount: multi-factor authentication, robust encryption, and continuous monitoring are non-negotiable safeguards to protect personal data. When simplicity and security go hand in hand, citizens can confidently trust the technology they’re accessing.

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2. Interoperability That Actually Works

Interoperability allows disparate systems to communicate seamlessly, so citizens don’t have to supply the same information repeatedly. A strong Citizen Relationship Management Platform enables this. Picture this: you update your address in one department, and every other department automatically receives the update. That’s the magic of interoperability in action. By coordinating in-person service processes, appointment scheduling, document handling, and more under a unified data-governance framework, public administrations eliminate redundant data entry, slash processing times, and create a cohesive, efficient experience for everyone.

3. Data Hygiene: The Single Source of Truth

All the interoperability in the world won’t help if the data is faulty. A Citizen Relationship Management Platform thrives on a centralized, high-quality data repository that acts as one secure, consistent source of truth. The underlying citizen relationship management software is crucial for maintaining this data integrity, preventing duplicate entries, correcting outdated information, and making updates straightforward. When data is clean, administrators can tailor services to each person’s real needs and make smarter policy decisions. Investing in data hygiene and data cleansing is essential to delivering accurate, customized services.

4. Proactivity and Personalization: Going Beyond “Just Reply”

A truly modern Citizen Relationship Management Platform doesn’t wait for citizens to ask; it anticipates. By analyzing available data, the platform can automatically surface relevant services or send friendly reminders. Imagine getting a notification: “Congratulations on your newborn! Here are available benefits you may qualify for.” Or receiving a nudge: “Your water meter needs inspection: Schedule an appointment now.” This proactive, personalized outreach increases citizen satisfaction and lightens administrative workloads.

5. Accessibility and Inclusion: Digital Services for All

No one should be left behind. Accessibility is a cornerstone of any Citizen Relationship Management Platform: compliance with standards like UNE AA (38 specific requirements to ensure web accessibility), WCAG, and WAI-ARIA guarantee that people with visual, hearing, or motor impairments can navigate and use every feature. Collaboration with organizations representing users with disabilities helps tailor interfaces to real needs. True inclusivity goes beyond technical compliance: services should be intuitive and easy to use for everyone, regardless of ability. Co-creating solutions with citizens ensures digital transformation benefits all.

6. Artificial Intelligence and Automation: Smart Service, Human Heart

AI and automation are game-changers for public administration. Automated workflows can handle repetitive tasks – like processing standard permit applications – while AI-powered chatbots answer routine questions (“How do I renew my driver’s license?”) around the clock. But human oversight remains key: generative AI must be monitored to guarantee accuracy. By offloading predictable tasks to machines, staff can focus on complex issues and build genuine relationships with citizens. This balance of smart automation and human empathy creates a faster, more personalized service model.

Read how the City of Burbank completely overhauled their website to increase accessibility and citizen reach by allowing users to access services from any device.

The Role of a DXP-Powered Customer Portal

A customer portal built on a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) can serve as a citizen relationship management software for government. Here’s how:

Unified Access Point
A DXP-based portal brings together content, transactional services, and communication channels in one seamless interface. Citizens log in once (leveraging that unified digital identity from the first pillar) and instantly see personalized dashboards: everything from permit applications in progress to upcoming local events.
Personalized Content Delivery
DXP capabilities allow administrators to display different content based on segmented user profiles: if you’re a small-business owner, you’ll see permit deadlines and financing options from your local government; if you’re a parent, you’ll see school enrollment dates and childcare subsidies. This level of personalization feels like a concierge service, guiding each citizen to the resources they need most.
Integrated Data and Workflow Orchestration
Within a DXP, back-end integrations connect to various government systems – tax records, social services, healthcare, permitting, and more – enabling interoperability. When a citizen updates their address in the portal, that change immediately flows to every connected department. Workflows, created by non-developers through low-code, can be triggered automatically: once you submit a document, the portal can generate notifications, schedule inspections, or issue digital confirmations.
Proactive Notifications and Self-Service
A DXP portal can push real-time alerts via email, SMS, or in-portal banners: “Your recycling collection schedule has changed,” or “Your application is approved: schedule your pickup.” Self-service features, like chatbots and guided wizards, significantly improving citizen request management by reducing phone calls and in-person visits.
Robust Analytics for Continuous Improvement
Digital Experience Platforms come with built-in analytics to track user behavior: which pages they visit most, which forms they abandon, and which content drives the highest satisfaction scores. These insights feed back into the Citizen Relationship Management Platform, highlighting areas for improvement—whether it’s streamlining a form, adding a new tutorial video, or optimizing a chatbot response.

A Citizen Relationship Management Platform transforms government interactions from static, siloed processes into dynamic, user-friendly experiences. By building on six foundational pillars – unified digital identity, interoperability, data quality, proactivity, accessibility, and smart automation – public administrations can deliver services that feel as seamless and engaging as any top-tier consumer app.

When powered by a Digital Experience Platform, a customer portal becomes the one-stop hub that ties it all together: personalized dashboards, integrated workflows, self-service tools, and proactive notifications. The result? A more efficient, transparent, and genuinely citizen-centered government.

Partner Pulse: Solteq on Digital Growth and DXP Strategy

2025-06-27T18:24:03Z

For this edition of Partner Pulse, we sat down with Sacha Helfenstein, the Head of Advisory at Liferay partner Solteq.

From his vantage point as a “digital Sherpa,” Sacha shares how Solteq, a leading IT service provider and software house, guides companies through complex digital transformations. Solteq has a strong foothold in the Nordics and a growing presence across Europe, solving real-world business challenges with technology and delivering digital business solutions across industries to help clients unlock value through SaaS and cloud-based services. With expertise particularly evident in the manufacturing sector, Solteq uses digital experience platforms like Liferay to power long-term innovation.

In the interview, Sacha reflects on Solteq’s highlights from the last year, including achieving Liferay Platinum Partner status and implementing several major DXP projects. Looking ahead, Sacha outlines an ambitious plan to offer manufacturing clients a digital transformation blueprint, combining best practices, flexibility, and fast time-to-value.

The conversation also explores AI, organizational readiness for innovation, and the elements of a strong tech partnership. Tune in to hear how Solteq and Liferay are collaborating to shape the future of digital business.

Our Partner Pulse blog series offers insights from technology partners around the world on the latest trends, implementation tips, industry information, and more:

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region
Hear from our partners about digital trends in Central and Eastern Europe.

How to Achieve Digital Agility for Your Website

2025-08-07T08:50:35Z

Note: This article was last updated on August 1, 2025, to ensure all information is up-to-date.

Key Takeaways

Digital agility is mission-critical. Without flexible, modern systems, your site becomes a barrier to growth and innovation.
AI turbocharges your website. From auto-generating content to smart product recommendations, AI helps you adapt faster and delight users.
Low-code empowers teams. Let non-technical staff build pages, workflows, and apps, freeing IT for bigger projects and speeding up launches.
Multi-site management keeps brands consistent. Centralized control and cloning functionality mean you can spin up localized sites in hours, not days.
Headless (and hybrid) delivers true freedom. Decouple content from design so you can push updates to any channel – web, mobile, kiosks – effortlessly.

Why Modernizing Your Website Can’t Wait

Running a complex business today feels like a high-wire act. You're constantly balancing shifting customer expectations, the urge to innovate, and the need to grow smoothly – all while keeping your digital experiences seamless. But here's the kicker: if your website or its underlying software is stuck on old, clunky systems, it's not just a little slowdown; it's a huge roadblock keeping you from adapting and outsmarting the competition.

Digital agility lets you test ideas, tweak fast, and launch updates without second-guessing. Think of it as giving your team access to rapid evolution. Leaders in digital agility are also likely to gain a competitive edge, enabling them to deliver digital experiences that drive real business value more quickly. Nearly half (49%) of the global executives who participated in this organizational agility survey claimed that they spot new digital opportunities faster than their competitors.

"Digital agility is essential to successful transformation, allowing organizations to drive innovation at scale, deliver new initiatives faster and create the experiences that customers want."
Kurt Anderson, Managing Director and API Transformation Leader at Deloitte Consulting, via Forbes

If your current content management technology is holding you back from achieving the agility your business demands, it’s time to consider a modern solution. This blog post explores how AI, low-code, multisite management, and headless capabilities can support achieving digital agility. As a comprehensive guide, it covers key strategies, tools, and best practices to help your organization achieve digital agility.

Introduction to Digital Agility

Digital agility is the cornerstone of modern business success, enabling organizations to quickly adapt to shifting market demands, evolving customer expectations, and rapid technological advancements. In today’s fast-paced digital environment, being agile is not just an advantage – it’s essential for survival.

A content management system (CMS) sits at the core of digital agility, empowering businesses to streamline content creation, publishing, and management processes. By adopting agile software development practices and leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, organizations can enhance their online presence, reach new audiences, and respond swiftly to change. A robust CMS, combined with agile methodologies, ensures that content management and development processes remain efficient, flexible, and aligned with business goals, giving companies the ability to innovate and thrive in the digital age. In fact, 94% of businesses surveyed by digital experience platform Crownpeak say speed and agility are “very” important to delivering and managing impactful digital experiences

Benefits of Digital Agility

Embracing digital agility brings a wide range of benefits that can transform how organizations operate and compete. With the right tools and strategies, businesses can effectively manage multiple sites or even multiple websites, ensuring consistent branding and customer experiences across all digital touchpoints.

"There’s no denying the digital age demands agility."
Brett Raven, Managing Director of Accenture Song APAC, via The Australian

Multi-site management solutions simplify the oversight of different sites, making it easier to coordinate updates, share resources, and maintain quality. This agility also fosters greater collaboration among teams, driving innovation and efficiency throughout the organization. For example, healthcare organizations can leverage digital agility to streamline the delivery of medicaid services, improving health outcomes while reducing operational costs. Ultimately, digital agility enables companies to respond rapidly to new opportunities, deliver better services, and stay ahead in a competitive digital landscape.

First Step to Digital Agility

The first step toward achieving digital agility is a comprehensive evaluation of your organization’s current state. This means taking a close look at your content management processes, technology infrastructure, and team collaboration practices. By identifying bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for growth, businesses can lay the groundwork for a successful strategy that aligns with their business objectives.

It’s crucial to understand how digital content is created, managed, and maintained throughout its lifecycle to ensure consistency and relevance. Engaging teams in this assessment process helps uncover valuable insights and fosters a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement. By focusing on these foundational practices, organizations can create a clear roadmap for digital transformation that supports both immediate needs and long-term goals.

Creating a Digital Agility Strategy

Developing a digital agility strategy starts with defining your organization’s vision and setting clear goals. Assess your current capabilities and identify gaps that could be addressed with new technologies or improved processes. A successful strategy should include a detailed plan for implementing content management systems and adopting agile software development methodologies. Prioritizing continuous improvement and streamlining processes will help your business stay responsive and efficient. Encourage collaboration across teams and invest in tools that support version control and cost savings, ensuring your content management practices are both effective and scalable.

By fostering a culture of innovation and leveraging the latest digital technologies, your company can create and implement a strategy that drives growth, enhances efficiency, and delivers exceptional customer experiences.

Using AI to Improve Digital Experiences and Boost Enterprise Efficiency

Integrating AI into your website boosts digital agility by enabling faster adaptation to evolving business needs. In addition, AI-driven personalization enables content tailoring at scale, helping businesses better understand and serve customers and potential customers. This strengthens customer connections, fosters loyalty, and encourages growth. In fact, 56% of consumers become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.

Here are several ways AI can drive your organization’s digital agility, with a focus on key strategic areas such as user experience and operational efficiency:

AI Capability	How it Boosts Agility & Efficiency	Real-World Example
Content Generation	Streamlines content creation, expedites go-to-market strategies.	Manufacturers generate optimized product descriptions for thousands of items from technical specs.
Asset Auto-Tagging	Automates tagging and categorization, provides instant content access.	Public sector agencies improve accessibility of records (permits, licenses), reducing search time.
Product Recommendations	Dynamically adapts to customer needs, increases conversions.	Banks automatically match clients with relevant financial products based on past transactions or spending habits.
Personalization	Fine-tunes customer interactions, delivers hyper-personalized content.	Telecom companies surface family plan benefits after a customer searches for information on adding lines.
Global Reach & Localization	Accelerates expansion into new markets, automates translations.	A global manufacturer automatically translates manuals, product descriptions, and support materials into multiple languages.
Customer Self-Service	Resolves routine inquiries instantly, provides 24/7 support.	Health insurance providers use chatbots to help policyholders check coverage, file claims, or get guidance on preventive care.

Empowering Business Users with Low-Code

Empowering business users to manage and update digital experiences without constant reliance on IT is a critical component in achieving digital agility. With IT teams increasingly bogged down by project backlogs – a staggering 72% of IT leaders report this as a major obstacle – freeing up their resources for strategic initiatives is more important than ever.

This is where the power of low-code tools comes into play. By enabling non-technical teams to contribute directly to website creation and maintenance, you can accelerate development cycles, allocate IT resources to strategic projects instead, and respond more quickly to changing market needs. Low-code platforms also give business users a sense of ownership and control over digital content, fostering greater engagement and accountability.

Here’s how low-code capabilities can enhance digital agility across industries:

Low-Code Capability	How it Boosts Agility & Efficiency	Real-World Example
Effortless Website & Page Creation	Empowers non-technical users to manage content independently.	Public sector agencies streamline website updates (announcements, service info, forms) without IT support.
Rapid Application Development	Speeds up creation of fully integrated applications.	Manufacturers quickly develop a parts request application integrated with inventory and supply chain systems.
Content Approval Workflows	Ensures content authorization and maintains quality.	Financial services companies set up automated approval workflows for promotional materials to meet regulatory standards.
Advanced Form Capabilities	Facilitates complex form creation, automates data collection.	Government agencies digitize permit applications, allowing citizens to submit online and track status.
Customizable Data Display	Empowers users to control data presentation and organization.	Insurance providers create custom dashboards for agents displaying claims status, policyholder info, and real-time updates

Navigating Website Complexity with Multi-Site Management

As your business grows, you may need to manage multiple websites for different brands, products, regions, or campaigns. Research shows that 74% of enterprises now rely on at least two CMS solutions to manage their digital presence. This shift highlights the growing complexity of modern digital operations. Managing multiple sites presents unique challenges, such as maintaining consistency, managing content across channels, and overcoming operational complexities. Prioritizing communication, leveraging technology, and involving everyone in key decisions are essential. Having the tools in one solution to manage multiple sites simplifies this complexity.

If your solution includes multisite management, this means you have a centralized platform for creating, managing, and organizing all your digital properties, ensuring brand consistency and streamlining workflows. Content management systems play a crucial role here, supporting collaboration, version control, and review standards across all sites. Each site in a multi-site management system is unique, necessitating flexibility in management approaches to address specific needs effectively. Managing the content lifecycle – creation, storage, review, and disposal – across multiple sites is vital to ensure content remains relevant, compliant, and aligned with organizational goals.

The following examples illustrate key features of multisite management that support digital agility:

Multi-Site Management Feature	How it Boosts Agility & Efficiency	Real-World Example
Site Cloning	Quickly deploy and customize site clones for new digital presences.	Manufacturers deploy localized corporate websites for new markets, ensuring consistent branding and adapting to local needs, boosting global expansion efficiency.
Pre-built Templates	Standardized layouts and reusable components maintain brand integrity and speed up site creation.	Financial services quickly launch new product landing pages using templates, ensuring branding and compliance.
Unified Asset Libraries	Centralized storage eliminates redundancy and streamlines content distribution.	Telecom companies store and manage marketing materials and product images in a unified library for efficient distribution across digital touchpoints and regional sites.
Simplified Site Management through Centralization	Streamlines content updates and controls site configurations (including security) from a single console.	A government agency manages multiple regional public service websites, ensuring consistent content delivery and centralized control while allowing localized contributions.

Simplify Your Multisite Environment with a DXP

Read how a digital experience platform like Liferay DXP can help you master multisite management with these five best practices. Download the ebook here.

Delivering Seamless Omnichannel Experiences with Hybrid Headless Technology

Headless capabilities allow businesses to separate content from its presentation, making it easier to deliver consistent experiences across websites, mobile apps, kiosks, and emerging digital touchpoints. Unlike traditional content management systems (CMS) that tightly couple content with a single front end, headless architectures provide the flexibility to serve content anywhere via APIs. This enables seamless omnichannel delivery – something 90% of users expect, but only 29% feel they actually receive. This is also an ideal approach for development teams who require maximum control and flexibility over the front-end experience. Analyzing customer behavior through tracking tools aids in making data-driven decisions for multi-site management, further enhancing the effectiveness of headless architectures.

Hybrid headless capabilities take this flexibility further by offering organizations the choice to use either API-driven content delivery or traditional, coupled content management, depending on the specific use case. This allows for both the agility of a headless system and the familiar visual content management tools on which marketing teams often rely. For companies that either transition from a traditional CMS or need to balance developer flexibility with marketer ease-of-use, hybrid headless often provides a more practical and adaptable approach.

Here's how delivering content across all touchpoints with hybrid headless capabilities contributes to your digital agility:

Hybrid Headless Technology	How it Boosts Agility & Efficiency	Real-World Example
Omnichannel Delivery	Reach and engage audiences everywhere with personalized content across all touchpoints to stay competitive.	A financial services provider delivers tailored advice and product recommendations via mobile app, website, and automated messages for consistent experiences.
Developer Flexibility	Leverage modern development frameworks (e.g., React, Angular) for faster, more dynamic digital experiences, simplifying content delivery and attracting talent.	A telco provider uses React to create a self-service portal delivering real-time network usage and billing data across smartphones and desktops.
Unified Content Management	Consolidate content creation and updates in one central system to scale content, ensure consistency, and reduce duplication.	A manufacturer updates product specs and safety guidelines from a single platform, reflecting consistent information across their website, partner portals, and digital signage.
Improved Performance	Enable faster content delivery and optimize performance by decoupling back-end and front-end, speeding up load times and access to information.	A public sector agency ensures faster access to public records and real-time website updates, enhancing user experience and reducing citizen wait times.

Implementing Digital Agility

Putting digital agility into action requires a structured, step-by-step approach. Start by:

Developing a digital agility roadmap that outlines your goals, timelines, and key milestones.
Implement digital technologies such as advanced content management systems and multi-site management tools to streamline content creation, publishing, and site management across multiple sites.
Train your teams on new processes and tools, clearly defining responsibilities to ensure accountability and smooth collaboration.
Streamline workflows to eliminate bottlenecks and foster a culture of continuous improvement and innovation.

Bringing Everything Together: Synergy for the Win!

Traditional CMS solutions often struggle to provide the flexibility and scalability needed to meet the demands of a fast-paced digital landscape. As businesses expand, adopt new technologies, and face shifting market demands, the limitations of these systems can become more apparent. They lack the agility required to deliver personalized, seamless experiences across various touchpoints and quickly adapt to new market opportunities.

"Being able to leverage modern technologies like AI and low-code as well as multi-site management and hybrid headless capabilities in tandem becomes a key differentiator," says Bryan Cheung, Chief Marketing Officer at Liferay. "Imagine a global enterprise using AI to personalize product recommendations on their e-commerce website – all built and maintained by business users with low-code tools. This content gets delivered to multiple websites or channels via multisite and hybrid headless capabilities, all managed from a central platform."

Unlike most traditional CMSes, a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) unifies all of these elements into one cohesive solution. By integrating AI, low-code development, multisite management, and hybrid headless capabilities, a DXP streamlines operations and accelerates growth. DXPs provide the digital agility your business needs to quickly adapt and deliver exceptional digital experiences that drive real business value.

Prioritize Digital Agility for Your Solutions

Digital agility should be a top priority in your business strategy. Your website solutions can determine whether users stick with you or turn to competitors that offer better, more connected experiences – making digital agility essential for long-term success and customer loyalty.

Ready to choose the right website technology for your business?

Check out our ebook, "Evaluating Website Technologies: How Headless CMSes, DXPs, and Liferay DXP Compare," for an in-depth look at how these platforms compare in functionality and scalability.

What Is an Enterprise Website? Don’t Neglect These Essential Elements

2025-08-19T16:47:03Z

Note: This article was last updated on August 13, 2025.

Key Takeaways

Exceptional website experiences are the standard, not the exception.
A Content Management System (CMS) is software that enables users to build a website without code and is the most common technology used to build websites.
An enterprise website is designed to handle the complex requirements and structures of an enterprise business.
Prioritize security, accessibility, and scalability as crucial components of an enterprise website.
A DXP typically includes out-of-the-box capabilities that go beyond traditional CMS functionality so you can create multichannel digital experiences and consolidate your tech stack.

Everybody Needs a Website

After the dawn of the internet in the mid-90s, the business world started scrambling to go online too. Initially, companies created websites to complement in-person experiences. Having a website was a flex in itself, no matter how questionable the design.

Over time, however, digital strategy has moved from the sidelines to front and center. Today, it’s hard to overstate the importance of your organization’s website.

Your website isn’t—or shouldn’t be—just a glorified advertising mouthpiece that ticks another digital marketing box. You need a website that is an authentic and engaging introduction to your products, services, and corporate identity. As Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, once put it, “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” And in today’s digital-first era, that brand knowledge comes from your website.

After all, websites influence 97% of buyers before they make a purchase decision. And even if, for instance, you’re operating in the public sector for citizens who won’t be buying from you directly, your web presence should still communicate clearly who you are, what you do, and how to accomplish specific tasks.

The most effective websites are those that captivate visitors and serve regular users effectively.

What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?

Almost 70% of active websites have been built using a Content Management System (CMS).

A CMS is software that enables users to build and manage websites without code. CMSes drastically decrease go-to-market times and reduce maintenance costs. With a CMS, web developers don’t need to use a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but can instead take advantage of user-friendly functionality to create and edit content, pages, and sites quickly.

Common Features of a Content Management System

Feature	Benefit
WYSIWYG Editor	Makes it easy for non-technical users to create and edit content and preview how content will look
Workflow management	Helps establish review processes to maintain quality and consistency
SEO tools	Improves visibility in search results and helps drive organic traffic
Version control	Allows managers to track or revert changes in the case of data loss or unwanted edits
Analytics dashboards	Gives data insights into content performance so users can understand audience behavior and optimize
Pre-defined templates	Enables fast, on-brand content creation and saves design resources
AI-powered content creation	Accelerates content generation and assists with editing for more efficient content creation and management
Easy-to-use interface	Simplifies new user onboarding and helps content creators focus on creating and managing content
Migration tools	Enables easy transfer of existing content from old systems, saving manual time and effort

What Is an Enterprise Website?

Most companies, enterprise businesses included, have software like a CMS that can handle the premise of captivating visitors and serving regular users to a certain extent. But there’s a difference between a website for your enterprise and an enterprise-level website.

Enterprise businesses are typically large businesses of around 500+ employees that have complex structures and requirements, often but not exclusively B2B. So an enterprise-level website is a website specifically designed for these organizations that adequately addresses the complexity and requirements of the business itself with the right functionality.

Enterprise websites act as the central hub for all digital touchpoints, including mobile applications and even social media. In order to maintain a consistent brand identity, an enterprise website should connect these touchpoints together through seamless integration.

Important Elements of an Enterprise Website

Support for multinational corporations with translation and localization tools.
Information and resources that can be personalized to a variety of audiences including end users, customers, business partners, and suppliers.
Strong architecture that can accommodate large traffic volume.
Sophisticated data management that processes user and visitor data safely and in compliance with regulations.
SEO tools that help search engines surface relevant search results.

At the heart of a successful enterprise website is providing a fantastic user experience, measured in metrics like engagement and conversion rates.

Enterprise Web Design

An important part of UX is how well your CMS or other website software handles best practices for enterprise website design.

Best Practices for Enterprise Website Design

A design system that helps control brand consistency across large teams.
Mobile responsiveness that adapts according to screen size and offers compelling, user-friendly experiences on all devices.
Optimization for page speed. Most users now expect pages to load within three seconds or less. 40% of visitors abandon your website if it takes longer.

All of these elements are important for building a website that reflects your needs. In the rest of this post, we’ll dive deeper into three additional key components of an enterprise website that your current website software must address: security, accessibility, and scalability.

3 Key Components of an Enterprise-Level Website

The trifecta of security, accessibility, and scalability, when handled well, can ensure your website truly meets the complex standards of your business. Read on to find out if your current technology measures up.

Security: Take a Thorough and Proactive Approach

Every day, around 30,000 websites get hacked. That adds up to almost 1 million websites per month.

Those are sobering numbers given how many industries are protecting sensitive user and business data. And if your website and hosted applications can’t afford unexpected downtime, security should also be top of mind when evaluating the effectiveness of your website software.

Most website software providers have the basics down, like encrypting web traffic and adding MFA and Federated Authentication. But not all prioritize security adequately.

So what should a truly secure website platform offer?

Key Security Business Needs

Certified protection. While you have to follow security best practices when building your website, certifications confirm the platform’s secure foundation, allowing you to concentrate on your website’s specific security needs rather than addressing platform vulnerabilities. Key certifications include ISO/IEC 27001 and SOC 2 (Type 1 & 2) for general security, ISO/IEC 27017 and CSA STAR (Level 1 & 2) for cloud security, and ISO/IEC 27018 and HIPAA for data privacy. (HIPAA only applies to the healthcare industry.)
Sophisticated user access control. Many businesses may need to go beyond the standard roles basic website software offers and create custom roles that grant highly specific permissions to ensure only the right users access the right content or edit that content. No one should be able make changes without authorization, whether accidentally or maliciously in the case of a cybercriminal. This is important whether you’re a university differentiating between administrators, professors, and students or a manufacturer with a different microsite for each of your dealers.
Application safeguards. Layers, layers, layers! Secure your sites like a multi-layered vault, with an IP permission layer, authentication layer, service access policy layer, and a user permission layer. These layers strengthen your website’s defenses.

Enhanced Protection Through Cloud Deployment

Hosting with the right cloud provider can actually be more secure than self-hosting. Does your platform vendor enable PaaS or SaaS deployment?

SaaS and PaaS subscription options can include:

Protection against cyberattacks. Cloud subscriptions may have intrusion detection systems for constant monitoring and identification of possible threats, DDoS technology that absorbs malicious traffic, and anti-malware technology that keeps malware information stored for recognition purposes.
Effective vulnerability management. The most secure platform vendors proactively monitor and scan their infrastructure for security vulnerabilities. They should alert customers or apply fixes directly depending on the deployment method. SaaS deployments in particular benefit from the platform vendor’s regular DAST and SAST scans that also help test and expose application vulnerabilities.
Expert help from a SOC team. A platform vendor’s in-house security team dedicates resources to ensuring the security of their software. With SaaS deployments, SOC teams will take on additional security tasks like performance and log monitoring, scans, and updates and patches.
Assistance if an attack or outage does happen. Sometimes, either through bad actors or an event like a natural disaster, websites still go down. Most SaaS and PaaS subscription options help restore your website using regular backups and disaster recovery strategies to bring you back ASAP.

This is really only the start of what you should consider regarding security. For a more in-depth look at how to ensure the security of your website, read 6 Best Practices to Strengthen Website Security.

Liferay has prioritized security for over two decades, developing a trusted platform for building secure websites, particularly in highly regulated industries. Our partnership with Google Cloud further enhances the security of PaaS and SaaS deployments. Learn more here.

The Accessibility Imperative: Creating a Better, More User-Friendly Web for All

Nearly two billion people are living with a disability—yet 96% of the top 1 million websites aren’t accessible. And in critical industries like government, news, and ecommerce, for instance, 70% of websites are inaccessible to vision-impaired users.

At a fundamental level, if you want to reach as much of your audience as possible, give all users equal opportunity to visit and perform tasks on your website, and comply with accessibility regulations, meaningful accessibility is non-negotiable.

As Annie Jean-Baptiste, author and Director of Products for All at Google, noted, “Build for everyone, with everyone.”

Does your website platform have the right tools to help you build for everyone and meet accessibility requirements? Or have you had to develop cumbersome, custom, even expensive workarounds that are hard to manage?

The right website platform will:

Prioritize accessibility features. Built-in tools like color contrast, keyboard navigation support, and alternative text generators for images make accessibility easier to achieve. Additional elements include screen reader compatibility and resizable text.
Check accessibility for you. Verify your website’s compliance with different standards like WCAG and WAI-ARIA with the platform itself. WCAG includes many broad recommendations for helping make your websites more accessible, while WAI-ARIA publishes definitions and technical documents to help implement website accessibility.
Help scale accessibility. You should be able to create accessible templates and components to maintain consistency throughout your website. Accessible templates and components decrease time to market and expand your audience sooner.
Be accessible itself. Your website platform should accommodate developers with accessibility needs too. This widens your potential talent pool and also increases fairness and inclusion.

Meaningful accessibility places accessibility at the center of your thinking when designing and building your website, which isn’t a possibility if you’re stuck with the wrong platform.

Scale Your Business—Not Just Your Website

If you haven’t figured out the recipe for digital agility with your website platform, your organization will have trouble growing.

Empower Business Teams Alongside IT with Low-Code

Can your website software handle the challenges of a rapidly evolving market in order to scale effectively?

If you have a beautiful but static website that requires an MIT degree and ten years of coding experience to know how to update, you’re limited in how you can respond to changing market conditions and the changes of your business itself.

As we mentioned before, website development platforms like CMSes with low-code tools enable business users to do more than just create and edit content. Some even allow you to create new sites and applications without code. With more people in your business able to take on what used to be IT-exclusive tasks, you save time and improve internal efficiency.

Two Practical Examples

A telecom provider launches a hyper-local campaign for a new fiber rollout in a specific region. With low-code, the provider’s regional marketing team could build a dedicated campaign microsite.
A manufacturer wants to create and integrate a parts request app into their website that connects with inventory and supply chain systems. With the right technology, the manufacturer could build this app with minimal IT involvement.

Add Commerce and Self-Service to Think Beyond a Simple Website Experience

The example we just used may require the integration of additional commerce capabilities, including a parts catalog, real-time inventory checks, automated purchase order generation upon review, and customer notifications for order and shipment dates. Website builders usually lack built-in commerce, a limitation that becomes apparent as digital experience needs grow. These tools will require you to add additional software that may not integrate smoothly.

Your customers will also need support further along their journey, like self-service options that allow them to act independently when logging in. These authentication experiences can become complex in ways that most website development platforms struggle to handle without costly customizations.

If you want a single platform with a wide range of out-of-the-box capabilities to build your websites and fulfill other digital experience needs as your business grows, look into a Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

How DXPs Help You Consolidate Your Tech Stack

A DXP is software, often targeted to enterprises, that combines the functionality of multiple products or tools into one platform to create user journeys with interactive, engaging, and useful content at scale. As digital channels became the main method of communication for most organizations and as users gained an appetite for superior digital experiences, DXPs have risen in popularity.

3 Origin Stories of the Modern DXP

Most DXPs started as a different, more basic technology like a CMS, portal, or commerce tool.

CMSes	Portals	Commerce
Tend to focus on marketing and agencies	Known for focusing on long-term customer health through solutions like customer portals	Most common in the retail industry with inventory and shop management and payment integrations
Concerned with the beginning of the buyer’s journey	Strong integration capabilities	Most common in the retail industry with inventory and shop management and payment integrations

Today, DXPs are often equipped with analytics to understand and optimize the user experience. On the operational side, a DXP can help encourage collaboration among multiple departments like marketing, IT, design, and sales in digital experience creation.

A great DXP will empower you to be flexible and agile in creating truly customer-centric experiences. DXPs go far beyond the traditional CMS; they enable the building of smooth, personalized journeys across websites, portals, and other online and offline touchpoints.

Don’t Settle for a Lackluster Enterprise Website

Your website can’t be an afterthought in your digital marketing strategy. Enterprise websites that act as gateways to critical services must prioritize security, accessibility, and scalability, as these elements are crucial for organizations that want to protect data, reach all users, and support growth.

Geoff Cubitt, CEO of Isobar US, framed it this way: “Companies that invest more in digital transformation actually outperform their peers over time.” Strategic investments in digital strategy and the right technologies are critical to the long-term health and success of your business.

Are you interested in comparing website technologies? Read how headless CMSes, DXPs, and Liferay DXP stack up against one another in seven common use cases.

As one of the most flexible DXPs in the market, Liferay DXP gives you the tools you need to build the websites you envision — and more. Explore further here.

Last updated July 31, 2025.

What Exactly Is Modern Application Development in Liferay?

2025-05-29T21:11:30Z

A New Development Paradigm

These days, developing in Liferay DXP looks very different from even just a few years ago. Plugins, for instance, used to be the best thing since Windows 95. (In fact, we’ve already waxed poetic about the magic and pitfalls of plugins.)

Now, the landscape has shifted in favor of more sustainable solution-building. That means leveraging and prioritizing the full breadth of Liferay DXP’s out-of-the-box capabilities and 300+ features. If you absolutely can’t cover your use case OOTB, explore Client Extensions. Client Extensions at a basic level are services used outside of the product in a way that doesn’t interfere with the core.

Plugins have become the last resort of development. And even then, we recommend following best practices to make sure you can remove your plugin later with either a client extension or OOTB capability. And if you really need to go the plugin route, the best place to look is Liferay Marketplace.

Just because development looks different doesn’t mean the old approach is wrong—there are still certain cases where we’d recommend it. For the majority of our customers and partners, however, the current way of developing that prioritizes easier upgrades and future-proofing is the best fit.

Rather than emphasizing a dichotomy of right/wrong, the term “modern application development” highlights just how much developing on Liferay has evolved over the years, especially with the move to quarterly releases.

So what does this look like in practice?

Major Development Shifts

Below, you’ll find a few examples of what development used to look like versus now.

10 Best Practices for Developing Today with Liferay DXP

Now you have a basic framework for understanding what modern application development is and isn’t in Liferay.

Next, we’ll cover ten best practices.

1. Follow existing best practices

Your deployment method—Liferay SaaS, Liferay PaaS, or Self-Hosted—doesn’t matter when we’re talking about best practices, since the primary business value of Liferay-based solutions comes from the core Liferay DXP product.

The most important best practice? Start building your solution with the features and functionality available out of the box. Liferay DXP has a long list of features you may not even be aware of, and we’re always adding new ones. Make sure you keep up with what’s new—and don’t be afraid to find creative ways of solving your use cases.

2. Equip your own internal teams

Your teams should have the right tools and processes to be successful. Even if you’re managing custom code outside of Liferay DXP, as with the Liferay SaaS deployment option, you still need to think about the developer experience:

Liferay Workspace should be your first stop to help you manage and organize your Client Extensions.
Blade CLI is where you’ll manage local servers, build deployable artifacts, and handle local deployment.
Liferay Cloud CLI, for Liferay PaaS or Liferay SaaS deployment methods, interacts with Liferay DXP’s cloud resources.

3. Properly organize and package your code

The way you organize your code has both short and long-term ramifications:

Short term. Code organization has a direct impact on the resources your solution is consuming. For instance, if your deployment method is Liferay SaaS, CPU and Memory vary based on your subscription and subscription add-ons.
- Example: You have three different applications that include object actions or CRON actions, implemented as Spring Boot microservices. If you packaged these as three different Client Extensions, this means you would be running three different Spring Boot servers, each taking up precious CPU and Memory with duplicated overhead. Putting all three into a single Client Extension, however, would reduce your usage to one Spring Boot server.
Long term. Code organization also impacts maintenance as well as how easy it is for a new developer or implementation partner to understand your setup.
- Example: Remember those three applications? Maybe they were built and maintained for three different departments by three different development teams or even three different implementation partners. In this case, how difficult would it be to handle the possible conflicts that might arise from disparate teams working on the same Client Extension?

This is why you need to balance present and future considerations as well as any technical limitations of your specific Client Extensions.

4. Design your data models and APIs for performance

You can’t necessarily approach data modeling with Liferay Objects the same way you would when working with normalized data. Instead, you have to think about how you’re actually going to use and interact with data.

Because Headless APIs are the primary way you should be reading and updating data, think about the performance impact if you had to make multiple calls to retrieve related data from inside a complex normalized data structure as before.

In the past when you were running code inside Liferay, those calls came from “inside the house,” so multiple calls to different services to aggregate data didn’t have such a negative impact. Now, it’s like the calls are coming from outside the house, and each call needs to unlock the front door and show proper identification, so making multiple calls to different endpoints to assemble your data can lead to significant impact on your throughput.

5. Leverage batch processing

We mentioned that you’ll be interacting with Headless APIs a lot. If you’re not handling this interaction correctly, it becomes a bottleneck.

That’s where the Batch Framework and Batch Endpoints come in for scalability. Remember all those calls from outside the house, waiting in line? If you only have a single endpoint, this creates a major problem. With Batch Endpoints, however, you can create or update many data records via a single call. No more line!

6. Embrace the asynchronous patterns of microservices

In the Before Times when Liferay development was traditionally monolithic, we followed request-driven, synchronous patterns, and this worked well.

With Client Extensions, however, we’ve moved toward a microservice-based approach, which means embracing the asynchronous patterns that rule the microservices world.

Since this is a complete paradigm shift, you may need time to adjust. But, especially for a transactional application like a ticketing or reservation system with high expected volume, for example, you’ll reap the rewards many times over.

7. Use OAuth to manage security

Another vestige of the Before Times? You may have been comfortable accessing Liferay DXP’s service layer and permissions system directly.

That’s not the case anymore with Client Extensions. So, going back to the caller analogy, how can you show ID and get that door unlocked?

Create an OAuth application to access Liferay DXP’s resources securely, define the scope, and grant only the specific access that the external service requires. (You wouldn’t normally let your roof contractor use your master bathroom!)

Make sure you’re following the best practices for OAuth:

Restrict access token privileges to the minimum required for a specific application or use case.
Store your OAuth credentials securely.
Use Service Accounts for automated workflows and integrations.

8. Ensure portability by using External Reference Codes

If you’ve worked with Liferay entity ids before, you’ll need to learn to rely on External Reference Codes (ERCs) now. An ERC is an alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies entities across your entire solution and across multiple systems. The power of an ERC is that it tells you exactly what entity you’re working with, regardless of its origin or destination.

You can’t control an ERC when you’re importing data from an external system, but any entity created in Liferay DXP, though it generates an automatic value, can be changed. You’ll want to use business- or developer-friendly values to ensure your code and API usage is easier to understand.

9. Test early, test often, and test realistically

Don’t make testing an afterthought. Even from your initial solution conceptualization, plan how to test your application in a way that mimics the real-world experience and day-to-day wear-and-tear it will take.

For example, if you’re working in a distributed environment like Liferay SaaS, running your application locally for testing isn’t enough. Things may appear to work fine, but upon deployment, you’d probably discover, too late, unanticipated problems. This could impact your overall timeline as well as your performance.

10. Leverage your browser's computing power vs. server-side resources

In the past, developing with Liferay leaned on server-side processing. With front-end Client Extensions that provide support for technologies like React, Angular, and VueJS, you can move some of that processing to your browser. These technologies offer your users more immediate feedback and responsiveness while reducing your server load.

A New Frontier of Liferay Development

Gone are the wild west days of Liferay development. And although there are certain circumstances where you may want to harness the wild mustang of plugins, your default should be instead to turn to the reins and fences of modern application development.

Modern application development in Liferay DXP still gives you the opportunity to build creative, innovative solutions—just in a more sustainable way.

Ready to dive into Liferay development yourself? Start a Pre-Built Trial.

Behind the Code is a blog series featuring the insider expertise of Liferay gurus on topics like new technology trends, the latest and greatest feature updates, and more.

Author Bio: Jeff Handa is a Senior Manager of Solution Delivery and has worked at Liferay for almost two decades, with training and consulting experience across 18 countries. Jeff is passionate about helping customers understand how to get the most out of Liferay DXP’s out-of-the-box features and how to correctly extend the platform. In his spare time, Jeff enjoys spending time with family, woodworking, grilling, and mastering the art of beer brewing.

How Global Companies Are Defending Against DDoS Attacks

2025-05-29T20:31:13Z

Just a few weeks ago, the social media platform X suffered a massive DDoS attack, resulting in intermittent outages.

Although this was one of the first big DDoS attacks of 2025, it’s certainly not going to be the last.

What Is a DDoS Attack?

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is a malicious attempt to overwhelm the target’s infrastructure with a flood of traffic. Companies like Google, GitHub, and Cloudflare have all been targets of DDoS attacks.

According to Statistica, in the fourth quarter of 2024, around 512,000 DDoS attacks were registered worldwide. That figure had already increased from 274,000 incidents in the first quarter of 2023, and is only expected to further increase in 2025.

And as websites go down, each attack can cost organizations an average of $6,000 per minute.

Why the Increase in DDoS Attacks?

Several key factors are contributing to the dramatic increase and spikes in DDoS attacks:

Rising geopolitical tensions. As a way to attack other nations and groups, DDoS attacks have been used to take down energy grids, transportation systems, and healthcare networks.
Growth of IoT devices. The increase in new technologies, like IoT devices, has given more opportunities and attack surfaces for cybercriminals. Now, cybercriminals can exploit poorly secured IoT devices to fuel larger botnets, a network of computers infected by malware that are under the control of a single attacking party.
Ransom attacks. To demand ransom payments, adversaries often attack and take down websites with DDoS attacks. Cloudflare estimates that 9-19% of DDoS attacks are financially motivated.

How to Protect Against DDoS Attacks?

DDoS attacks show no signs of stopping. If anything, experts predict that both the frequency and sophistication of DDoS attacks will increase in the coming years. So what can you do to help protect against these attacks?

Leverage AI/ML tools. Machine Learning (ML) can help identify attack patterns much faster than a human could and block malicious IP addresses before an attack brings your website down.
Use various fingerprinting techniques. By identifying and blocking botnets early, most attacks can be mitigated.
Block IP addresses. Use rate limiting, whitelisting, and threat intelligence tools to block known attacker IPs.
Implement a web application firewall (WAF). WAFs help block attacks using customizable policies to filter, inspect, and block malicious traffic.
Monitor threats in real-time. Log monitoring can help pinpoint potential threats by analyzing traffic and any unusual activities. However, this requires a dedicated team to regularly monitor deployments. Alternatively, you can look for an external expert team so you can offload these tasks.

DDoS Protection in Action

DDoS attacks aren’t just a concern for large social media companies—every company, including yours, needs to be prepared.

For example, a company in Brazil was targeted by a sophisticated botnet attack that occurred in multiple waves. This company received 360 million requests, and at the peak, they had 14.8 million requests coming in a minute. With ML, the company was able to identify a blocking rule in under two minutes after the first request came through.

Similarly, a critical infrastructure provider was attacked with more than two million requests per second, sending close to a billion requests in total. By blocking the fingerprints of the botnet, they were able to mitigate the attacks well before any damage could be done.

In the past, a simple rate limit and fingerprint blocking may have been sufficient to prevent any attack. But that’s typically no longer the case. In 2025, we’re seeing attackers change tools, tactics, and botnets several times within a single attack, sometimes in less than 10 minutes. You have to be strategic with your cybersecurity strategy to defend against these increasingly sophisticated attacks.

Secure Your Solutions with Liferay

In the examples above, those companies were able to defend against DDoS attacks because their solutions were built with Liferay DXP. With a complete, flexible digital experience platform, these companies created the solutions they envisioned on an incredibly secure platform.

For over two decades, Liferay has placed security, compliance, and data protection at the core of our product, offerings, and operations. Because of our expertise and emphasis on security, we’ve provided trusted solutions to industries where security is paramount, like finance, government, and healthcare.

Additionally, because of Liferay’s partnership with Google Cloud, our customers can take advantage of Google’s world-class secure infrastructure and technology with our Liferay’s deployments: Liferay PaaS or Liferay SaaS. This partnership helps improve web traffic coming from ISP networks, providing a sophisticated form of DDoS protection, CDN, load balancing, and WAF.

With Liferay SaaS specifically, customers can offload data security and management to the Liferay team. Our SaaS offering provides features only available with SaaS, including:

AI-powered DDoS prevention and WAF to thwart cyber-terrorists.
Threat intelligence rules deployed to block known adversaries.
Monitoring incident management and security operations team available 24/7.
Vulnerability monitoring and fixes to ensure attackers don’t get a foothold.

These features, including premium DDoS protection, are now also offered to Liferay PaaS customers through our Premium Security add-on subscription.

Don't Wait to Secure Your Solutions

You can’t afford to wait until the next DDoS attack hits. See how Liferay can help secure your digital solutions here.

Agentic AI: What's Next in AI

2025-08-19T16:28:14Z

Note: This article was last updated on 8/19/2025.

Key Takeaways:

Agentic AI, the next progression in AI, has the autonomy to make decisions and take actions on its own.
Agentic AI will be able to help automate workflows, serve customers more effectively, and make informed decisions.
But agentic AI will present its own challenges with security, governance, and lack of AI-ready data.

For the past few years, generative AI has been the buzzword. But now, as technology has progressed, a new evolution has arrived: agentic AI.

What Is Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has experienced remarkable growth over the past decade, driven by breakthroughs in machine learning, natural language processing, and other advanced technologies. At the heart of this evolution is agentic AI, which can operate independently and handle complex tasks with minimal human intervention.

These agentic AI systems enable organizations to:

Tackle complex tasks and perform tasks autonomously
Execute decisions
Automate routine processes, all without the need for constant human oversight.

As agentic AI continues to mature, its ability to operate independently and adapt to new challenges is setting the stage for a new era in artificial intelligence.

Generative AI vs. Agentic AI Capabilities

While both agentic AI systems and generative AI represent significant advancements in artificial intelligence, they serve distinct purposes.

Generative AI is designed for content creation— generating original content in response to user prompts—by leveraging large language models and deep learning techniques. This technology excels at generating personalized content and enhancing creative workflows.

In contrast, agentic AI operates independently, executing actions and making decisions without human intervention. Agentic AI systems use machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to analyze data, recognize patterns, and make data-driven decisions in real time. Agentic AI is particularly effective at analyzing and solving complex problems across various industries, enabling organizations to address challenging and multifaceted issues that would otherwise require significant human expertise.

For example, agentic AI can automate customer service inquiries by understanding user intent and resolving issues independently, while generative AI can craft tailored responses or marketing materials. By combining the strengths of both, organizations can deliver seamless customer experiences and automate complex business processes more effectively.

According to research from Gartner, by 2028, 33% of enterprise software applications will include agentic AI, up from less than 1% in 2024. Gartner suggests this increase will mean 15% of day-to-day work decisions can be made autonomously.

What's the Difference Between Agentic AI and AI Agents?

AI agents are designed to perform specific tasks within a controlled or predefined environment. These systems are rule-based, focusing on repetitive, well-defined tasks. Think of customer service bots or automated scheduling assistants.

On the other hand, agentic AI refers to systems that act independently and exhibit autonomy in their decision-making process. These AI models can perceive their environment, analyze that data, make decisions, and adapt over time. For example, self-driving cars leverage agentic AI to analyze its surroundings to make safe and accurate driving decisions.

How Is Agentic AI Used?

AI agency is still somewhat limited at the moment. However, companies are innovating and developing agentic AI technology towards greater flexibility and adaptability. Agentic AI is now being used in a variety of AI applications, from content creation and data analysis to predictive analytics and customer service, demonstrating its versatility and integration capabilities. We’ve already mentioned self-driving cars. Agentic AI can also be leveraged to:

Agentic AI Use Case

How it Boosts Agility and Efficiency

Real-World Example

Automate workflows

Agentic AI can help manage business processes and automate complex tasks, including complex workflows and routine tasks, independently without needing human intervention. This automation streamlines operations and boosts employee productivity.

A logistics company can use agentic AI to automatically adjust delivery routes based on real-time traffic conditions.

Serve customers more effectively

AI agents or chatbots can help customers with predefined answers, but are ultimately limited. If a complicated issue arises, it often needs to be escalated to a human representative.

In contrast, an agentic AI model can better understand the customer’s emotion and intent, analyze customer data for hyper-personalized experiences, and suggest steps to resolve their issue, providing more personalized and proactive service while also freeing representatives to handle more strategic tasks.

If a customer reports a missing order to a retailer, agentic AI can resolve the issue by verifying the order, contacting the shipping courier, and sending the customer an update.

Make informed decisions

Because agentic AI models are able to process vast amounts of real world data, including real time data, they can quickly recognize patterns, identify outliers, utilize predictive analytics, and handle complex scenarios to make decisions. This use of real world data improves the accuracy and personalization of AI-driven insights.

In healthcare, AI technology streamlines administrative tasks and enhances patient care. Healthcare providers can leverage agentic AI to monitor a patient’s habits, medication, and history to identify potential health issues. Integrating agentic AI into smart healthcare devices, such as smart inhalers, enhances real-time data collection and patient monitoring, enabling more proactive healthcare interventions.

Optimize supply chain operations

Agentic AI systems can help analyze historical data to forecast demand, enable predictive maintenance, and improve inventory levels by automatically adjusting orders. By seamlessly integrating with diverse data platforms and systems, agentic AI further enhances operational efficiency.

A manufacturer can use agentic AI to monitor its supply chain and automatically reduce the purchasing of specific parts when the associated product is not selling as much.

How Does Agentic AI Work?

Agentic AI models typically follow a four-step process for problem-solving:

Perceive. Gather and process data from relevant sources.
Reason. Understand tasks and generate solutions, usually through a large language model (LLM.)
Act. Execute those tasks by connecting with external systems through APIs.
Learn. Improve through a continuous feedback loop to drive more intelligent performance and greater accuracy over time.

AI Systems and Infrastructure

The success of any AI-powered application relies heavily on robust AI systems and infrastructure. For agentic AI systems to function effectively, they require a solid foundation that supports continuous learning, advanced natural language processing, and sophisticated knowledge representation. Leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and specialized models, such as large language models, allows AI agents to gather data, process information, and execute tasks efficiently. Seamless integration with external tools and content management systems further enhances the capabilities of these AI systems, enabling them to fit smoothly into existing business workflows. By supporting continuous learning and knowledge sharing, modern AI infrastructure empowers agentic AI to deliver intelligent, adaptive solutions that keep pace with evolving business needs.

Challenges with Agentic AI

As with all AI implementations, the evolution to agentic AI presents its own challenges:

Security vulnerabilities. As AI models continue to evolve, security will be an ever present concern. Agentic AI can open the door to advanced cyberattacks, including smart malware, prompt injections, and malicious AI agents.
Limited AI oversight. Especially since agentic AI systems can operate autonomously, a robust data governance framework is crucial for guiding AI models and ensuring responsible data management that aligns with regulatory compliance and ethical considerations.
Lack of AI-ready data. In order to perform autonomously, agentic AI needs to process a lot of data. Data is the foundation of all AI, including agentic AI.

To take advantage of agentic AI, data must be prepped for AI use, which includes removing data silos, integrating disparate datasets, or future-proofing your data strategy. According to a recent Google survey, only 44% of respondents were confident in their organization’s data quality.

So how can you make your data ready to fuel agentic AI? Read this blog for the keys to unlocking AI success.

Preparing for Agentic AI

In 2025, research firm Forrester named agentic AI a top emerging technology for 2025. Analysts say that, “agentic AI is not just a step in the evolution of automation; it is a breakthrough capability that will become a competitive necessity.”

But in order to truly get the benefits of agentic AI, you’ll need to start strategizing how you can prep your data, infrastructure, and teams for agentic AI.

Ready to get started with AI? See how Liferay DXP provides out-of-the-box AI capabilities and the ability to integrate with other and emerging AI technologies.

How to Navigate Tariff Uncertainty in 2025

2025-05-29T20:33:16Z

With higher tariffs, changing trade policies, and rising geopolitical tensions, your organization has to be strategic about how to mitigate some of these challenges to ensure the viability of your supply chains this year.

Specifically, the increase in U.S. tariffs in 2025 will lead to significant supply chain disruptions. Because tariffs raise import costs, your company may be scrambling to adjust your logistics and sourcing strategies. You might see delays in product availability as importers reevaluate their relationships with suppliers and navigate new compliance requirements, which may add layers of complexity to the supply chain.

The Key to Survival in 2025: Agility

Maybe your company is racing to stockpile inventory or switching to a single-region strategy, whether nearshoring or working with a non-tariffed country. But these are not viable approaches for the long-term.

Tariffs, while significant, will not be the only disruption in the coming year. You must look to the key to resilience that will help you navigate through future disruptions as well: agility.

Here are four ways to increase agility in your supply chains:

Optimize supply chain processes with AI

According to Fictiv’s 2024 State of Manufacturing Report, AI is increasingly being used in a broader range of applications, especially in manufacturing and supply chain management. 51% of manufacturing leaders are using AI for supply chain management, and 47% are using AI in product design. And we’ve really only scratched the surface of AI’s potential in optimizing supply chains.

Here are a few ways you can use AI to benefit your company:
- Track inventory levels, market trends, and customer demand to forecast and manage inventory more effectively. This means you can reduce the inventory you procure if demand isn’t present or increase inventory if demand is spiking, helping you save money and maximize profits.
- Analyze supplier performance, pricing, and market conditions to understand the risk of working with a particular supplier. You can also leverage AI to evaluate supplier performance and provide insights for improvement.
- Monitor and track performance of equipment and technology for predictive maintenance. AI can alert you when potential outages or failures might occur, minimizing downtime and increasing equipment longevity.
- Streamline workflows and automate routine tasks such as reviewing contracts and processing orders to enable a more agile and responsive supply chain.
  
  According to a recent study, companies have already seen impressive results with AI. 68% of supply chain organizations have integrated AI to enhance traceability and visibility within their operations. This technology boost has led to a 22% increase in operational efficiency.
  
  Adopting AI requires strategic and thoughtful execution, however. Learn the 3 keys to success with AI here.
Implement a multi-region strategy

Even though certain countries may be tariff-free, relying on a single region or supplier for key components and materials can still expose you to significant risk. That region may be subject to natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, or financial instability.

Instead, you need to diversify supplier networks across regions and industries to decrease dependency on any single supplier or market for when disruption occurs. A multi-sourcing strategy also creates healthy competition among suppliers, giving you more bargaining power to ask suppliers for discounts or product improvements.

Although multi-sourcing may reduce supplier risk and increase flexibility across the supply chain, it can complicate supplier relations, requiring greater resources to manage a growing supplier network.
Leverage low-code tools

Start automating tasks using low-code tools to empower non-technical users to improve processes without depending on IT. Currently, more than 2/3 of enterprises surveyed by KPMG have already adopted low-code into their supply chain technology.

For instance, you can enable non-technical users to create new pages for new products, build workflows to automate supply chain processes, and easily collect information from suppliers through forms, all without needing to code. And with your IT team saving more time, they can respond swiftly to urgent needs or changes, paving the way for a more agile and adaptable future.

Would your organization benefit from a low-code platform? Find out in this blog.
Collaborate with suppliers for greater benefits

Strong partnerships with suppliers is key to building a resilient supply chain. By collaborating with suppliers, your business can:
- Negotiate long-term contracts that will protect from price increases or any rising costs.
- Find other cost-saving opportunities, whether that’s modifying product specifications or streamlining logistics to reduce transportation and storage costs.
- Plan for future innovation, product development, and supply chain strategy together, bringing in supplier expertise and best practices to the table.

Suppliers can do more than just provide the materials or parts that you need—they can be critical to a thriving business and a resilient supply chain.

The Role of Robust Supplier Management

Although the strategies discussed above will help your business navigate future disruptions, ultimately what will help increase supply chain agility is the ability to gain a complete picture of your supply chain. A complete picture enables you to make proactive decisions to protect your business. With greater supply chain transparency comes a greater ability to anticipate and defend against disruptions.

Many organizations are still struggling to gain complete transparency into their supply chains. According to the GEODIS Supply Chain Worldwide Survey, only 6% of the 623 companies surveyed claimed to have achieved full supply chain visibility.

One way to not only gain supply chain transparency but also manage multi-region complexity and streamline communication and collaboration is by implementing a supplier portal.

A robust supplier portal can act as a single interface that brings together supplier onboarding, procurement, sourcing, settlement, and communication. A supplier portal can unify data from your ERP, PIM, CRM, EDI, AR/AP systems, and inventory management tools to act as a window into back-end systems, providing greater visibility into your supply chain.

Because data between these systems is connected, your organization can:

Reduce data inefficiencies, minimizing the chances for errors like duplicate payments due to duplicate master records.
Surface product and purchasing information through a single gateway.
Increase visibility into inventory to maximize inventory allocation and minimize overselling and stockouts.
Automate and digitize supplier processes like registration, onboarding, and order management.

A supplier portal not only gives visibility into what’s happening on the back-end but also gives suppliers an opportunity to communicate, resolve issues, and innovate with the team. Instead of siloed approaches like email or phone, you can consolidate all communication and collaboration within a supplier portal. Now teams can work more seamlessly with suppliers, responding to evolving business needs together with agility.

Building a Resilient Supply Chain

In a recent analysis, Gartner noted the potential impact of tariffs and suggested strategies for turning challenges into opportunities. “Enterprises should recognize tariff volatility as a multiyear, dynamic event,” said Suzie Petrusic, senior director analyst in Gartner’s Supply Chain practice. “Chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) who recognize this reality should continually evaluate opportunities to invest in strengthening their operations and attract outside investments from geopolitical actors and ecosystem partners.”

So although tariffs may be a challenge for the coming year, turn this challenge into an opportunity to find ways of increasing the agility of business operations so you can respond to future turbulence and change.

Start tackling these opportunities by learning how to build a supplier portal to increase back-end visibility and improve supplier communications here.

5 Supply Chain Trends Every Business Should Watch in 2025

2025-08-22T18:18:34Z

Note: This article was last updated August 22, 2025.

Key Takeaways:

Trends that will impact supply chain management in 2025 include key trends such as the rise of AI technology, supply chain automation, cybersecurity, increased global supply chain risks, and sustainability initiatives.
These top supply chain trends are not just trends, but an indication of how supply chain management is shifting. To build resilient and more effective supply chain operations, look to improving supplier relations as a start.

A new year means both fresh and recurring supply chain challenges for procurement teams and businesses. Since COVID-19, many businesses have encountered supply chain disruptions, impacting their operations and profits.

Especially in today’s volatile and hyper-connected global economy, the battleground for competitive advantage lies in supply chains. Rapidly changing market dynamics and the adoption of emerging technologies are driving both challenges and opportunities for supply chain leaders, who must embrace these factors to stay competitive. Martin Christopher, an expert in logistics and supply chain management, says, “the real competition is between supply chains, not companies”.

5 Supply Chain Trends for 2025

So how can businesses gain the competitive edge with their supply chains? The supply chain's ability to adapt to new trends and challenges will be essential for success in 2025.

Supply chain planning is a critical process for responding to these trends, enabling businesses to optimize demand forecasting, production scheduling, and inventory management. When evaluating which trends to prioritize, cost management should be a key consideration to ensure operational efficiency and financial sustainability. Additionally, market research can help businesses identify which trends are most relevant to their supply chain strategies by analyzing customer preferences and market dynamics.

Let’s take a closer look at these 5 emerging supply chain trends in 2025 and see how your business can take advantage of these trends to build strong supply chains:

1. The Dominance of AI

In the last two years, much of the chatter around AI has been about its ability to assist with personal tasks like answering questions or drafting documents. In 2025, AI will keep expanding beyond just personal use to improve and change supply chain operations. According to Statista, more than half of the global supply chain industry is expected to adopt AI this year. One report by EY states that at least 40% of supply chain organizations are already heavily investing in generative AI.

Wait, what exactly is AI again? Get the breakdown from our blog Demystifying AI — An Introduction for Enterprises.

AI can offer your business a tremendous opportunity to streamline many of your supply chain operations, sourcing, and procurement.

Here are just a few ways that AI can improve supplier management:

Accelerate supplier validation. Businesses can use AI to extract information from supplier registration forms and documents to analyze vendor data. This will help assess potential risk and evaluate whether this supplier is a good fit. AI algorithms can quickly flag any previous legal issues or identify any fraudulent behavior.
Streamline onboarding. The onboarding process itself can be accelerated using AI tools. For example, AI-virtual assistants can help walk suppliers through the onboarding process, even providing personalized content and next steps based on the supplier’s location, products, or supplier tier status.
Predict demand. AI-enabled forecasting can help forecast demand by providing predictive insights based on historical data, market trends, and inventory data.
Enable data-driven decision making. AI analytics empower supply chain teams to make informed, data-based decisions that optimize operations and reduce risks.
Support proactive decision making. Real-time AI insights give businesses the ability to anticipate and address issues before they escalate, improving overall supply chain management.
Empower logistics professionals. Logistics professionals can use AI tools to optimize logistics workflows, enhance decision-making, and drive greater efficiency and revenue.

What factors will actually make your AI strategy successful? Read about these 3 keys to
success with AI.

2. Automation that Accelerates Supply Chains

Along with AI, another key trend for 2025 will be automating manual tasks to accelerate supply chain operations. Today, only 1/4 of warehouses have some type of automation, but expect that number to increase this year.

While AI can help to automate processes, robotics, digital twins, and IoT will also play critical parts in increasing the speed of supply chains. Of course, the benefits of automation extend beyond just speed: by automating routine tasks, you can re-allocate resources towards more strategic activities, reduce labor costs, and increase operational efficiency.

Here are 3 easy ways to start digitizing supplier processes today.

3. The Importance of Cybersecurity

Ensuring strong security measures are in place will continue to be critical for 2025, especially as supply chains become increasingly digital. In 2024, supply chain attacks and IT outages showed that no infrastructure is totally immune to risk. Remember the CrowdStrike update that affected millions of systems and the XZ backdoor supply chain attacks?

Last year, the global average data breach cost was $4.88 million, a 10% increase from the previous year. Additionally, the number of data breaches increased by 200% between 2013 and 2022. These numbers are particularly concerning for procurement teams that handle sensitive information around supplier contracts and pricing.

To stay ahead of these threats, your team needs to explore advanced security technologies, evaluating how best to secure your data and processes. AI can be important here as well, identifying potential cyberattacks and monitoring real-time operations.

4. Increased Supply Chain Risk

Security breaches and cyber attacks are not the only risk to supply chains. Changing environment regulations, geopolitical tension, inflation, labor shortages, and upcoming trade laws and tariffs will all impact supply chain viability.

To mitigate these risks, you need to be prepared to evolve and adapt quickly, choosing to embrace agile technologies that empower your supply chains to be resilient against these changes.

Additionally, you’ll need greater visibility into your supply chains in order to know how to evolve and adapt. This will require real-time data to understand what’s going on and to identify areas for improvement.

5. ESG: From Compliance to Strategy

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements have already started putting immense demands on supply chain leaders and will only maintain that pressure. In fact, Blue Yonder’s 2024 Supply Chain Executive Survey revealed that 44% of organizations increased sustainability initiatives in the past year. In 2025, we expect this percentage to increase even more. Your business will need to prioritize sustainability efforts and practice transparency around your efforts to meet ESG regulations.

You can turn these challenges into opportunities for stronger business performance and greater alignment with customer demands as you make supply chain sustainability a core part of your business. You will need to prioritize sustainability efforts and practice transparency around your efforts to meet ESG regulations. Adopting a circular economy approach is increasingly important for reducing waste, promoting recycling, and supporting product lifecycle management as part of your environmental initiatives. You can turn these challenges into opportunities for stronger business performance and greater alignment with customer demands as you make supply chain sustainability a core part of your business.

For example, reducing Scope 3 emissions, the carbon footprint generated from supply chain activities, will be a key focus for many businesses this year. Measuring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions is essential for meeting regulatory requirements and achieving corporate climate goals. To create a more sustainable supply chain, data is crucial to identifying areas of high environmental impact and finding suppliers who can provide sustainable and cost-effective materials.

Implementing Supply Chain Trends and Technologies

Adopting the latest supply chain trends and technologies requires more than just investment—it demands a deep understanding of your organization’s current capabilities and a clear strategy for change. Supply chain professionals should assess readiness for innovations like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT), and develop a roadmap for implementation. This process involves investing in workforce training, exploring new business models, and fostering a culture of supply chain innovation and experimentation. By embracing emerging trends and technologies, companies can enhance supply chain visibility, boost operational efficiency, and secure a competitive advantage in a dynamic marketplace. Ultimately, successful implementation hinges on a willingness to adapt and a commitment to continuous improvement.

Building Supply Chain Resilience in 2025 and Beyond

By 2025, it’s not enough to be reactive: your supply chain must become agile and adaptive in order to survive. Rather than waiting for the next crisis to hit, you need to build your supply chains to protect and ensure your future.

One way to start is by strengthening your supplier relationships. A more robust and transparent supplier network will help accelerate your supply chains, and you can optimize your supplier management with a supplier portal. Learn how to build an effective supplier portal here.

Looking Back and Looking Ahead: What’s Happening with Enablement at Liferay

2025-05-29T20:42:39Z

2024 was an exciting year for me at Liferay. I joined the Liferay Enablement team, an incredible group of professionals who I can confidently call Liferay rockstars. Under the leadership of the amazing Hanna Ilén, this team has inspired me every step of the way, and it's a privilege to be part of such a passionate, talented, and innovative group.

At Devcon 2024 in Budapest, Hanna shared some of the phenomenal achievements we made this year. Starting from scratch, in just a few weeks, we created a new course titled “Building Enterprise Websites with Liferay.” This course was designed to empower Liferay partners and personnel with timely, relevant, and practical training on Liferay’s latest capabilities. Delivered in a bootcamp format, this three-day course has reached a global audience:

25 sessions delivered in 12 countries/15 cities worldwide and 6 different languages
Attended by almost 900 practitioners - partners and Liferay employees, including developers, consultants, sales engineers, product people, engineers, and more eager to deepen their expertise

The training focused on building a website for a fictitious company, Clarity Vision Solutions, leveraging the wealth of Liferay's latest out-of-the-box-features and Low-Code/No-Code capabilities. Feedback from attendees has been overwhelmingly positive, with many expressing excitement that Liferay is investing in robust training once again. Here’s some specific feedback we received from some of the participants:

"This day, even if it’s covering familiar concepts, has already been great. It’s leagues ahead of the last training I took 6 years ago, and it is already helping me to understand concepts better than before." – US Partner
"A shout-out to Liferay’s Search capabilities! I didn’t realize how powerful the Search features are, I am very excited to apply this new knowledge in my work." – Brazilian Partner
"I am excited to talk to our customers, currently on 6.2, about moving to 7.4 and this new model." – French Partner
"The bootcamp provided helpful information for our broad range of students. We had beginners, who received an excellent overview of how Liferay works and how things should be done within the platform. Also our seasoned Liferay experts, who could challenge their views and experiences with you in a highly constructive and helpful way. Your expertise and enthusiasm made the sessions engaging and learning process both effective and fun." – German Partner

But that’s not all—this course is now available for free on learn.liferay.com. The course includes comprehensive materials, exercises, and an accompanying GitHub repository. This ensures that clients, partners, and the broader Liferay community can benefit from the training at their own pace.

In addition, we’ve also launched another key course: “Mastering Liferay Workspaces and Tooling”—a deep dive into development tools like Liferay Workspace, CLI, and IDEs. This course is also available on learn.liferay.com and is free for all.

Ready to see the power and flexibility of Liferay SaaS? Start your Pre-Built Guided Trial and begin building in minutes.

A Look Ahead: Roadmap for 2025

As we reflect on our 2024 milestones, we’re already hard at work on the roadmap for 2025. Here’s what we’re excited to deliver:

Mastering Data Modeling with Liferay Objects
Expanding on the Clarity example to showcase best practices for data persistence and access using Liferay Objects.
Mastering Liferay Client Extensions
Demonstrating how to utilize various Liferay Client Extensions in real-world implementations like Clarity.
Mastering Liferay Design Elements
Covering custom Fragments, Stylebooks, Templates, and Frontend Client Extensions to build rich, dynamic UIs.
Mastering Liferay’s Headless API
Teaching how to develop and consume Liferay Headless APIs for integrations and external applications.

These new courses will roll out gradually during the coming months, with the first expected already in early January - if not sooner.

A Call to Action

If you’re a Liferay developer, partner, or client, now is the perfect time to dive into the free courses available on learn.liferay.com. These courses aim to equip you with best practices to maximize your investment in Liferay and accelerate your implementation timelines. Even though the courses are free, we encourage you to create an account and sign in so you can track your progress, collect course badges, and more.

Stay tuned for the new courses as they launch, and join us on this journey of learning and innovation. Together, we can unlock the full potential of Liferay, streamline implementations, and bring your ideas to market faster than ever before!

About the Author: Dave Nebinger is a Lead Solution Architect with Liferay, with over 9 years of experience working for Liferay and over 18 years of experience with Liferay technology and the Liferay Community.

Behind the Code is a blog series featuring the insider expertise of Liferay gurus on topics like new technology trends, the latest and greatest feature updates, and more.

The State of the Art in Shipping: A Seamless Experience for Customers and Businesses

2025-05-29T21:02:10Z

When it comes to skyrocketing customer expectations, the transport and logistics sector is no exception. Gone are the days of tiresome phone calls, endless email chains, and a lack of transparency in the shipping process. Instead, a user-friendly, efficient, and seamless online freight booking and management experience is no longer a perk – it's a massive competitive differentiator.

What Do Customers Expect from a State-of-the-Art Shipping Experience?

Customers in the transport and logistics industry crave convenience and control. They expect an easy-to-use online platform that allows them to:

Obtain instant quotes. No more waiting for quotes via email. Customers expect real-time pricing based on their specific shipment details.
Book shipments easily. The booking process should be intuitive and straightforward, allowing for quick booking with minimal data entry.
Track shipments in real-time. Customers want constant visibility into the location and status of their shipments, from pick-up to delivery.
Manage documentation electronically. Eliminate the hassle of paper trails. Uploading and accessing shipping documents electronically saves time and increases accuracy by reducing errors.
Access self-service options. Empower customers to manage their accounts, update shipment details, and access frequently asked questions (FAQs) through a self-service portal.
Receive proactive communication. Timely updates on shipment status, potential delays, and any other relevant information keep customers informed and alleviate anxiety.

Benefits of a State-of-the-Art Shipping Experience for Transport and Logistics Companies

While a seamless shipping experience is crucial for customer satisfaction and loyalty, it also offers significant benefits for transport and logistics companies themselves. Here are just a few benefits:

Increased Efficiency: Online booking and management systems automate manual tasks, freeing up valuable staff time for more strategic activities.
Reduced Costs: Streamlining processes lowers administrative costs associated with manual booking and communication.
Improved Customer Satisfaction: A great customer experience and an efficient customer journey translates to increased loyalty and repeat business.
Enhanced Data Collection and Analytics: Digital platforms can collect valuable data on customer behavior and shipment trends, enabling data-driven decision-making and service improvements.
Competitive Advantage: Businesses that offer a state-of-the-art shipping experience stand out in a crowded market, attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.

Yusen Vantage Focus-Book: A Practical Example of Innovation

A prime example of a company leading the way in the digital transformation of the shipping industry is Yusen Logistics. Founded in 1955, Yusen Logistics is a global supply chain logistics company that provides ocean and air freight forwarding, warehousing, distribution services, and supply chain management. Yusen’s recently launched digital booking platform, “Yusen Vantage Focus-Book” (YVF Book) introduces a streamlined approach for customers managing their freight shipments. Based on Liferay DXP and deployed through Liferay’s SaaS offering, the platform embodies a state-of-the-art shipping and logistics experience. Let's take a look at some of YVF Book’s capabilities and features:

Digitalized Booking Experience: With just a few clicks, customers can effortlessly book air and ocean freight forwarding services through the platform, streamlining the process and eliminating manual paperwork.
Online Shipping Instructions Submission: By automatically transferring booking data directly into the shipping instruction form, manual input is eliminated. This feature streamlines the process, ensuring a more efficient and hassle-free experience in managing shipping instruction.
Centralized Management: No matter where they are, customers can review and manage all documents and information on their shipments in one centralized location. Acting as an integrated logistics hub, the platform provides a comprehensive overview at a glance.
Enhanced Real-Time Visibility: YVF Book gives customers full control over their logistics operations by providing complete visibility into the shipping process. Customers can track shipments in real-time and access live status updates and milestone tracking, ensuring they are well-informed throughout the shipment journey.
Effective Communication: The platform facilitates effective communication by bringing together all stakeholders, minimizing delays, and ensuring smooth collaboration throughout the shipping process.

This state-of-the-art shipping experience is a great practical example of the transformative power of digital solutions in the transport and logistics industry: embracing innovation and prioritizing a seamless shipping experience can not only improve customer satisfaction and loyalty but also help you gain a significant competitive advantage.

The Road Ahead

As technology continues to evolve, the shipping experience will undoubtedly become even more sophisticated. Advancements in areas like artificial intelligence (AI) for real-time route optimization as well as the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) devices for real-time shipment condition monitoring are only two examples of how future shipping journeys will not only be efficient, but also entirely transparent and predictable for both businesses and their customers.

Discover how you can empower customers and shippers, optimize carrier and partner relationships, and increase employee productivity with Liferay DXP. Learn more about our solutions for the Transport and Logistics sector.

The Future of B2B Commerce in 2030

2025-05-29T21:01:13Z

Technology has already radically shifted B2B commerce experiences into ones that are more personal and easier to access.

Emerging trends like AI-driven analytics, blockchain-based supply chains, and hyper-personalized buyer journeys are not just disrupting the present but setting the stage for unprecedented innovation.

By 2030 and beyond, businesses will likely navigate a fully-digitized ecosystem where predictive insights, autonomous processes, and augmented reality-enhanced decision-making become integral to the B2B landscape.

So, looking ahead, what can you expect from B2B Commerce?

B2B Commerce Will Be Smart

AI will continue to be a hot topic, especially in B2B commerce. According to Gartner, the number of businesses adopting AI has grown by 270% in the past four years.

AI will help change how businesses operate and perform:

AI can improve inventory accuracy by up to 95%. Companies worldwide lose $300 billion in annual revenue because of poor inventory management.
79% of marketers stated that integrating AI into marketing and sales has increased business revenue.

Using AI will extend far beyond operational and performance improvements. AI can help B2B companies better understand and serve their customers by:

Generating content and experiences tailored to individual customers. With AI, businesses can present personalized product recommendations, offers, and content that are more likely to drive conversions.
Enhancing privacy and security by identifying the possibility of fraud and detecting suspicious purchases quickly.
Predicting demand to help optimize inventory levels and minimize excess.
Enabling new business models, such as voice commerce, social commerce, and experiential commerce to provide customers with more seamless purchasing experiences.

Read this blog to learn how to implement AI successfully.

B2B Commerce Will Be Connected

The line between physical and digital channels will become more and more blurred. In fact, the hybrid of the digital and physical is now called “phygital.” Although this buzzword is more common for B2C retail spaces, it will become increasingly important in the B2B space as well.

Even though B2B commerce involves more touchpoints and more complexity than B2C purchasing, B2B customers still expect B2C-like experiences.

For this reason, “phygital” commerce will become important to help bridge the gap between B2B and B2C commerce experiences.

What can phygital look like for B2B? Let’s say your business is going to a trade show or exhibition:

Set up VR or AR booths for more interactive demos and hands-on experience.
Add virtual assistants to your booths to guide attendees, giving them personalized pitches and information.
Allow visitors to see your catalog on a tablet or screen and select products that they’re interested in. Using this information, your sales rep can follow up with more personalized demos and content, helping attendees feel like your company understands their needs.

Phygital is still relatively new, but is set to play a major role in the B2B space. By leveraging phygital, B2B commerce will provide more deeper and personal experiences for customers.

B2B Commerce Will Expand

B2B organizations are expanding into B2B2X business models, allowing them to serve wider audiences and increase revenue streams. In fact, sales for B2B2C grew 25% faster than traditional B2B sales.

The shift in buyer behavior and digital platforms has made B2B2C possible, allowing for scalability. B2B2C has proven extremely successful in the Telecom, Fintech, and Manufacturing industries in particular.

For the future, however, B2B2C will need to have these things in place to maintain and increase success:

Integrated channels to communicate between partners, wholesalers, retailers, and end customers.
Real-time data on orders, inventory, pricing, and customer information so that all channels are aligned.
Scalable technology that can handle both B2B and B2C business models and can grow to expand into new business verticals.

Although the B2B2C model can be beneficial for both your business and your customers, you’ll need a robust commerce platform to help you meet complex needs adequately.

The New Era of B2B Commerce

The future of B2B commerce, while brimming with possibilities, will require your business to think carefully about your strategy and implementation plan.

Reach this future of B2B commerce with a commerce platform that brings powerful commerce capabilities on a scalable digital experience platform: Liferay DXP.

Learn more about Liferay DXP's Commerce capabilities here.

Partner Pulse: Insights on Digital Innovation in the CEE Region

2025-05-29T20:48:08Z

Central and Eastern Europe is abuzz with digital transformation. For this first edition of our new interview series, Partner Pulse, we've asked Liferay partners bitlife and Webtown about their take on the trends shaping the region's businesses. From the rise of AI and cloud computing to the challenges of legacy systems and data security, these Liferay partners offer unique insights into the opportunities and hurdles facing companies today.

Which current digital transformation trends in Central Eastern Europe are most likely to deliver actual value to businesses?

Webtown: AI, AI, AI... Everyone is looking at and talking about AI. As I see it, it has huge potential, but we're still at the beginning of the journey. It will be very effective in supporting and even improving business processes. But the toolset still has room for improvement, and companies still have to learn that there is value beyond chatbots and intelligent content generation. However, it's already clear that AI can only work well if business processes and the software that supports them are well-aligned, and the connection between different software is well-designed. So, the second key focus we observe is integration... While automation is already a priority, driven by the need for efficiency, we anticipate even greater demand for it in the near future.

bitlife: In Central Eastern Europe, the digital transformation trends likely to deliver the most value to businesses include cloud computing, which improves flexibility, and scalability, and reduces operating costs, making businesses more agile. Additionally, AI and ML are being increasingly used to automate processes, analyze data, and personalize offers, leading to increased efficiency and improved customer experiences. Investing in cybersecurity is crucial to protect against the rising number of cyber threats and safeguard valuable business assets. Lastly, adopting remote and hybrid work models enhances employee satisfaction and productivity, contributing to a positive work environment.

How are businesses in your region leveraging digital experience technology to innovate and stay competitive?

bitlife: Businesses in our region are focusing on personalizing customer experiences, tailoring everything from product recommendations to website content. We're also seeing a big push toward omnichannel experiences, ensuring customers have a seamless journey across all channels. Finally, marketing automation is helping businesses streamline their efforts and deliver more targeted campaigns.

Webtown: It is difficult to give a good answer. We see that the concept of digital experience is becoming more widespread, with a growing number of organizations investing time, energy, and money to deliver a truly unified digital experience for their users. This is certainly a good sign. However, in many cases, especially in large enterprises, we see companies trying to build digital experiences on old, entrenched, inflexible, inefficient business processes, rather than allowing business processes to become more efficient based on how the market works and the needs of modern users.

Which industries in Central Eastern Europe are leading the way in digital transformation?

Webtown: Central Eastern Europe presents an interesting landscape of digital transformation. Notably, the financial sector has been an early adopter, improving efficiency despite old core systems by leveraging integration platforms. The media world experienced the most disruptive impact, with spectacular solutions changing consumer habits. Public services also saw significant development, with room for improvement in user experience but impressive growth in features. Further digitization of public services holds great potential for future development.

bitlife: In Central Eastern Europe, we see some exciting digital transformations across various sectors. Banking and financial services are leading the charge, with online banking and personalized financial solutions becoming the norm. E-commerce and retail are also flourishing, offering customers tailored shopping experiences and convenient delivery options. But it's the manufacturing industry that's truly captivating. Polish factories, in particular, are at the forefront of the digital revolution, embracing Industry 4.0 concepts like automation, IoT, and big data to optimize production and stay ahead of the curve.

What are the main challenges businesses in Central Eastern Europe face when undergoing digital transformation?

bitlife: From our perspective, businesses in Central Eastern Europe encounter a few key challenges when embarking on digital transformation. There's often resistance to change, stemming from ingrained organizational culture or outdated processes that hinder adoption. Additionally, securing sufficient budgets for digital transformation initiatives can be a struggle, hindering progress. Lastly, a lack of awareness regarding the potential benefits of digital transformation can lead to hesitation and missed opportunities.

Webtown: The region has a unique characteristic: it consists of several relatively small, but quite isolated economic systems. Alongside large international multinationals, there are also a few dozen local large companies, but most businesses are smaller in scale. For large companies, the approach might be simpler in theory, as they shape their digital presence on a global scale. Smaller businesses, however, often have underdeveloped processes that need to be served by digital solutions, and they tend to build these solutions based on patterns observed in larger organizations. This approach doesn't always lead to instant success. Financial constraints are certainly strong, but developing digital maturity is also crucial. I believe these are not just regional but rather global characteristics. If the goal of digitalization is to improve efficiency and business outcomes, then the direction is good.

What opportunities do you see for your customers' growth and development in the digital space in your region?

Webtown: That’s difficult to answer. The tools and trends in the area of digitalization are rather global than regionally specific, and success depends on how well an organization adapts to them. However, I'm hopeful that economic recovery in regions impacted by COVID and political conflict will provide a significant boost to digital transformation efforts. This will create even more opportunities for growth and development for businesses in these areas.

bitlife: From our vantage point, there's a wave of opportunity sweeping across Central Eastern Europe for our customers in the digital space. We're seeing a surge of interest from industry players looking for comprehensive digital transformation solutions. The public sector is also stepping up its demand for advanced digital services. Additionally, the healthcare industry is undergoing a digital awakening, offering significant potential for growth. And with increased investment in digital infrastructure, the foundation is being laid for even more ambitious digital initiatives.

What role do technologies like AI, low-code, IoT, or blockchain play in the digital transformation journey of businesses in Central Eastern Europe?

bitlife: While AI and low-code may be the current buzzwords in the corporate world, it's actually startups - with their agility and focus on innovation - that are actively utilizing these technologies. Meanwhile, IoT and blockchain have matured beyond the hype, with significant implementations already seen in the energy and financial sectors respectively. It will be fascinating to witness how AI, low-code, and other trends evolve and shape the future of technology in the years to come.

Webtown: I believe that the more digitalization-savvy companies in the region have quite well recognized the value of the tools and solutions mentioned above. AI is increasingly being used to support customer service, data analysis, and even content generation. With low-code/no-code solutions, companies can speed up the development of simpler IT systems significantly. IoT might be gaining ground a bit more slowly in the region, but it has already spread nicely in sectors like manufacturing and logistics. As for blockchain, I’ve noticed that it's becoming a more prominent topic at IT conferences, although I have to admit I haven’t delved as deeply into this area as the others yet. :)

I feel that each of these technologies has its own experts, with strong professional competencies available to implement IT developments of any kind. I see this as being true across all the countries in the region.

Can you highlight a success story where a company in Central Eastern Europe successfully implemented a digital transformation strategy? What were the key factors that contributed to this success? And, if available, can you share some key success metrics?

bitlife: A standout success story in Central Eastern Europe is the Polish company Allegro, the region's largest e-commerce platform. They've truly embraced digital transformation, solidifying their market leadership.

Allegro's success is multifaceted. They've invested heavily in cutting-edge technologies, adopted an omnichannel approach with a strong customer focus, fostered strategic partnerships, and prioritized innovation and talent development.

The results are impressive. They've seen significant revenue growth, expanded their market share, and increased their user base considerably. Customer satisfaction is high, thanks to improved service and delivery. And their successful IPO in 2020 speaks volumes about investor confidence in their strategy and future potential. Allegro's story is a testament to the power of digital transformation done right.

Webtown: When I think of a success story in digital transformation, the Hungarian state healthcare system immediately comes to mind. The digital service infrastructure for healthcare had been in the works for a while, but the COVID pandemic accelerated its development. We were fortunate enough to contribute to several projects within this initiative, and our team is incredibly proud of the results. While there's always room for improvement, particularly in terms of user interfaces, the functionality and impact achieved are already impressive. It's a great example of how digital transformation can truly make a difference in people's lives.

Looking at the next 5 years, which specific technologies or trends do you believe will have the most significant impact on digital transformation in Central Eastern Europe? How can businesses prepare for the next wave of digital innovation?

Webtown: I'm sure that the rise of AI and automated processes will be of huge importance, but I think the biggest challenges of digitalization are in the areas of accessibility and data security. There is a lot of potential in the spread of cloud services, and there is a huge potential in web systems that can be more stable through flexible scalability and hosting. But if you look at large enterprise procurement, four out of ten still prefer on-premise systems. This is probably the biggest difference between the CEE region and the rest of the world, I think. Here, there is greater concern about data security, more people are afraid of being exposed to cloud providers. That’s why strengthening IT security is both a natural and very necessary requirement, but also a driver for better quality digital services in the future, because it can build confidence in the use of newer solutions.

bitlife: Over the next five years, I believe we'll witness the profound impact of AI and AI-as-a-Service, not just as buzzwords, but as integral tools transforming how businesses operate. The shift towards cloud and multi-cloud solutions will accelerate, providing the agility and scalability needed for future growth. Edge computing will also gain prominence, particularly in areas like energy management and sustainable development, where real-time data processing is critical.

Furthermore, low-code/no-code platforms will empower individuals across organizations to create applications, driving innovation beyond traditional IT departments. To prepare for these changes, businesses must prioritize investing in digital talent and skills while fostering a culture of flexibility and adaptability. By embracing these technologies and trends, businesses in Central Eastern Europe can position themselves at the forefront of the next wave of digital innovation.

Digital Experiences, Your Way

Build experiences that look and function the way you envision using the world’s most flexible DXP, Liferay DXP. See how you can build a customer portal, intranet, supplier portal, partner portal, and more, all on a single platform.

The Top 6 Trends That Will Shape the Student Experience in 2025

2025-05-29T21:02:19Z

78% of university students polled by KPMG said that the pandemic has changed their student experience expectations, and 75% believe that the “university of the future” won’t resemble today’s institutions. Does this reflect the experience of your own students?

The higher education industry is at a tipping point. In order to increase student enrollment and retention, consider these 6 emerging trends that will impact the student experience in the coming years.

6 Trends Shaping the Student Experience in 2025

1. "The University for Me"

After the pandemic took learning online, “one-size-fits-all” pre-recorded videos and lessons quickly resulted in frustration and reluctance to pay the high enrollment fees. In fact, higher education enrollment is only now experiencing growth following years of decline during the pandemic.

To combat this, focus on your students as individuals to show the value of pursuing a four-year degree. No longer will it be sufficient to give all students the same kind of education. Instead, students want the flexibility to study when, where, and how they want.

By departing from the rigid frameworks of traditional education, delivering adaptive learning can provide dynamic and personalized approaches that evolve according to the learner’s strengths, weaknesses, and preferred learning styles.

To make adaptive learning a reality, you can leverage AI to:

Deliver tailored learning paths that adjust to each student’s needs and progress. By analyzing data, AI algorithms can identify which instructional methods are most effective for each student and what type of content is best suited for the student’s needs. This personalization can help boost engagement and retention.
Make real-time adjustments to the learning experience based on the student’s performance. For example, more specific materials and resources can be provided if a student is struggling with a particular concept.
Provide instant feedback and support to students through an AI-enabled chatbot, emulating one-on-one tutoring.
Gamify the learning process to keep students motivated and engaged.

Adaptive learning is already being leveraged to help students in universities around the world. According to a study conducted by the University of Illinois, students using personalized learning technology demonstrated an average improvement of 8-11% in their learning outcomes compared to students using traditional instructional methods. And a study conducted by EdTech Review found that students using personalized learning technology demonstrated a retention rate that was 15-20% higher compared to students using traditional instructional methods.

2. A Truly Hybrid Campus

Today’s students expect a seamless, integrated experience on-campus and online. A hybrid university is not just a compromise between traditional and online learning, but must be the new paradigm to leverage the strengths of both adaptive, personalized online learning and face-to-face experiences to help students deeply connect with their community.

Undergraduates are more likely to choose a hybrid option, with 30.5% choosing to take both online and on-campus courses and 14.8% of graduate students opting for hybrid approaches.

Additionally, according to a survey conducted in 2023, of the college students who were able to choose a hybrid course, 70% of these students were satisfied with their course. Of the students who didn’t have a choice, however, only 49% were satisfied.

Learn more about what effective hybrid student experiences can look like here.

3. Digitization of All Student Processes

Even though learning may happen online, only 5% of higher education leaders say that their daily operations are digitized, according to Workday’s global survey of senior executives across different industries. This impacts all processes, including applications, enrollment, registration, and more, even reaching to teacher and staff processes around pay, benefits, and training.

This leaves students with jarring experiences; students might be able to log online to attend their classes but have to go in person to fill out an application for financial aid or use an outdated system to pay for classes.

Digitizing doesn’t just mean moving these processes online. You need to be able to deliver a seamless, unified experience from application to graduation to set up your students for success. Having a student portal that brings all these processes, resources, and tools together not only delivers a better student experience overall but also makes management easier.

4. Virtual and Augmented Technologies for More Interactive Learning

There's a tremendous opportunity to use virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies to support students. These tools can help increase student engagement and present knowledge in a way that’s more accessible and interactive. Studies show that AR improves motivation and increases attention by nearly a third. For example, medical students learning about surgical techniques can practice using AR before performing on actual patients.

Additionally, AR and VR extend outside the bounds of the classroom so that students from anywhere can get hands-on experience. Although cost and technical maintenance must be considered, AR and VR have the potential to play an increasingly important role in shaping the future of higher education.

5. The University of Tomorrow

The modern student is starting their university experience during a time when it is estimated that they will hold over 12 jobs in their lifetime. Employment experts say that the rapid change in employment and technical disruptions means that individuals need to become lifelong learners to prepare for multiple career changes. In fact, half of all workers' core skills will need to be updated every five years according to the World Economic Forum.

To better prepare students, you can shift towards micro or stackable credentials and short-term courses so that students can get a broader range of education and skills. Your institution is actually best placed to take advantage of this opportunity, as you can capture the student at the start of their tertiary education and undergraduate degree and continue to provide value throughout their career. By doing so, you provide the initial value expected of you as an educational institution as well as a pathway for future career pivots. This allows you to earn revenue from that student, not just over the first 3 to 4 years of their career, but potentially the next 30 to 50 years.

Learn more about how you can continue to serve students well past graduation by extending their lifetime value here.

6. A Culture of Wellness

Especially after the pandemic, the demand for mental health treatment on campus has increased. As a university leader, you need to think creatively as to how you can help your students, especially since counselors are inundated with higher caseloads.

In addition to telehealth and group therapy, you can connect students with a range of available services that don’t require them to wait for a counselor. For example, students could create their own wellness plans through their student portal, where they can get test-taking tips, access free seminars, or even connect with other students who may also be navigating the same issues.

It is especially necessary to train your staff and faculty to identify students in distress, given that a student may never physically step foot on campus. With remote and hybrid learning, many students only ever come into contact with their professors, so faculty members must be able to detect when a student is struggling in order to direct them to the right resources.

There’s a growing recognition of the importance of mental well-being and a commitment to providing students with the support they need to be successful. Ultimately, students are more than just a grade or a number, and the way you approach students’ mental health and wellbeing will impact how engaged and committed these students are towards their education.

Success Story: Keeping Up with Student Needs

Serving over 30,000 students across seven universities and a law school throughout Maine, the University of Maine System built a unified portal that helps students, faculty, and staff find the right resources more quickly. The MyCampus Portal continues to be a vital resource for students to enroll in classes, download important documents, and access critical tools for payment, benefits, and grades.

Meeting Student Expectations in 2025 and Beyond

The future of higher education lies in providing the experience that students want, whether that is through digital channels, hybrid classrooms, or innovative technologies. Ultimately, you need to look at how you can serve and equip your students better for the changing world ahead, ensuring your own relevance and value in the evolving digital landscape.

Discover how to empower your entire campus community – faculty, staff, students, and alumni – with enhanced digital services that streamline operations and optimize costs. Learn more here.

Making the Business Case for Digital Transformation in Universities: ROI and Beyond

2025-05-29T20:43:23Z

Universities across Australia have started investing more in digital technologies. But there’s a key difference between just digitising existing processes and fully embracing digital transformation.

Digitising means applying technology to current methods, while digital transformation involves rethinking and redesigning systems to fully leverage new technologies.

Securing buy-in for transformation initiatives requires a well-constructed business case that clearly outlines potential return on investment (ROI) and broader strategic benefits.

This blog explores the key steps universities can take to create a compelling business case for digital transformation, emphasising the importance of linking efforts to clear outcomes and ROI.

The Business Case for Digital Transformation

As universities juggle competing priorities, such as rising costs and growing sustainability requirements, complete digital transformation can be overlooked. For example, some universities may focus on upgrading their online learning platforms but stop short of integrating these systems into a cohesive experience for students.

Globally, education is under-digitised compared to other industries. Holon IQ reveals less than 4% of global expenditure on tech goes to education. This highlights the need for greater investment in digital solutions across the board.

According to the report, Future Disruptions for Australian Universities, Australian universities will face major challenges over the next 10 to 20 years. These challenges include geopolitical tensions, climate change, and evolving technologies like generative AI, which are already reshaping how we learn. The report suggests universities need to adapt their operations and learning experiences to new technology.

As information becomes more digital, the spaces for learning and research also need to change. For example, in the future, there will be less need for lecture theatres and more demand for technology-enabled collaboration and group spaces.

Additionally, students increasingly expect services and education delivery to be digitised to a high standard. A report by Great State reveals 70% of students say digitised universities must become as good as Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably already understand the importance of investing in digital transformation at your institution. The challenge may be convincing others to make investments that will set your university up for the future.

We’ll show you how to make a business case for digital transformation, including predicting both direct and indirect ROI.

Making a Business Case for Digital Transformation

Step 1. Align digital transformation with institutional goals.

The first step in making a business case is to make sure digital transformation matches the university's strategic goals.

Your business case should demonstrate how digital tools can help achieve specific goals, such as increasing student retention, improving graduation rates, or expanding online course offerings.

For example, if your goal is to invest in a digital experience platform (DXP) like Liferay DXP, make sure you outline how this investment maps onto your strategic goals.

A DXP can significantly improve the student experience by providing a unified platform for accessing academic resources, participating in online discussions, and managing administrative tasks. DXPs can also cut down on administration costs by automating routine processes, which can lead to a reduction in administrative overhead.

Additionally, the enhanced engagement and streamlined experience offered by a DXP can contribute to increases in student retention and boosts in overall student satisfaction.

By connecting outcomes to the university’s strategic objectives, you create a strong case for why a technology like a DXP is a valuable investment.

Step 2. Secure stakeholder engagement.

When making a business case, involve key people from the start. This includes faculty, administrators, IT staff, and students. Their feedback helps identify the best digital solutions and shows how they’ll benefit the university community.

Engaging these stakeholders early helps ensure your changes are effective and get their support, making implementation smoother.

Step 3. Conduct a cost-benefit analysis.

A detailed cost-benefit analysis is crucial to any business case. The analysis gives a clear picture of potential returns and required investments. Include both direct and indirect costs, as well as expected benefits over time.

Here’s what to include:

Initial costs: Include expenses for software, hardware, implementation, and training. Be clear about the upfront investment needed.
Ongoing costs: Consider maintenance, subscription fees, and costs for scaling up the digital infrastructure.
Financial benefits: Highlight savings like reduced administrative costs, lower dropout rates, and increased revenue from new online programs.
Qualitative benefits: Focus on improvements like better student satisfaction, enhanced faculty engagement, and a stronger institutional reputation.

Here’s an example of a formula you can use for cost-benefit analysis.

Calculate total costs: Sum up initial costs (software, hardware, implementation, training) and ongoing costs (maintenance, subscriptions, scaling).
Calculate total benefits: Combine financial benefits (cost savings, increased revenue) and estimated financial value of qualitative benefits (improved satisfaction, engagement).
Calculate net benefit: Subtract total costs from total benefits to determine the net benefit, and calculate ROI by dividing the net benefit by total costs and multiplying by 100.

Step 4. Articulate the long-term value of digital investment.

Although ROI is critical, a successful business case will also articulate the long-term value and strategic benefits of digital transformation.

Here are examples of the long-term value digital transformation can provide:

Enhanced student experience: Digital tools can make the student journey smoother, from enrolment to graduation. These tools offer personalised support, easy access to resources, and a seamless learning environment.
Improved institutional competitiveness: In the global education market, universities that invest in advanced digital solutions can attract top students and faculty and build strong partnerships with other institutions.
Agility and resilience: A strong digital setup helps universities quickly adapt to changes, like new educational trends, shifting student needs, or unexpected events like a pandemic.
Sustainability goals: Many digital initiatives support sustainability by reducing the need for physical resources, cutting down on waste, and promoting energy efficiency.

By investing in digital tools, universities can enhance the student experience, boost competitiveness, improve adaptability, and support sustainability goals.

Step 5. Build a strong communication strategy.

Even the most well-crafted business case will fall flat without effective communication.

Presenting the case to stakeholders requires a clear, persuasive narrative that highlights the urgency and importance of digital transformation.

A clear communication plan will have:

Tailored messaging: Stakeholders have different concerns. Administrators may focus on cost savings, while faculty might prioritise improved teaching tools. Tailor the message to each group for the most effective communication.
Data-driven evidence: Use data and case studies from other universities to illustrate the potential ROI and strategic benefits. Concrete examples make abstract concepts more relatable and compelling.
Transparency: Be upfront about the challenges and risks associated with digital transformation. Acknowledging these factors builds trust and demonstrates that the university is prepared to address potential hurdles.

Transforming the University Experience

As we’ve discussed, the university experience is evolving rapidly, driven by advances in technology, changing student expectations, and global shifts in education. To stay competitive and relevant, universities must not only adapt to these changes but also anticipate what the future holds. By investing now in transformational tools, institutions can position themselves ahead of the curve.

Using this business case framework, universities can effectively demonstrate how these digital investments will meet current needs as well as prepare the institution for future demands. Whether it's enhancing student engagement, improving operational efficiency, or expanding global reach, the right digital tools will ensure that universities are equipped to thrive in an increasingly digital world.

Investing in digital transformation now means reaping the benefits both today and in the years to come.

Are you ready to invest in digital transformation for your university? Book a conversation with one of our experts.

Thinking Beyond the Campus: Leveraging Existing Technology to Improve the Student Experience

2025-05-29T21:02:40Z

Universities across Australia are facing a common challenge: students are raising their digital standards, and institutions are racing to keep up. A report by Great State reveals that 91% of students believe their university's digital services should match the quality of face-to-face interactions on campus.

Despite increased university investment in digital services, however, there is still a gap between student expectations and reality.

KPMG Australia’s 2024 report, Student Services in the Age of the Customer, reveals a wide gap exists between the seamless service students experience in their everyday lives and what they get from universities.

Interested in closing the gap?

In this blog, we discuss elevated student expectations and outline how you can create a seamless experience by integrating the tools and platforms your university already uses. Improving digital experiences may seem complex, but with the right tools, it’s often simpler than administrators realise.

Student Expectations in 2024 and Beyond

Today’s students expect their digital educational experiences to be simple and intuitive, looking for frictionless integration between digital and in-person learning—if they attend campus at all. UAC’s 2024 Student Lifestyle and Learning report reveals that 41% of students prefer a blended learning approach, up from 38% in 2023.

With more students studying online, even partially, the demand for a better experience increases.

On top of this, students are also raising their self-service expectations.

KPMG Australia reports that investment in an improved self-service experience is on the rise, but students are still struggling with tasks like enrolment, fees, timetabling, course and progression. These struggles stand in stark contrast to the easy self-service students experience in other areas of their lives. In fact, one study finds 70% of students say digitised universities must become as good as Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook.

How Universities Can Improve the Student Experience

Trying to keep up with tech giants might seem tough, but universities today are often more advanced in their digital journey than they realise. Covid-19 sped up digital adoption, and universities across APAC already have technology systems holding valuable data and running admin processes.

Most universities can greatly improve the student experience by taking one simple step: making information easier to access by integrating existing digital tools and platforms in one central location.

For example, right now, a student may have to navigate one platform to access course materials, another platform to submit assignments, and yet another to check their grades. By integrating these tasks into a single, intuitive digital hub, universities can make it easier for students to manage their academic lives.

In the next section, we’ll explain how you can do this.

Creating a Seamless Student Experience

A superior student experience has three ingredients:

Streamlined administration processes
Easier communication between students and faculty
Access to educational resources anytime, anywhere

Students want to log in to handle admin tasks easily, access course materials and updates quickly, stay connected with faculty and peers, and manage their academic progress with timely notifications.

As mentioned, most universities already have digital systems to manage these processes. The missing piece is integration. When systems aren’t connected, students often have to search a long time for information and log in to multiple systems just to complete simple tasks. For instance, a student might need to use one system to view assessment information and another to request an extension to the same assignment. An optimal student experience would mean this process happens from the same dashboard.

Using a Digital Experience Platform to Connect Systems

Connecting information is easy with the right digital experience platform (DXP). A DXP like Liferay DXP helps universities create, manage, and deliver personalised digital experiences across different channels, such as websites and mobile apps. Think of a DXP as a flexible tool that allows users to bring content together in the most efficient way.

For example, with Liferay DXP, universities can connect existing systems to create personalised student portals that act as hybrid learning platforms. A student portal built on Liferay DXP provides unified access to all university services through a single interface, eliminating excessive clicking and reducing confusion. This enables universities to improve their student experience instantly without completely overhauling their technology ecosystem.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how universities can use DXPs to improve three critical parts of the student experience.

Streamlining Student Administration with a DXP

Example: A first-year student navigates enrolment

Shelley, a first-year university student, is navigating the enrolment process. Traditionally, this meant using several platforms: one for filling out forms, another for uploading documents, and a different one for checking enrolment status.

A DXP like Liferay DXP simplifies this process. Shelley can create her account, enter all required information, upload documents, and track progress in one place.

The process with a DXP:

Enrolment dashboard: Shelley logs into a unified portal, where she sees a clear enrolment checklist, progress tracker, and direct links to upload required documents.
Support access: If Shelley encounters any issues, she can easily access help through the same portal, using built-in support features like chatbots or support ticket submission, ensuring quick resolution without leaving the platform.
Notifications: Shelley receives real-time notifications about important deadlines and any additional requirements.

This integration reduces the time and frustration often associated with enrolment, making the process smoother and more transparent.

Improving Communication Between Students and Faculty with a DXP

Example: Coordinating on course requirements

Emily, a student, needs to discuss a project with her professor, Dr. Smith. Traditionally, this might involve sending emails back and forth or waiting for office hours. With a digital experience platform, however, this communication can be streamlined significantly.

The process with a DXP:

Integrated messaging system: Emily and Dr. Smith use an integrated messaging feature within the university portal to exchange messages, share files, and schedule meetings.
Virtual office hours: Dr. Smith sets up virtual office hours within the platform, where Emily can book a time slot and join a video call directly from the portal.
Course updates: Emily receives notifications about course updates, assignments, and feedback through a personalised dashboard, ensuring she stays informed and can respond promptly.

By centralising communication tools within the DXP, both students and faculty can manage their interactions more efficiently, reducing delays and improving the overall educational experience.

Providing 24/7 Virtual Access to Educational Resources with a DXP

Example: Accessing lecture notes remotely

Alex is a student who needs to access lecture notes while traveling or during non-course hours. Without a centralised platform, Alex might have to navigate multiple systems or wait for email updates.

The process with a DXP:

Centralised portal: Alex logs into a single portal where all lecture notes, assignments, and course materials are organized by subject and date.
Remote access: Whether on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, Alex can access the portal from anywhere with an internet connection.
Assignment submission: Alex can submit assignments directly through the portal, receive confirmation, and track submission status without having to switch between platforms.

This seamless access to educational resources ensures that students can continue their studies effectively, regardless of location or time constraints.

Case Study: The University of Maine System

A great example of effectively using a DXP is the University of Maine System. Serving over 40,000 students across seven universities, the University was facing challenges on a legacy version of Liferay. The University struggled with slow search functionality, lack of accessibility, and difficulty managing diverse user needs.

By upgrading to Liferay DXP, the University was able to:

Implement Single Sign-On (SSO). SSO provides secure and seamless access to internal and external resources for students, faculty, and staff.
Streamline content management. The portal enables hundreds of users to easily create, edit, and manage personalised content without technical expertise.
Enhance the user experience. Search has improved, and the platform adheres to accessibility standards.

The University of Maine System now benefits from an efficient, user-friendly portal that reduces maintenance costs and improves access to critical resources across all campuses.

Read the full case study here.

Learn More About Liferay DXP
Interested in learning more about Liferay DXP? Click here to read how we can help universities around the world transform student experiences.

16 Awesome Web Portal Examples

2025-08-19T17:11:36Z

Note: This article was last updated on August 19, 2025.

Key Takeaways

Web portals are a type of online platform designed to deliver a unified, personalized experience for any specific audience, like customers, employees, suppliers, dealers, or vendors.
There are several different types of web portals, including customer portals, intranet portals, vendor portals, government web portals, educational web portals, supplier portals, client portals, community portals, education portal, hr portals, internet portal, and more.
To build an effective web portal, a digital experience platform (DXP) is most suited to help you deliver and evolve the experiences your users want.
This article will provide examples of web portals across different industries, highlighting their features and use cases.

Introduction to Web Portals

Web portals are a type of online portal that allow organizations to provide engaging authenticated user experiences due to their integration and personalization capabilities. Web portals enhance communication within organizations by unifying content, tools, and processes into a single interface, providing centralized access to information and services and delivering a personalized experience for customers, employees, suppliers, or any specific audience.

Websites are generally static, offering the same content to every visitor regardless of their profile or preferences. In contrast, web portals often require users to log in, and user authentication ensures secure and personalized access to data and services based on their preferences and previous interactions.

These web portals also offer easy access to resources and tools, making it simple for users to perform tasks and retrieve important information. A web portal is a web based platform designed to centralize and streamline user interactions.

Why Use a Web Portal?

Web portals offer much more than just a gateway to information—they serve as interactive hubs where users can manage tasks, collaborate, and engage with content specific to their roles. A portal provides centralized access to services and information, streamlining user interaction and service delivery. Portal developers can create custom web portal solutions that address unique business requirements, enhancing communication and providing seamless access to essential resources.

Since portals require authentication, this allows users to retrieve personalized information while ensuring security and data compliance.

Whether for businesses, educational institutions, or government agencies, web portals provide a flexible foundation for delivering online services and supporting digital transformation.

See how these 16 excellent web portals across different industries and use cases provided engaging experiences to their users.

Self-Service Customer Portals

A customer portal provides customers with a single interface to access relevant information, manage their accounts or orders, and resolve issues, independently. Customer portals empower your customers to do more, making it easier for the teams who serve them as well.

1. Broadcom Inc., Customer Portal

As a global technology leader in semiconductors and infrastructure software solutions, Broadcom serves a wide range of customers spanning multiple industries. Broadcom needed a solution that would act as a universal support hub. In building a new self-service customer portal, Broadcom is able to help customers more efficiently by providing access to education resources, documentation, licensing, knowledge bases, blogs, and support through virtual and live agents. This not only increased customer satisfaction ratings, but also reduced customer support tickets and decreased overall clicks by 66%.

2. Embasa, Customer Portal

Embasa, a sanitation company that serves over 350 of Bahia’s municipalities, serves their customers more efficiently with their self-service customer portal. Customers can easily find the resources they need through a personalized experience based on their property location. The new portal has saved Embasa $20,000 monthly on customer support costs and also increased monthly processed requests by 750%.

Want to see more customer portal examples? Learn more in this blog.

Banking & Insurance Portals

Banking and insurance web portals provide clients with effective self-service through a regulatory-compliant, secure interface, offering personalized access to financial information and services.

3. Gulf Insurance Group-Kuwait, Wealth Management/Insurance Portal

Gulf Insurance Group-Kuwait achieved a 30% increase in customers and reduced their total cost of ownership after adding self-service features that enable users to purchase policies, submit claims, request quotes, and more. Other online features like single sign-on and endorsement capabilities helped the insurance company adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic and make 100% of their insurance products available digitally.

4. Carrefour Bank, Financial Customer Self-Service Portal

In order to properly serve a quickly-growing customer base, Carrefour Bank created a new self-service portal for its audience, which gave users the ability to access financial extracts, manage their interactions with the organization and negotiate their debts and credits in a single location. By replacing their old portal, Carrefour was also able to plan for continued expansions in online services and the ability to build and publish new products for their customers in the future.

This portal was also launched on the cloud, which helped Carrefour easily back up their portal, autoscale for increased traffic, and cut down deployment times to less than 10 minutes.

Also See:

Why Self-Service is Essential for Customer Web Portals

Self-service is becoming increasingly important in digital tools such as web portals. Companies that are able to provide relevant and agile customer experiences will be the ones that can differentiate themselves from their competitors. Learn more about best practices related to self-service in order to be rewarded with the long-term benefits.

Download the Whitepaper

Patient Portals

Make it easy for patients to get a 360-degree view of their health with a patient portal, which is a type of healthcare portal that provides centralized access to health-related information and services. Patients can access medical records, update patient information, and schedule services and appointments.

Patient portals facilitate communication between patients and healthcare providers as well as healthcare professionals, making it easier to manage care and receive timely responses. Features often include the ability to request prescription refills, view test results, and securely message a provider.

5. Vivisol, Patient Portal

As a leading home care provider in Europe, Vivisol wanted to better serve their patients by providing high-quality digital healthcare services that aid and complement their in-person care. So, they unified their 12 existing sites onto a single portal, giving patients a consistent experience and self-service tools to access information and request services independently.

6. MedImpact, Benefit Program Portal

MedImpact provides pharmacy benefit programs to hundreds of organizations, each with their own unique combination of offerings for members. MedImpact’s portal centralized authentication and authorization control across numerous sites that had been previously built to supply and manage various benefit programs. Combined with single sign on capabilities and custom portlets, the portal lowered MedImpact’s operational costs and increased their control over the programs they manage for pharmacies.

Intranets

Intranets are a type of corporate portal—internal web portals that act as a single source of truth for employees. As corporate portals, they can provide both internal and external access to information and resources, supporting workflow management and user navigation for various users. HR portals are a specific type of corporate portal that streamline HR management tasks such as onboarding, training, and benefits administration. Employees should be able to find the resources they need quickly, access the tools they frequently use, and be updated on important news, all through the intranet.

7. Team Global Express, Intranet

Transportation and logistics company Team Global Express empowers their workforce with self-service features through their new intranet, GEConnect. Productivity has increased since employees can easily find their payslips, submit an IT ticket, and be up-to-date on the latest policies. In addition, workers who do not have regular internet access can connect to the intranet offline by registering their phone to receive text updates.

8. Skoda Auto, Intranet

Leading car manufacturer Škoda Auto has over 300 different user groups among their 40,000 employees, and delivering the right content at the right time to these users was very difficult. But with a new intranet, Škoda was able to centralize employee resources, personalize content and communications, and provide AI-enabled search, ultimately increasing employee satisfaction by 82%.

See five additional examples of effective intranet web portal solutions from different industry leaders from around the world in this ebook.

Dealer and Partner Portals

9. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Partner Portal

With over 650,000 users across 174 countries, HPE struggled to deliver relevant information to their partners. To remedy this, the new HP Partner Portal offers a single entry point to all of the services and tools available. Global partners are now able to receive content in a targeted and relevant way. Now 70% of partners return regularly to leverage the partner portal.

10. Volkswagen Group France, Dealer Portal

To improve both customer and employee satisfaction, Volkswagen overhauled their extranet and intranet, with new portals supporting existing applications and providing new needed features. Volkswagen’s intranet portal supports five sites for each of the Group’s brands and provides various internal services, document access, internal news and a vehicle repository. The extranet portal supports a network of dealerships and repairers, managing applications and documents for day-to-day business and information access.

Supplier Portals

Manage suppliers more efficiently on a supplier portal that can provide you the visibility needed to streamline supplier processes, like onboarding, purchasing, and communication. Supplier portals facilitate seamless interaction between companies and their suppliers by streamlining communication and procurement processes.

11. Douglas, Supplier Portal

With over 800 suppliers, Douglas, Europe’s leading premium beauty retailer, needed a more efficient way to collaborate with their suppliers. With their supplier portal, Douglas was able to provide a single source of truth for their suppliers, which improved communications and digitized common processes like onboarding, accelerating the journey by 50%.

12. Advanced Energy, Supplier Portal

Leading manufacturer Advanced Energy uses their supplier portal as a centralized system to collaborate with their suppliers. Instead of siloed approaches including fax, email, or phone, all critical communication is now handled through their supplier portal. The portal has enabled suppliers to forecast and procure purchase orders, with estimated savings of over 1.5 million dollars.

Explore 5 key use cases for supplier portals with examples from global leaders in this ebook.

Government Web Portals

Government web portals provide a single point of access for citizens to interact with various government agencies and departments, streamlining the process of finding information, applying for services, and managing their interactions with the government.

13. Council of Europe, Government Program Portal

The Council of Europe includes 47 member states and was created for the protection of human rights, democracy and the rule of law across the continent. The Council consists of several different operational entities, each with its own programs being run across member states, and created a program portal to host its more than 200 sites. The portal allows users to manage content across these sites and has improved internal communication between the programs as well as management over projects that include other organizations, such as the European Union.

14. City of Vienna, Intranet

To ensure information and communication flowed seamlessly in all of the City of Vienna’s departments, the city implemented an intranet solution with self-service features, collaboration tools, and an easy-to-update CMS. This resulted in less time and resources spent on administration, reduced internal email volume, and increased communication between teams.

Student & Faculty Portals

Student and faculty portals provide centralized access to academic information, resources, and services for students and faculty members, respectively.

15. New South Wales Department of Education, Staff Portal, Student Portal, Parent Portal

More than 1,200,000 New South Wales school students, and their parents and teachers, use state government portals to access everything from timetables and reports to teachers’ annual leave balances. These portals not only make it easier for the staff to manage administrative tasks and teachers’ paperwork but also allow students and parents to engage more closely with the schools.

16. Maine’s Public Universities, Multi-Campus Portal

The University of Maine System provides their students, faculty, and staff across seven universities and the University of Maine Law School with a self-service portal to access relevant resources, manage courses, look at benefits, and more. All users log into the MyCampus Portal, and with the portal’s strong identity management and authentication system, they can navigate to an experience that is tailored to their role and status.

Each of these 16 web portals were created using Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Web Portal Design and User Experience

The design and user experience of a web portal are fundamental to its success, directly impacting how users interact with the platform and the value they derive from it. Whether building a customer portal, corporate portal, vendor portal, or government portal, thoughtful design ensures that users can easily access relevant information, complete tasks efficiently, and enjoy a personalized experience tailored to their needs.

Key elements of effective web portal design include clear navigation, robust search functionality, and responsive layouts that work seamlessly across desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Portal developers must ensure that the portal platform chosen is scalable, secure, and capable of integrating with existing systems, so that the portal can grow alongside organizational needs. Custom web portal solutions are often preferred for their flexibility in meeting unique business requirements and providing a tailored user experience.

Web portals also enhance communication and collaboration through features like online forums, discussion forums, and interactive web applications. These tools facilitate seamless interaction among users, whether they are employees sharing knowledge, partners accessing marketing materials, or students collaborating on educational resources. For instance, education web portals provide access to online courses, learning materials, and collaboration tools, while partner web portals offer external partners a centralized platform for accessing resources and managing joint projects.

Ultimately, investing in the design and user experience of your web portal pays dividends in customer satisfaction, enhanced communication, and streamlined operations. By focusing on easy access, personalized content, and a user-friendly interface, organizations can create portal solutions that not only meet current needs but also adapt to future demands. Whether you’re developing a customer portal, corporate portal, or government web portal, prioritizing user experience will help you deliver a competitive, engaging, and effective online platform.

No matter who your audience is, a web portal can serve as an effective means to provide personalized experiences to your end users. However, as user needs continue to evolve, your portal solution will need to evolve accordingly.

To do so, you can build a custom web portal solution on a platform flexible enough for future needs: a digital experience platform (DXP).

Digital Experiences, Your Way

The Evolution of the Plugin Model — And Why It Needed to Evolve in the First Place

2025-05-29T21:00:54Z

Sometimes I sit and reflect: what made me fall in love with Liferay? Maybe that sounds like a strange way to pass the time. But after almost 15 years of developing expertise in Liferay, it’s fair to call it an integral part of my life.

My conclusion to that question, every time: the blessing and the curse of plugins.

Plugins are the best. Simply put, a plugin is an independent piece of functionality that gets inserted into your existing software, enabling you to extend what’s already there or add entirely new functionality.

If you’re a developer, you’ve probably experienced the dopamine hit that comes with deploying a plugin and actually seeing your work in action—particularly if you’ve written your own plugin that changes the way base functionality in a product works.

I love plugins. I’m addicted to plugins. And in Liferay, you can use plugins to accomplish complex tasks with relative ease, which makes you look like a genius and a rockstar at the same time. So who wouldn’t love plugins?

The answer: Anyone working on an upgrade from one version of software to the next.

That’s the issue that Liferay’s ultra-flexible development model created—and the issue that we set out to solve.

But first, some background.

The Power and Lure of Plugins

Pluggable architecture used to be all the rage. The idea that you could free yourself from the limitations of traditional development and task accomplishment seemed to open up an endless realm of possibilities.

Why? Well, at a basic level, most product companies try to anticipate their users’ goals, and then develop capabilities to help users meet those goals. If you make HR software, for example, you might create a way to automate the employee review process.

Plugins were created to address a problem for rapidly growing businesses that often have extremely complex requirements: it’s virtually impossible to anticipate all necessary product capabilities, so having the ability to build functionality into an existing product allows you to change and adapt for the future.

At Liferay, we took plugins a step further. In our product, not only could you “plug in” new capabilities, but you could also “plug in” changes to override existing behavior. This made it possible to alter just one part of an existing feature rather than replacing the whole thing (though you can do that too, if you want.)

For instance, you could inject logic to run as part of a Login pipeline of actions without building the entire login solution. Essentially, you’re taking the out-of-the-box capability and squeezing your way into the execution by adding instructions that tell Liferay, “...and when you get to this point, do x and y as well.”

This way of working with plugins became a clear differentiator between Liferay and competitors. As a developer, the power and productivity gains of Liferay’s plugin model were what sold me. I could get more done in less time, maximizing the value I could deliver to customers. Projects that would have taken me three months to complete with another product I could finish in two weeks.

But everything comes with a price.

The Price of Plugins

With all their power, plugins have tradeoffs.

1. First Tradeoff: A Limited Tech Stack

This doesn’t happen by design. Rather, it’s a consequence of the fact that the portal container (in our case, Liferay DXP itself) manages the plugins. Although there are no boundaries in terms of what you can do with your plugins, you can only work in the context of a finite set of tools. This could be an issue for multiple reasons, but the most challenging one is finding developers who are comfortable using the technology and/or educating internal teams to use it.

2. Second Tradeoff: API Dependency

Dependency on the product’s APIs is a particular pain-point for people who aren’t plugin fans. APIs are great at doing their job: making sure when you actually “plug in” your plugin, that it works, but APIs also reflect the exposed capabilities of the product itself. As the product changes, so do the APIs.

This is what can make upgrades to a new version so challenging. If newer capabilities get released, but the plugins you’ve created have interfered with or now rely upon the old capabilities inextricably, you can’t upgrade smoothly. That’s why it’s important to maintain the plugins you create, rather than plugging them in once and then leaving them alone without reference to how the product changes.

3. Third Tradeoff: The Investment

Like many vendors, Liferay adheres to open standards. These standards are agreements by which major market players have chosen to abide. But Liferay (also like many vendors) frequently extends those standards to provide additional functionality in order to offer a developer or user experience that ends up being unique to Liferay. So while it’s very simple, for example, to create a plugin/widget that lets users enter or track data, render it on screen, and then make it available to other systems, in the traditional method, that plugin would only be available to use in Liferay.

At least, that was the case. Until now.

From Plugins to Client Extensions

We knew we had to solve the issue that our plugin model had created, and we knew it would involve a paradigm shift in our approach to the Liferay Customization Framework, which is the way we determine when and how to customize.

We began brainstorming with a big end goal: let’s still give customers the ability to customize our solutions, including with new functionality, while allowing them to maintain a decoupled solution.

Easy, right? Not exactly—a lot of complexity hides behind this goal. Fundamentally, it means asking for autonomous systems that can exist on their own but are aware of the existence and capabilities of other systems. These two systems then would work together to solve problems—a technologically symbiotic relationship.

In the Liferay DXP plugin world, that looks like taking the plugin out of its traditional home, the portal container, and running it externally. By moving the plugin outside of the portal container, however, the product needed to change in other ways, because unless Liferay DXP knows about the existence of the plugin living somewhere else, there can’t be any task delegation.

Does all of this sound too complicated? Transfer this idea to the way a company works with people. When I need a new design for an area of Liferay Learn, I don’t come up with it myself—I delegate to our Design team. When that section is done and ready to be announced, I don’t take over our social media accounts—I go to our Marketing department. I have a business outcome I’m trying to achieve, but on the way to that outcome, I’m plugging into different organizational groups to leverage their skillsets for the best result. If I don’t know how to talk to Design or Marketing, I can’t delegate to them, and suddenly, my job gets harder, and the result likely won’t be nearly as good because I don’t have the expertise that those departments have.

This is how we wanted the new way of customizing, called client extensions, to work. The main difference between a plugin and a client extension is this: a plugin is something internal to the product, and a client extension is a service I can leverage from outside of the product.

Plugins are what we build and deploy in the product that are managed by Liferay’s portal container, whereas client extensions are components Liferay DXP is aware of and could possibly use but has no direct control or responsibility over. In this way, client extensions don’t interfere with core product capabilities.

Client Extensions: Flexibility for the Future

Client extensions are the brave new world of extending Liferay DXP. Again, the main attraction of this approach is that your extensions live outside of Liferay, eliminating those tradeoffs we talked about earlier:

No tech stack constraints. Except for the small amount of “glue” needed to bridge Liferay DXP and the system referenced by the extension, there are no management restrictions created by the portal container.
No fears of breaking API changes. Integration is now done via a versioned and open-standards based headless API, which frees you to update Liferay DXP without needing to upgrade your customization at the same time in lockstep.
Less overall investment. You don’t necessarily need your entire IT team to learn niche technologies or invest in outside developers. Now, you can use the expertise of your existing team with practically any technology to build solutions.

Okay, you might be saying, that sounds great. But what if I’ve already invested in plugins as part of my solution? Can I convert my plugins to client extensions?

Converting Plugins to Client Extensions

The first thing I do when I hear this question is counter with one of my own: does what you’ve built with a plugin need to be moved to a client extension at all? Many plugins developers have built in Liferay over the years can actually be replaced with out-of-the-box capabilities using configuration over code. We have 300+ capabilities, many of which you may not even be aware of!

Service Builder is a great example. In the past, that’s how developers could extend the Liferay data model to store entity information according to your specific organizational needs – i.e., modeling your business. Now, however, you don’t need to convert this to a client extension: you can use Objects to model the entity via the UI, and then leverage features like Content Management, Page Builder, and Fragments to capture the data and render it for users.

There may be cases, however, where you still need functionality not included in our out-of-the-box capabilities. (Always double and triple-check first, though.) In these instances, how much work it is to convert your plugin to a client extension depends largely on the complexity of your plugin or widget to begin with.

Want an example of what to do when this happens? Read more here.

Additional Benefits of Client Extensions

Adding client extensions to the paradigm of the Liferay Customization Framework doesn’t just address the tradeoffs of the plugin model. There are additional benefits as well:

Disparate teams can work in parallel. Teams can work autonomously and release on their own schedules instead of coordinating with our maintenance windows. So, for example, if your solution is a Customer Portal, and you have a team responsible for building and maintaining a tool like a quote calculator built using a client extension, that team can evolve, fix bugs, and release when they want to.
Client extensions and the resources they used can be scaled without Liferay. If this quote calculator suddenly becomes the most popular tool inside and outside your organization, you may need additional resources to keep up with demand. When the calculator is deployed in the Liferay portal container as a plugin, scaling up resources would mean scaling up Liferay DXP itself. But if you used a client extension, then the resources that are running the calculator live outside Liferay DXP, so you could ramp up with additional hardware, VMs, or containers without increasing the number of Liferay nodes. You’ll save on license costs this way as well.

Limitations

Like all software, the framework of client extensions is continuously evolving.

Although client extensions offer solutions to many customization needs, they don’t yet cover every use case that the traditional plugin model supports—yet.

If this happens and you’ve explored out-of-the-box capabilities thoroughly too, you may still need to build a plugin. We do still support plugins, but this method of deployment rules out the possibility of using Liferay SaaS to host.

And if you find yourself in these circumstances, here’s a fleshed-out version of the Liferay Customization Framework for deciding that age-old question of when to customize:

Make every effort together with Liferay or one of our trusted partners to find the functionality you need with out-of-the-box capabilities.
Repeat Step 1. Really!
After you’ve made sure you can’t cover your use case with out-of-the-box capabilities, look into your options with client extensions.
If client extensions absolutely won’t work either, turn to plugins. But make sure to architect your solution in such a way that you can take the plugin out easily later, either when a client extension or out-of-the-box capability becomes available.
Don’t keep what you need a secret! Please tell us about the gap, and why this feature you had to add as a customization is so important for your business.

Have an idea already? Drop us a line at hello@liferay.com.

Conclusion: The Future Is Up to You

Now you have the bigger picture of why we made the shift from the old plugin model to the new world of client extensions.

And as much as I love plugins and will always have a soft spot for them, I’ve made room in my heart for client extensions after seeing their potential. Client extensions still carry the heritage of Liferay with them, what’s been special from the beginning—giving our customers the opportunity to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in order to meet, and exceed, business needs.

Behind the Code is a blog series featuring the insider expertise of Liferay gurus on topics like new technology trends, the latest and greatest feature updates, and more.

Author: Andrew Jardine, Lead Solution Architect at Liferay

Why Security Should Be a Business Leader Concern

2025-05-29T21:13:51Z

Security can no longer be an issue only delegated to your IT or SecOps teams.

The global average cost of a data breach increased by 2.6% from $4.24 million in 2021 to $4.35 million in 2022, representing a constant and significant risk to business continuity, reputation, and profits.

Rising cyberattacks and the current geopolitical landscape require security to be at top of mind for every business leader. Not only for their own products and operations, but also for the technologies that they implement.

When considering the technologies in your own tech stack and future investments, security can no longer be just a checkbox at the bottom of your procurement to-dos. Bring it to the discussion early so that you’re not wasting your time with a solution or tool that isn’t able to properly secure or protect your data.

Security Terminology Business Leaders Need to Know

Security, compliance, data — all terms that get thrown around. But what does each mean and why is it important for your business?

Security refers to a set of practices and measures taken to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of systems and information.

Compliance involves adhering to a set of rules and regulations established by governments such as GDPR or HIPAA, industry bodies, or even internal company policies.

Cybersecurity is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and programs from digital attacks.

Data Protection focuses on protecting users’ personal data. Data Protection Compliance is a subcategory of Compliance. The main goal of data protection is to prevent any use of personal data (by internal and external parties) in a way that could harm individuals.

Zero Trust is a security model based on the principle of not trusting any entity by default, regardless of its location or context, and requiring verification before granting access.

Data Protection and Security Measures to Look For When Selecting a Vendor

According to Gartner Digital Markets’ research, security and cyberattacks are a top trigger of software investments, especially to protect against financial, legal, and reputational damage.

When selecting a vendor here are a few key things to look for in regards to security. As a business leader, you may not need to understand all the specifics but having answers to these points early in the discussion will help ensure you actually go with a vendor that can present real trust and credibility.

How does this vendor secure my users’ data? What security measures does this vendor put in place?
What regulations does this vendor comply with? At the very least, the vendor you consider needs to be compliant with the data protection laws where your business operates, for example GDPR. Are there other regulations that the vendor follows?
How are data transfers governed? Does the vendor take measures to comply with the applicable data transfer requirements and limitations? Data might not stay in one location. For example, data might be transferred to subprocessors in another country. If so, how does the vendor protect the data that is being moved and what actions will the vendor take to comply with the applicable laws?
Any verifications that this vendor has been given? There are many independent organizations that verify the security, privacy, and compliance controls of different technologies, including A-LIGN and CSA.
What types of security threats does this vendor protect against? For example, what can this vendor do against malware, phishing, or DDoS?
What vendors does this vendor use and how are they secure? Just as you are looking to another vendor, that vendor may also leverage other vendors in their technology. How are they ensuring the security of those vendors? If one doesn’t comply, then the security of the entire tool is compromised.

A Platform You Can Trust

We’re able to lay out these foundational principles because they are also what guide our own platform.

For over two decades, we’ve placed security, compliance, and data protection at the core of our product, offerings, and operations at Liferay. Because of our expertise and emphasis on security, we’ve been able to provide trusted solutions to industries where security is paramount, like finance, government, and healthcare.

Our cloud offerings are based on the Google Cloud Platform and both Liferay and Google commit to providing a robust, secure offering. Additionally, Liferay will handle more of the security tasks for customers on our PaaS and SaaS offerings, including incident management, infrastructure security, and DDoS protection. But we also offer an on-premise deployment option for customers that need to meet very specific security and privacy requirements.

Here’s how we would answer the security measures above, and the type of responses you would want to look for from vendors you consider.

Liferay protects user data with a strong emphasis on data protection. We design our products and offerings with robust security measures to safeguard information, including enforcing strict data access policies, carrying out comprehensive vendor evaluations, aligning our practices with evolving privacy regulations, and regularly educating and equipping our employees, commitments enshrined in our agreements.
Though no software product can offer a checklist of features to make your company completely GDPR compliant, Liferay DXP provides tools to greatly accelerate a company’s journey towards compliance. With out-of-the-box features such as data export, data erasure, and user permissions combined with Liferay DXP’s flexible architecture, businesses can adapt the platform to the evolving needs of their data protection strategy. For a more detailed dive into how Liferay ensures it complies with the requirements under GDPR, read more here.
Liferay does transfer personal data, but implements appropriate safeguards where required by regional data protection laws. Applications running on Liferay’s cloud offerings can also achieve data sovereignty compliance through Liferay’s regional controls, data encryption, and Google Cloud’s Sovereign Cloud.
Liferay regularly undergoes independent verification of our security, privacy, and compliance controls to help businesses meet their regulatory and policy objectives and has received the following certifications: SOC 2 Type 2, ISO/IEC 270001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018, HIPAA, CSA Start Level 1 and 2, and Spain Esquema Nacional de Seguridad.
With Liferay’s infrastructure, organizational, and product security, you can stay protected with:
- Intrusion detection system, which enables constant monitoring and the early identification of potential security breaches.
- DDoS technology enhanced with WAF and AI from Google to protect against known and unknown malicious traffic.
- Anti-malware technology on all relevant systems
Liferay undergoes a rigorous vetting process of all vendors to ensure that your security is not compromised by any of the vendors we use.

See how Liferay's secure platform handles critical security and risk concerns. Access Liferay's complete security profile and responses on Gartner's Third-Party Risk Platform here.

Liferay’s Commitment to Security

We’ve made security a priority of our platform so that you can conduct your business operations, with a platform you can trust. To that end, we’ve provided full transparency on how we handle security in our platform and organization. To assess these documents and resources, visit our Trust Center.

Why Migrating to Liferay DXP from HCL DX Makes Sense For Your Business

2025-05-29T21:13:38Z

In late 2018, when IBM announced it would be selling a large portion of the company’s software portfolio, including WebSphere Portal, to India-based HCL, the move was met with shock by many in the community. A contemporaneous article in CRN cited an IBM partner when writing that “the news that IBM would be selling parts of its software business came as a complete surprise to IBM's channel partners” (Kovar).

Real Story Group Founder Tony Bryne, a long time industry observer and analyst, tried to make sense of the news, sharing his view that the products IBM was divesting from were “mostly legacy offerings, in long-term decline.” Tony speculated that HCL saw an opportunity to take ownership of legacy technology that was sticky due to its frequent heavy customization, enjoying the fruits of licensing revenue until the products’ eventual demise in a few years. He added that customers were right to be concerned—colorfully saying they had “good reason to feel a bit queasy”—and noting that “it's not clear that HCL actually knows how to execute effectively on this model.” Tony’s concern was that a service provider like HCL might not be a good custodian of a software portfolio (Byrne).

Signs of Trouble

Tony’s caution proved prescient. Writing in 2020, Vivek Agarwal, CTO of solution provider XTIVIA, noted that HCL had since rebranded WebSphere Portal as HCL DX and only released v9.5 in October 2019, over three years after IBM released WebSphere Portal v9.0 in 2016. In addition to the slow pace of releases, Vivek noted that “at least some of the WebSphere Portal customers have experienced an increase in annual support and maintenance fees.” Like Tony, Vivek cited concerns about whether a services company like HCL would be able to successfully manage a software portfolio, writing that “time will tell whether HCL can successfully make the transition” (Agarwal).

State of the Union

The situation has not improved in the past few years. In 2023, HCL announced they would no longer offer new customers perpetual license packages. Instead, HCL DX would be sold on a consumption-based subscription model anchored on user sessions. Existing customers were given until June 30, 2024 to renew under the previous perpetual license model, otherwise they too are forced to adopt the new pricing model (Farnand). This announcement was separate from HCL’s decision to institute a standard 15% increase in the cost of software renewals as of July 15, 2023 (HCLSoftware).

Why Liferay?

If you’re an HCL DX customer frustrated by price hikes and a slow pace of innovation you may be wondering if there’s an alternative. At Liferay, we believe Liferay DXP represents an attractive alternative to HCL DX.

Like HCL DX (formerly IBM WebSphere Portal), Liferay DXP is a portal heritage offering. Liferay DXP’s support for common portlet specifications, including Portlet 3.0, Spring Web Model-View-Controller (MVC), and JavaServer Faces (JSF), means customers with substantial investment in WebSphere Portal may find migrating to Liferay DXP is substantially easier than moving to any other offering. In addition, WebSphere Portal and Liferay DXP are both primarily written in Java, with similarities in programming and development approaches. This means IT teams migrating from HCL DX to Liferay DXP can continue to use many of the design approaches with which they’re already familiar (Agarwal).

For those unfamiliar with our product, Liferay DXP is a feature-rich, modern Digital Experience Platform. Liferay DXP includes CMS, DAM, personalization, commerce, and more, enabling leading organizations like Airbus, Jose Cuervo, and Petrobras to build engaging digital experiences for their audiences. Organizations like Excellus BlueCross BlueShield and National Government Services have already migrated from WebSphere Portal/HCL DX to Liferay.

Liferay DXP was developed entirely by Liferay, so the platform delivers a seamless, uniform experience. In addition, the open source nature of our product gives customers confidence that they know exactly what’s running in their organizations. Liferay DXP is offered via self-hosted, PaaS, and SaaS deployment options so we can meet customers wherever they are in their cloud journey.

Ready to learn more? Explore our platform or book a call with sales!

Why Low-Code Is Essential for Your Customer Portal Project in 2025

2025-05-29T21:13:21Z

In a digital-first world, your customers have become accustomed to immediate access to information and seamless experiences. They demand quick responses and resolutions to their inquiries or issues – preferably through self-service and automation. Providing excellent customer service is a key differentiator for your business, as customers are more likely to choose companies that offer exceptional support.

So, increasingly, businesses not only expect their customer portals to relieve pressure on their service teams but also help them innovate and address constantly evolving customer needs. Your customer portal should be adaptable, helping you collect valuable customer insights and easily refine the experience in response. If you want to increase agility and innovation in customer service and support, you can’t afford technological bottlenecks.

Enter low-code: Gartner predicts that this year, “70% of new applications developed by organizations will use low-code or no-code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020.” In addition, 26% of executives think that investing in low-code capabilities is one of the most critical investments in automation (up from 10% since 2020).

Considering these stats, as well as the pivotal role that efficiency, speed, and flexibility play in staying competitive, looking for low-code capabilities when planning a customer portal project is not just a trend – it’s a strategic imperative.

In this blog post, we'll explore why it’s so important to consider customer portal solutions that offer low-code capabilities. We’ll also take a look at how low-code can streamline your approach to digital experience delivery and unlock a world of possibilities for customer engagement and satisfaction.

Why Should Businesses Use Low-Code/No-Code?

Businesses can leverage low-code capabilities across a large spectrum, driven by the multiple benefits they provide. Here are a few scenarios where a low-code-enabled solution excels – whether you're building a customer portal, supplier portal, intranet, or any other solution:

Faster Time to Launch
Leveraging low-code capabilities is often a faster alternative to traditional code-based development when organizations need to address immediate requirements. 451 Research estimates that low-code can cut 50-90% of development time compared to using a coding language.

Democratization of Development – Enabling “Citizen Developers”
Low-code empowers non-technical departments or teams to contribute to solving their individual needs independently, reducing dependency on IT. By providing intuitive tools and drag-and-drop functionality, these “citizen developers” are enabled to build and customize digital solutions with little to no coding knowledge.

Process Automation
When it comes to streamlining, looking for ways to automate repetitive manual tasks is critical. With low-code, non-technical users can create and deploy automations that improve the efficiency of business processes and operations.

Prototyping and Proof of Concepts
Low-code is a fast way to build prototypes and proof of concepts to validate assumptions, collect feedback, and iterate on designs before committing resources to full-scale development.

3 Ways Low-Code Capabilities Improve the Quality and Efficiency of Your Customer Portal

Let's have a look at customer portals in particular and delve deeper into four key use cases where the strategic implementation of low-code capabilities can unlock significant benefits and add valuable functionality for your organization and your customers alike.

1. (Workflow) Automation

Is your goal to speed up your customer-related business processes and streamline customer interactions? A low-code enabled customer portal offers powerful visual workflow automation tools, allowing you to get tedious tasks off your staff’s desk and accelerate customer service and support processes.

For example, easily build workflows via drag-and-drop through an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to:

Streamline Service Ticket Routing and Resolution: Whenever a customer creates a new service ticket, an automated workflow can route the request to the right individual or team for follow-up. You can also set up workflows to escalate unresolved tickets automatically after a defined timeframe to ensure service quality.
Streamline Order Management: Build workflows that monitor order statuses and send real-time updates to customers via email or SMS. Notifications about shipment, delivery, or potential delays keep customers informed and reduce inquiries. You can also build workflows that allow customers to trigger actions like requesting order changes or returns directly through the portal.
Define Service Level Agreements: Measure the time to complete specific workflow events to define service level agreements. This approach can provide valuable insights into how effectively you're meeting customer expectations and highlight areas for improvement.

2. Data Management

Excellent customer experiences rely on robust data management. However, building a comprehensive architecture that manages and leverages customer data effectively within your portal can be complex and time-consuming.

A customer portal with low-code capabilities supports you with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface, enabling you to define the core data objects vital to your business operations and delineate their relations. This empowers your team to organize and oversee customer-related data with accuracy:

Relationship Mapping: Visualize and establish relationships between data objects effortlessly with an intuitive GUI. By dragging and dropping icons representing customers, service tickets, products, orders, and returns, your staff can understand, define, and expand your data model far more intuitively than when working with traditional text-based configurations. For instance, you can easily link customers with their associated orders or service tickets to provide a comprehensive view of their interactions with your business. Another practical example could be connecting products with their related orders so that you can track inventory levels and sales performance in real-time.
Data Integration: Leverage headless APIs to integrate data from other back-end systems (third-party services like CRM systems, payment gateways, and logistics providers) into your defined objects. This ensures comprehensive data access and a synchronized flow of information across your portal’s ecosystem.
Metadata Enrichment: Enhance the depth of your data by adding additional metadata fields within your defined objects. For example, in a customer portal context, you can include fields such as "product category," "release date," or “customer reviews” for each product object. This enriched metadata facilitates more nuanced analyses, as your staff will benefit from improved filtering, sorting, and reporting capabilities, enabling them to better understand customer preferences and market trends.

3. Content Creation, Personalization, and Branding

Is your current solution lacking when it comes to delivering a unique and personalized experience that reflects your brand? Low-code capabilities can assist you in certain aspects of your site-building and personalization efforts. When creating a customer portal, leverage low-code tools to simplify the following tasks:

Control Branding and Design: Low-code based theme builder tools allow business users to customize colors, fonts, and layouts for your entire site and ensure alignment with your brand identity.
Build, Update, and Personalize Web Experiences: Business users can easily build new pages, update existing web content, or control how content is displayed and how data is sorted with the help of drag-and-drop page builder tools. Users can also customize page layouts and arrange content blocks for optimal user experience and information hierarchy. Then, quickly add text, buttons, animations, and other graphical elements. In addition, business users can easily configure personalized experiences for different user segments.
Empower with Self-Service and Foster Engagement: Use low-code tools to build community forums to enable users to start discussions, share experiences, and ask questions. Provide answers to frequently asked questions by creating searchable knowledge bases that allow users to submit new questions and suggest improvements. Or implement step-by-step product guides with text, images, and embedded videos.
Ensure Mobile Responsiveness: When building your site and pages, low-code enabled page builders come with support for responsive design, ensuring your customer portal looks and functions flawlessly on any device.

The Outcomes: Expect These Results from a Low-Code Enhanced Customer Portal

As underscored by the above use cases, low-code tools can help your non-technical teams make significant improvements to your customer portal quickly without having to rely on IT. Ultimately, this allows you to create better experiences for your customers, too. Beyond the realm of immediate benefits, leveraging low-code for your customer portal sets the stage for long-term outcomes that deliver value to your entire organization:

Accelerated Time-to-Market
Low-code allows your organization to rapidly prototype, test, and deploy new solutions, significantly reducing time-to-market and fostering faster iteration and innovation cycles. Although low-code capabilities don’t necessarily enable the creation of an entire portal from scratch, they do expedite the development process by streamlining tasks like UI design, workflow automation, and data management. This means that you can build a visually appealing and functional customer portal in a fraction of the time (potentially reducing development timelines by 50-90%, according to 451 Research).
Enhanced Agility and Adaptability
With low-code capabilities, you gain the power to continuously adapt and evolve your customer portal to meet changing business needs and user preferences. This agility allows you to respond swiftly to market trends and customer feedback, experiment and iterate quickly, and future-proof your portal.
Improved User Experience
Customer portals that provide low-code tools are designed with both internal teams and end-users in mind, resulting in intuitive and user-friendly interfaces that drive engagement and contribute to higher satisfaction ratings.
Cost Savings and Freed-Up Resources
By streamlining the development process and reducing the need for extensive coding expertise, low-code capabilities can result in significant cost savings, enabling you to allocate resources more efficiently.

Next Steps: Why a Low-Code-Enabled DXP Is the Best Solution for Your Customer Portal Project

If you have a customer portal project coming up, the question you’re likely facing now is: What technology solution or platform is best suited for your needs?

Although "pure" low-code application platforms (LCAP) offer expedited development processes and promise a quick and easy fix for your challenges, there are a number of restrictions and disadvantages that you should be aware of – especially if you compare an LCAP with the “best-of-breed” approach of a digital experience platform (DXP):

Missing Core Functionality
Generic business processes may be easily automated with an LCAP, but a DXP offers a much wider range of core functionality out of the box. For example, capabilities such as a content management system (CMS), digital asset management (DAM), or commerce are typically not available in an LCAP and will have to be integrated.
Integration and Customizability
The main advantage of an LCAP is the ease and speed at which non-technical users can automate business processes. However, LCAPs can present limitations when it comes to advanced customizations and integrations. More intricate modifications and integrations frequently require coding expertise, often surpassing the capabilities of LCAPs. In contrast, composable code-based solutions like DXPs offer greater flexibility and depth in customization and integration possibilities. Why? For one, many DXPs boast flexible connectors or APIs that enable seamless integration with internal databases, CRM systems, and other enterprise software, ensuring data synchronization and a seamless user experience.
Vendor Lock-In and Deployment Options
The goal of an LCAP is to automate business processes across the enterprise. This often entails a vendor lock-in due to an LCAP’s reliance on proprietary user interfaces. This means you can only configure and customize the platform using the vendor's specific tools and interfaces, making switching providers difficult and restricting your future options. In contrast, DXPs mitigate vendor lock-in by providing open and extensible architectures, empowering organizations with greater control over their digital solutions.
In addition, LCAPs are usually SaaS only, limiting deployment flexibility for organizations with specific hosting requirements or regulatory constraints. With DXPs, you can find vendors that offer PaaS and Self-Hosted deployment as well, catering to diverse organizational needs and preferences.

In an era of heightened digital expectations, the synergy between a DXP's comprehensive features, flexibility, and low-code capabilities can help organizations unlock agility, scalability, and innovation.

Conclusion

Still not convinced that low-code can act as the catalyst for organizational success in an ever-evolving digital ecosystem? Here's an analogy: Think of low-code as a high-performance engine with inherent benefits: powerful, efficient, and versatile. Building a customer portal is like putting that engine in a car. The car (portal) can achieve various outcomes like faster speeds (customer engagement) and reduced fuel consumption (support cost reduction), but these depend on factors beyond the engine. The overall design and features of the car ultimately determine its performance and impact.

Making sure your customer portal comes with low-code capabilities is essential if you need to think long-term about your customer portal project. By leveraging low-code, your business can accelerate development, increase flexibility, and improve the overall user experience of your customer portal. Additionally, low-code enables your organization to digitize and automate key business processes within the customer portal, driving operational efficiency and delivering tangible business value.

Are you ready to build a powerful, low-code enabled customer portal that supports you in running more efficient business operations enhanced by automation and intelligence? Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) provides a number of low-code capabilities out of the box. Whether you want to collect and share data, generate and distribute reports, or build a system to track and handle issues and requests, our low-code solutions can help you streamline business operations without relying on IT support.

With Liferay DXP, you don’t have to compromise on your business requirements for your customer portal. Instead, create powerful solutions that look and function the way you envision on the world's most flexible DXP.

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Customer Portals with Liferay DXP: Supporting Capabilities and Features

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Maximizing Employee Value at Škoda Auto

2025-05-29T20:43:56Z

Škoda Auto, the Czech carmaker was founded in 1895, when it started making bicycles under the Laurin & Klement brand (named after its founders Václav Laurin and Václav Klement). Their first car was produced in 1905. In 1991, Škoda Auto became a part of the renowned Volkswagen Group. Since then, the car manufacturer from Mladá Boleslav has developed from a regional market leader into a dynamically growing global player that is active in more than 100 markets worldwide. Škoda celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2020, making it one of the oldest companies in the industry.

We had the opportunity to talk to Martin Šedivý, Product Portfolio Owner at Škoda Auto. He is mainly responsible for the Škoda Space Employee Portal, which is used by more than 40,000 people. In his role, Martin Šedivý acts like an entrepreneur within Škoda, bringing together different stakeholders, gathering information, defining needs, developing a vision, and finally implementing it – all to provide maximum value to customers.

Q: What projects has Škoda implemented with Liferay?

Martin: Škoda has implemented 2 projects with Liferay. First, the Škoda Space Employee Portal. Secondly, a platform for a more effective creation of public, non-profit Škoda websites.

The Škoda Space Employee Portal serves more than 40,000 people, from factory workers to office specialists in various fields to top managers. To fulfill its purpose, it needs to functionally merge dozens of integrations, hundreds of applications, and thousands of information pages, as well as corporate communications. We managed the project in an agile way – one of the first times at Škoda –, relying on local hardware solutions for security and integration reasons.

The public non-profit websites project emerged from a situation where the websites of Škoda Museum, Škoda Polyclinic, and Škoda Vocational School needed to move to new platforms due to a functional redesign. We thought ahead and instead of a simple migration of the three websites, we launched an initiative to build a platform that would allow new websites to be launched quickly (weeks instead of years) and following Škoda rules (security, authentication, CI/CD, etc.).

Q: Let's talk about the Škoda Space Employee Portal. Why did you initiate the project in the first place?

Martin: We initiated the new Škoda Space Employee Portal due to a combination of factors: The previous system was no longer suitable. It was too complicated and too costly to operate. We also had to deal with the increasing complexity of the digital employee environment and wanted to make it as easy as possible for every employee to access the Employee Portal from any device.

Q: What were your goals?

Martin: Our primary goal was to provide the greatest possible benefit to our employees and improve their user experience. The complex environment made this a challenge – we have 40,000 employees, more than 300 user groups with different needs, and over 700 applications and we run dozens of systems and integrations.
That is why we wanted to build a portal where everything – such as relevant information as well as employee tasks and processes – is in one place and accessible to everyone, from factory workers to top management. It needed to be easily accessible, simple to use, and secure for all of them.

Q: Why did you ultimately choose Liferay?

Martin: We looked at many different solutions and did a lot of research and product comparisons. In the end, we chose Liferay because it was the best fit for our needs and requirements – it's a robust platform with lots of features that are ready to be used out of the box. At the same time, it offers the flexibility to connect with other existing systems – including our core systems – and to customize and change them according to our needs.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about the implementation process?

Martin: It was a really complex project. We opted for an agile scrum approach. We also gathered a large group of stakeholders from across the company to help us work out the requirements and test the system. We worked in constant iterations, with very quick feedback loops between us and key user groups to constantly confirm that we were moving in the right direction with the new portal.

Q: How did the Škoda employees react to the new portal?

Martin: That was also a bit of a challenge and required a certain amount of, shall we say, change management. A company is a closed market. In a traditional competitive market, if a product doesn't fit or you don't like it, you can simply switch to a competitor. In a closed market, this is not possible and therefore requires a specific approach. If you offer a complex solution, it delivers added value for most, but not for all users. This is of crucial importance. As a result, some users might not like the new solution because it does not meet all their specific needs, while others will accept it immediately. And that's something you have to get to grips with. That's why we've invested a lot in training our employees about the new portal so that they know how to work with it and recognize the benefits. We also didn't present a finished product but MVP (minimum viable product) and communicated that there is always room for further improvement. Our employees had the opportunity to provide feedback. This way, we were able to dispel many uncertainties.

Q: Looking back on the entire project, what would you recommend to other project managers to make their project implementation a success?

Martin: First of all, be open-minded and don't just look at the provision of features and functionalities. Focus on everything that offers added value for your end customers. Don't make the mistake of digitizing the "paper world", but create a new and better digital version of it. Technology in itself is great, but it needs to be set up in such a way that it brings maximum benefit to the people who use it. Secondly, don't be afraid to remove or redesign features that aren't proving useful. And finally, educate your users and allow them to provide feedback. This is important and will improve acceptance and engagement with your solution.

Q: Where are you today?

Martin: We are successful and serve more than 17,000 different employees every day and almost 40,000 a month. 72% of our employee content is now consumed directly via the Employee Portal. Our focus now is on creating high-quality content, implementing AI into our search, maximizing collaboration with other systems and platforms, and delivering it to our customers through the portal.

Q: What is the typical user experience for your solution?

Martin: It depends on the users. We have employees who might just want to check their payroll through the system. Others use it daily to get the latest news and access relevant information. And it also serves as a gateway to other systems. In total, we have over 300 different user groups, and we customize the portal and its content to meet their needs.

Q: What are the biggest challenges for the automotive industry in terms of digitalization?

Martin: I can't speak for the company, but in my area of expertise it's certainly about complexity, time to market, and not always following every trend. You have to know your customers' needs and offer solutions that maximize value, without forgetting that it's not possible to deliver everything and serve everyone.

Are you interested in learning more about how to build an intranet that provides maximum value to your employees? Learn more here or request a demo of Liferay DXP.

How Integration with GenAI Can Streamline Content Creation in Liferay

2025-05-29T20:31:29Z

With so many great solutions at our fingertips, it’s an exciting time to be working in technology. New Generative AI (GenAI) tools like Google Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT are great examples of innovative technologies that can transform entire industries by automating complex tasks, fostering creativity, and enhancing decision-making processes.

In fact, the ways GenAI can be used are almost limitless. That’s why I’m excited to introduce the Liferay OpenAI Content Wizard and talk about how this project, created using the front-end JavaScript library React, came to life.

Setting the Stage

Maybe you think integrating GenAI into your current technical landscape will be too complex or costly of a task. The opposite is actually true. This is the story of how I went from being new to GenAI and just tinkering with an idea to building a helpful tool with over a dozen GenAI integrations made for Liferay’s Headless APIs. These integrations can create content for a fraction of a penny, and we’re happy to share them with the Liferay community.

Options seen within the Liferay OpenAI Content Wizard React project

Many people think GenAI’s uses only extend as far as creating content like blogs or articles quickly. From our own experience, however, we’ve seen teams use GenAI to take existing content from one group or department and turn it into something useful for another group or audience altogether. Here’s an example: say you have promotional materials for services intended for an adult audience. You can use GenAI to adapt that content into informational or educational materials for children ages 5-18. It’s just as easy to translate existing content into a different language, too.

Liferay already supports both tasks, offering tone selection in our out-of-the-box (OOTB) GenAI content integration as well as integration with automatic translation providers to ease the translation process. With a single click of a button, for instance, you can translate a full article or page into the language you need. You can also configure Liferay to tag content and images automatically through OOTB AI integrations.

From Text to Images to Data Structures

We’ve discussed text generation, so what about images? Image generation is easy to do, as well: the user just has to type in a prompt, no additional technical knowledge required. Stay tuned for OOTB image generation in Liferay for our Documents and Media feature. (Documents and Media is Liferay’s file storage and management application.)

When properly integrated, GenAI can also be used to create complex data structures like commerce products, page hierarchies, knowledge bases, and custom data sets. Liferay supports a visual, low-code approach to data structures that builds a full set of Headless APIs automatically.

I’m pretty proud of a recent project I worked on, where we integrated GenAI with Liferay’s Headless APIs for a custom data structure to generate data sets of a list of counties and populations within a region in a matter of seconds. And here’s the great thing: this functionality applies to any number of topics or themes.

I’ve mentioned the term Headless a few times. If you don’t know what that means, here’s some context: a Headless application separates the presentation layer and its associated tools from the other main functional components of any given software platform. That means that, for any platform that supports Headless, you can use the best presentation technology for a specific use case. For example, the built-in interface tools of your CMS may be fantastic for creating and maintaining your corporate website and eCommerce store, but not as great at developing a native mobile app or for creating targeted social media offers.

In addition, more and more businesses need to integrate with IoT devices and touchpoints that require specialized connections and user interfaces. With a Headless-friendly platform, you can use the best option while remaining flexible for integration purposes. Read more about the benefits of Headless technology here.

The Idea Forms…

My team builds Liferay demos to share the story of Liferay with both prospects and customers. Because Liferay can be deployed and implemented in countless ways, every demo has the unique challenge of showcasing our extensive toolbox in ways that relate to each specific business’s wants and needs.

When we’re generating content in Liferay, we use content that matches the right vertical, provided services, and expected outcomes. No “lorem ipsum” placeholder text here! This takes a lot of time and effort, and complex structures like products, knowledge bases, or message boards often require even more research to create a result that feels authentic and truly demonstrates Liferay’s potential.

In the past, we had to use data imports and scripts to build content in Liferay. Scripts improved our efficiency by avoiding manual data entry, but they required tech skills to edit. So we asked ourselves: What if we integrated GenAI with Liferay’s extensive Headless APIs?

The Liferay OpenAI Product Generator

By now, you’ve probably heard of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research organization that has developed several large language models and advanced image generation models, including ChatGPT.

Using a few common development technologies, we made a simple Product Generator interface that teams can use to create initial example content quickly in Liferay. This interface allows users to enter an OpenAI prompt and receive product details based on the information in the prompt. The generated content is possible because of an integration key with OpenAI.

Product Creation within the Liferay OpenAI Content Wizard React project

Once OpenAI generates product details, we pass them along to Liferay’s Headless endpoints to load into the system, meaning we can create products much faster than before. Images take a little bit longer, about 6-10 seconds per image. Compared to our previous process, however, we’ve saved a massive amount of time generating content this way rather than gathering and loading the content manually.

Products created using a Liferay/OpenAI content integration

Make an Impact with GenAI Images

One of the ways we were excited to test GenAI was by creating images based on a description. At first, this seemed intimidating, but the process is actually just as simple as text generation: you write a description of what you want and what model you want to use. OpenAI uses two excellent image generation models, DALL·E-2 and DALL·E-3.

Going back to the Product Generator example above, we’ve given the user the option of choosing the image generation model and selecting the image style as well. We also provide a calculated cost of the generation based on the number of images.

At $0.04 per image, DALL·E-3 is slightly more expensive than DALL·E-2 at $0.02, but the difference in cost is ultimately not significant, and DALL·E-3 is better at creating more realistic human depictions and images based on art styles.

For instance, you could choose one particular art style to create images with a specific look for long-term consistency and adherence to brand guidelines. We suggest style prompts like “Vector Art,” “Photorealism,” “Flat Design,” ”Pixel Art,” or “Digital Impressionism” to get you started, but it’s up to you to decide what’s best for your business.

Blogs created using a Liferay/OpenAI content integration with a “Flat Design” image style

Leveraging GenAI for Liferay Objects and Custom Schemas

In the realm of streamlined data structure creation, Liferay’s OOTB feature “Liferay Objects” stands out as a low-code tool capable of automatically generating Headless API endpoints for each schema you define in the system without additional development. GenAI works well in this context, too. As I mentioned, we recently created a custom data structure to create a list of counties, capitals, and populations.

For this integration, we provide a user interface where the data set can expand to as many fields as needed. The user specifies the list of field names and descriptions, as some of the fields can be optional, and indicates which Liferay API endpoint to call to populate the data set. When the user makes changes in the interface, the schema request to OpenAI should be updated as well.

UI for a Liferay/OpenAI content integration with Liferay Objects

This integration was able to populate a custom schema with records in just 10 seconds.

The flexibility of these integrations and potential outcomes is exciting. Another recent example involves generating a list of sample recipes complete with instructions, cook times, cook temperatures, and ingredients.

Custom Liferay Object records that were generated using a Liferay/OpenAI content integration

Fast Content Creation with the Liferay OpenAI Content Wizard

The Liferay OpenAI Content Wizard tool is available on GitHub. The tool can help generate over a dozen content types in Liferay, offering countless opportunities to leverage AI tools.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Are you as excited as we are about the power of GenAI integrations with Liferay? We’d love to hear your story! Email us at sales@liferay.com or send us a DM on LinkedIn to let us know your thoughts.

We’re continuing to invest in integrations with these technologies, and some of the best updates have come from incorporating customer feedback on features, like the importance of language support. The new language support feature of the Liferay OpenAI Content Wizard has enabled teams to create a multi-lingual FAQ section on a topic in mere seconds.

Let’s keep innovating and build great things, together!

Behind the Code is a new blog series featuring the insider expertise of Liferay gurus on topics like new technology trends, the latest and greatest feature updates, and more.

Author: Wes Kempa, Lead Sales Engineer, Liferay

Header image generated using OpenAI's DALL·E-3

11 Building Blocks for a High-Performing Supplier Portal

2025-06-27T17:45:28Z

A supplier portal, sometimes called a supplier platform or a vendor portal, is a solution that acts as a digital home for your supply network. Supplier portals provide visibility into everything from invoicing and payment to supplier data and status. They act as a one-stop shop for relationship management, capable of delivering value to your entire business in a number of ways.

Here’s a look at the building blocks every supplier portal should have and how to choose the right one for your needs.

Benefits of a Supplier Portal

There’s no doubt that the adoption of business-to-business (B2B) self-service commerce has expanded rapidly, particularly since the pandemic and related supply chain disruptions. In fact, the global B2B eCommerce market is estimated to reach USD 33,317.37 billion by 2030, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 20.2%.

But there are more aspects to B2B Commerce than you may have considered. When most companies think of eCommerce, they view it in the context of a better and more efficient way to sell to their customers, whether they are consumers or other businesses. However, to bring even greater efficiency to their organizations, large retailers, wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers are also looking for more effective methods of supplier management — like, for example, through a supplier portal.

Main benefits of a supplier portal include:

Digitization & Automation: Digitizing business processes is an essential success factor in today's market – and a prerequisite for eliminating manual tasks. A supplier portal allows you to digitize and automate procurement and payment processes, improving data accessibility and ensuring digital accuracy at every turn.
Communication & Visibility: When every supplier record, purchase order, request, and conversation exists in a single place, communication is faster and clearer. Plus, it’s easier to review and respond to supplier quality issues.
Efficiency & Optimization: Whether you’re managing the onboarding of new suppliers or improving invoice processing, a supplier portal allows you to start re-defining your existing workflows to boost efficiency across all your supplier relations. This includes offering self-service capabilities for each supplier profile.

Most Important Building Blocks for a Supplier Portal

Your supplier portal should allow you to speed up processes and communicate fast and efficiently, enabling you to quickly adapt to changing market dynamics. The following building blocks will help you accomplish this:

1. A self-service knowledge base that makes it easy for your suppliers to understand your purchasing process and the kinds of benefits they can realize by doing business with you.

2. An easy and efficient self-service onboarding process for new suppliers.

3. The capability to upload product-related data to your MDM/PIM database.

4. The ability to request quotes, capture order responses, and track their status to see if an order has been accepted or rejected.

5. Access to your campaign planning system and calendars to create, manage, and assess how products and promotions are performing.

6. Access to timely and relevant financial information such as Accounts Payable status, invoice tracking, performance against contracts, etc.

7. Visibility into EDI transactions to showcase metrics like fulfillment time and accuracy.

8. The ability to automatically route requests for information or approvals to the correct department or individual and to receive real-time status updates.

9. Document upload and management for regulatory and supplier health-related content.

10. A single simplified sign-on that gives suppliers access to any systems with which they need to interact.

11. Strong user and identity management that enables access control for each supplier account.

Although a supplier portal may be functional without any one of the above building blocks, it may not deliver everything you need to reap the potential benefits. If you want to get the most out of your supplier portal, search for a software solution that unites all of these.

Choosing a Supplier Portal: What to Look For

When looking for a supplier portal, you want to ensure you have the right functionality for both present and future needs. Make sure to prioritize:

Scalability
You may prefer to start small by making sure your solution offers the basics, such as self-service onboarding for new suppliers or a supplier knowledge base. However, your portal needs to be able to easily scale over time to accommodate more suppliers and applications. Pay attention to any additional costs you may incur when adding more users or additional functionality.

Flexibility
It's easy to be dazzled by a features demo of portal solutions. But you also need to be sure your portal platform can adapt to your needs as they change in the future. Ask your IT experts to evaluate the proposed solution to make sure it fits in with your overall digital ecosystem and offers the tools to grow.

CMS
Offering accurate and up-to-date information directly to suppliers is essential if you want to facilitate communication and collaboration. Content management capabilities help you provide a single repository for information by enabling you to create and manage content, such as web pages, blog posts, and wiki articles.

Digital Asset Management
We may live in a largely paperless world, but you'll still need to manage a range of different content types, including spreadsheets, PDFs, images, videos, Word docs, forms, government and health certifications, shipping documents, and more.

Search
An enterprise-level search capability is essential to help your users navigate your portal and quickly find the information they need. For example, refining search results on FAQ pages and knowledge bases using filters, such as categories, tags, and other metadata attributes, will greatly improve the user experience, helping suppliers to handle and resolve more straightforward issues on their own.

Personalized User Dashboards
Different categories of suppliers and individual users need to access information unique to their product type, user type, or vendor status. Your portal should be able to support dashboards that make it easy for every user account to find and view general information, role-specific data, and more. For instance, someone in your supplier's accounting department will need a much different view than someone in the sales or logistics team.

Integration Capabilities
A good supplier portal enables integrations with external technologies through native connectors, APIs, and other integration tools. Bring together existing systems to surface information such as the status of purchase orders, inventory levels, or number of open tickets, all from within the portal.

Automated Workflows
One of the advantages of an enterprise portal platform is the ability to create automated workflows to optimize routine processes. For instance, you can create a workflow to capture and track the progress of purchase orders, setting an SLA to trigger automatic reminders for suppliers if there is no response within five business days. And in the case of an invoice requiring updates, suppliers should be able to request changes directly within the portal, eliminating the need for phone calls or email communication.

User Experience Management
It’s critical to create a positive user experience that includes logical journeys with simple navigation. Ideally, your supplier portal unites all the sites and systems that suppliers and internal teams use under one login and password (single sign-on), helping both parties save time. In addition, the portal platform you choose should offer low-code capabilities to business users, allowing them to make changes that affect the user experience without needing to involve IT teams.

Get Started with Your Customized Supplier Portal

As the global supply chain grows more complicated and business partnerships increase reliance on self-service solutions, a good supplier portal will become particularly important. Aside from improved visibility and communication, these solutions put you in charge of real-time supplier relationship management, making the supplier portal an important channel to digitize all relevant interactions and monitor them on a single platform.

An effective supplier portal, therefore, needs to sit on top of your existing systems as a window to what is happening on the back-end. To achieve this, build your supplier portal with a flexible solution, like a digital experience platform (DXP).

A DXP is enterprise software that provides the foundation for companies to deliver connected, contextualized digital experiences across multiple touchpoints for the entire customer journey. DXPs provide capabilities out-of-the-box to support and accelerate the composition, management, and optimization of digital experiences. But what sets DXPs apart is their ability to integrate with other technologies and act as an interface to surface relevant data.

Ready to see for yourself? Here’s what a Supplier Portal built with Liferay DXP can do: www.liferay.com/supplier-portals.

Rethinking Content Management Systems: How Generative AI and LLMs Are Leading the Way

2025-05-29T20:57:07Z

Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) are playing a revolutionary role in transforming Content Management Systems (CMS). This transformation is more than a mere trend; it represents a fundamental shift in the way we conceive, manage, and personalize digital content. In this blog, we’ll explore the profound impact of these technologies as well as the ethical imperatives involved in navigating this new landscape.

In a way, we’re heading into a technological renaissance, where the benefits are numerous but so are the pitfalls. So what does the future hold for this brave new world?

Streamlined Brilliance: The Power of AI-Driven Content Creation

Generative AI and LLMs are the architects of streamlined brilliance. They have the potential to virtually eliminate much of the friction of content creation and drive productivity to previously unimagined heights:

Effortless Content Generation: Imagine creating content without the usual barriers. Generative AI and LLMs enable content to flow seamlessly from conception to reality. The efficiency shift is monumental. For instance, GitHub’s Copilot has already shown how AI can assist in coding, suggesting the potential in other content domains.
User-Centric Personalization: AI-powered CMS platforms are crafting uniquely personalized user experiences. By understanding individual preferences, these systems deliver content that resonates on a personal level, making traditional segmentation methods seem antiquated.
Simplified SEO: The often complex world of SEO becomes more transparent with AI. By deciphering search engine algorithms, AI ensures content gains visibility and prominence.

Navigating Challenges: Upholding Simplicity in the Digital Age

However, simplicity does not come without its unique set of challenges:

The Pursuit of Authenticity: AI-generated content, though impressive, raises questions about authenticity. Striking a balance between genuine human expression and AI-generated artistry becomes an interplay of creativity and ethics. The use of DeepFakes, for example, has shown how high-quality fake content can pose ethical dilemmas. One artist has recently produced a series of convincing images of historical figures taking selfies. The Mahatma Gandhi selfie is particularly funny, and it's obviously not real. But what happens when it isn't obvious that something AI-generated is fake?
Evolution of Roles: As AI takes on more content creation tasks, roles in the content ecosystem are evolving. Content managers become curators and guides, escorting users through the content landscape by architecting journeys and guiding experiences.
Ethical Considerations: Ethical challenges are emerging as AI becomes more prevalent in content creation. Maintaining transparency and integrity is crucial in upholding trust and ethical standards.

A Glimpse of Tomorrow: A Future Rooted in Simplicity and Innovation

So what’s in store for the future?

Short-Term Future (1-5 years):

The Era of Seamless Integration: AI content will merge indistinguishably with human-authored material, enhancing user engagement.
Virtual Content Partners: AI will become a collaborator, aiding in narrative development and experience tailoring.
Reimagined Privacy: Given AI-driven data collection, privacy will remain paramount, with users gaining more control over their data.

Long-Term Future (5+ years):

AI in Creative Arenas: AI will extend its influence to creative fields, leading to new forms of literature, art, and music. Just as sampling changed music forever in the ’90’s, so AI will in the next few decades.
AI's Educational Role: AI will revolutionize education with personalized and adaptive learning experiences, potentially tailoring learning paths that are unique to each and every student.
AI-Penned Narratives: AI will become a predominant storyteller across various domains.
AI Digital Companion: AI will evolve into a personal companion, understanding individual needs and intentions with precision.

The Ethical Imperative: Navigating the AI Frontier

As we navigate these uncharted waters of AI-driven content management, ethical considerations must guide us. Ethical AI in CMS encompasses various facets, each essential for the responsible development and deployment of these transformative technologies.

Transparency and Accountability

Transparency forms the cornerstone of ethical AI in CMS. Users have the right to know when they are interacting with AI-generated content. Content creators and managers must clearly disclose AI's involvement in content generation. Furthermore, mechanisms should be in place to hold those responsible for AI content accountable for its quality and accuracy.

For instance, if a news article is partially or fully generated by AI, it should be clearly indicated. Content managers should also maintain a record of AI-generated content, allowing for auditing and quality control.

Guarding Against Bias

Bias is an insidious presence that can haunt AI-driven content creation. AI models are trained on vast datasets that inevitably carry inherent biases from the source data. To ensure ethical content management, organizations must actively mitigate bias in AI-generated content.

This involves continuous monitoring of AI-generated content to detect and rectify biases. Content creators should be trained to recognize and challenge AI-generated content that perpetuates stereotypes, discrimination, or misinformation.

User Privacy and Data Security

Respecting user privacy and safeguarding data security are non-negotiable aspects of ethical AI in CMS. AI systems often require access to user data for personalization and content recommendations. However, this data must be handled with the utmost care and in compliance with privacy regulations.

Organizations must implement robust data protection measures, anonymize user data wherever possible, and offer users clear and accessible privacy controls. Transparency regarding data collection and usage is paramount in order to establish trust between users and CMS platforms.

Human Oversight and Responsibility

Although AI is a powerful tool, it should not operate in isolation. Human oversight remains critical to ensuring that AI-generated content aligns with ethical standards and organizational values. Content managers and creators must maintain an active role in supervising AI systems and intervening when necessary.

Additionally, organizations should invest in ongoing AI ethics training for their teams. Educating content creators and managers about the ethical implications of AI is vital for responsible content management.

Conclusion: Navigating the Complex Waters of Ethical AI in CMS

In this journey through the AI-shaped digital landscape, ethical considerations become our guiding star. While AI offers unparalleled potential for innovation and efficiency, it also presents ethical challenges that demand our attention. (And we only considered the relatively narrow field of Generative AI, not the possibilities of Artificial General Intelligence.)

By prioritizing transparency, combating bias, respecting privacy, and maintaining human oversight, we can navigate towards a future where AI in CMS not only enhances efficiency but actually upholds the values of integrity, authenticity, and user trust.

Note: In keeping with the theme, this blog post was co-authored with Chat GPT-4.

Are you interested in how you can leverage AI using Liferay DXP's powerful CMS capabilities? Request a demo here.

How to Make Client Portals a Competitive Advantage in Financial Services

2025-05-29T20:32:59Z

Self-service client portals offer financial customers convenient 24/7 access to a wealth of information and essential services – all consolidated onto a single, user-friendly platform. This streamlined access ensures customers only engage with live support from representatives when specific assistance is required to resolve more complex problems.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg for client portals. It's important to recognize that the potential of client portals extends far beyond this user-friendly surface layer. Are you ready to delve deeper and uncover the many possibilities they offer?

Let's embark on a CX expedition into the world of client portals to explore the full spectrum of their capabilities in the following infographic.

How prepared are you to captain a next-gen client portal? We’re ready to help.
Read the complimentary Gartner report Support Financial Empowerment to Transform Customer Service Into Growth to get prepared for the next stage of your CX journey.

Share this infographic on your site by downloading the full resolution image or the PDF version.

Supply Chain Digital Transformation: The What, Why, and How

2025-05-29T21:00:16Z

Years of unprecedented supply chain disruptions have dramatically altered discussions around the future of manufacturing. Now, manufacturers are rethinking supply chain operations in ways that might have seemed impossible not too long ago.

For many, the solution has been digitization — using predictive analytics, data management, generative AI, and other updated or entirely new technology in the supply chain process. To make this possible, however, manufacturers must understand three key things about supply chain digital transformation: why it matters, what it looks like, and how to start.

Here’s what you need to know.

What is Digital Transformation?

Digital transformation, sometimes called digitization, is the process of identifying, implementing, and utilizing digital technology in an area that didn’t previously take full advantage of it. There are different methods of transformation, from taking small steps and adopting one new solution at a time to completing workflow-, department-, or company-wide overhauls. For digital transformation to be successful, it must include elements of both procedural and cultural shifts; after all, technology is only effective when it’s actually used.

Supply chain digital transformation is just one example of this process, but it’s a vital one. Such projects can impact everything from supply chain planning and operational efficiency to customer experience and longevity. When digitization is successful, the traditional supply chain may no longer be recognizable — and in a world where efficient evolution is key, that’s good news for manufacturers.

Examples of supply chain optimization through digitization include:

Timing: Production delays, product shortages, and shifting lead times slow the traditional supply chain. Digitization, however, can help reduce these disruptions by improving overall supply chain visibility and helping you anticipate potential issues, allowing you to take control of timing across the board.
Expenses: Without the right technology, it’s difficult to keep track of quickly-changing costs, let alone plan for or minimize them. Digital transformation helps elevate your supply chain management techniques to allocate resources more efficiently, identify and minimize unnecessary costs, and more.
Relationship management: Everything from time zone shifts to differing priorities can complicate various relationships across the supply chain. Supply chain digital transformation allows you to communicate more effectively using digital technology like manufacturing portals, helping keep all stakeholders informed in real time. Information is always available and up-to-date, so decisions can be made without delay, and priorities are always clear.
Big data management: The supply chain creates massive amounts of data every day. Improved digital capabilities give you the tools you need to manage that data, inform your analytics processes, and turn raw information into actionable insights.

It’s important to note that the manufacturing industry can and does leverage digital transformation outside of supply chain management. However, if these projects aren’t completed concurrently, or if the idea of a digital supply chain is left out entirely, the resulting workflows can be disjointed — and the effects can include declining supplier relationships, increased production costs, and more.

The good news is that transforming the manufacturing industry to put the focus on the supply chain is possible with the right digital technology — and, of course, the right priorities.

Benefits of Supply Chain Digital Transformation

Despite the importance of digitization across the entire manufacturing industry, the truth is that organizations have limited budgets and must prioritize their upgrades, improvements, and evolutions. So why should digital supply chain transformation belong at the top of that list?

Here are just a few ways entire organizations and the global supply chain can benefit from meaningful digitization:

Cost-effectiveness: No organization within the supply chain, from raw material suppliers to end customers, can afford to waste money on guesswork. Supply chain digital transformation helps each business use key performance indicators and the proper data analytics to identify and overcome problems, optimize processes, track costs, and more. This helps create stronger, more accurate budgets.
Efficiency: Extra steps lead to wasted time and a higher potential for human error. When big data, advanced analytics, machine learning, and other technologies are at the forefront of a company’s approach, it’s easier to improve efficiency without cutting corners.
Simplicity: The more complex the supply chain becomes, the more difficult it is for manufacturers to deliver on customer expectations. Digital supply chain transformation simplifies otherwise burdensome processes to empower each individual player. This simplification extends to the onboarding process. By efficiently validating and approving suppliers, creating step-by-step journeys based on segments and user roles, and curating information and resources according to their needs, you can make onboarding less time-consuming and costly.
Resilience: When supply chains are digitized, they’re more resilient. That’s because digital supply chain management benefits from improved visibility, clearer communication, stronger analytics, and better relationships — all things that help manufacturers and supply chain partners do their work more effectively.
Confidence: Digital technology like supplier portals enables better, faster decision-making and stronger supplier relationships, minimizing confusion and uncertainty. No manufacturer can completely eliminate delays, complications, and unforeseen issues, but with increased supply chain visibility and efficiency, you’ll know how to communicate with suppliers and accurately plan around any problems that do occur.
Customer satisfaction: When supply chain planning is at its best, every stakeholder can operate with the utmost efficiency — and this leads to a better experience for end customers. Accurate delivery estimates minimize delays, and reliably excellent products are just a few ways consumers can see the value of a well-managed supply chain.

While supply chain planning should be at the forefront of your digital transformation project, it’s important to remember there are other areas where digitization can benefit your manufacturing operation. In the same way that neglecting the supply chain can jeopardize the value of digital transformation, focusing too much on this single element can lead to diminishing returns.

For example, placing sensors to gather machine data can help inform and empower your factory floor analytics, giving you the information you need to simplify production procedures. This doesn’t just save time and reduce human error; it also indirectly supports the entire supply chain by helping you better understand your needs and challenges, as well as how your partner relationships can be structured to help with both.

Planning Your Digital Transformation Journey

Digitization must support the entire organization before it can support the supply chain. As such, you need to carefully consider your company’s first steps — one of which should be choosing a manufacturing portal.

Manufacturing portals act as the framework for digital transformation because they allow you to focus on large-scale supply chain considerations and day-to-day operations on the same platform. You’ll be empowered to simplify supplier relationships, perform key analytics processes, allocate resources, and more — all in one place.

As you plan this portion of supply chain digitization, keep in mind that some features may be more important than others. For example, a high-performing supplier portal should act as a single interface to support, streamline, and even automate all related interactions, including tailored workflows for purchase orders, invoice changes, and more.

Once your manufacturing portal is up and running, you can begin structuring your digital transformation project based on what has worked for other supply chain leaders. Here are just two examples:

Dealer Portal

MacDon, a leading manufacturer of agricultural equipment, doubled site visitors across more than 1,000 dealers after upgrading their dealer portal. With the improved system, users can check inventory, submit warranty claims, and perform other tasks that help streamline the supply chain and increase sales.

Self-Service Solution

Manufacturer of building materials Mueller, Inc. chose self-service functionality to address supply chain challenges. As a result, customers can interact more smoothly with the manufacturer, creating customized quotes that make it easier for internal stakeholders to accurately allocate resources.

Take the First Step Toward Supply Chain Transformation

Supply chain optimization is an absolute necessity in today’s complex manufacturing environment. As ongoing disruption creates new challenges, it becomes increasingly important for manufacturers to digitize their approach — not just to better serve their customers but to accurately and reliably perform their role in the overall supply chain.

While supply chain planning demands a key role in digital transformation, however, it’s far from the only consideration. Solutions must include functionality that helps digitize the entire manufacturing process from beginning to end — and that’s where digital technology, like partner portals, can be utilized for maximum efficiency.

Flexible, reliable, and capable of taking different forms depending on your needs, manufacturing partner portals (which are one form of a manufacturing portal) are the perfect first step toward digital transformation. They don’t just digitize supply chain management; they help you take advantage of your strengths to perform better in a challenging environment.

If you’re ready for a digital transformation solution that puts the focus on supply chain management without jeopardizing other processes, it’s time to explore Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform. Get started today.

You're already eying a supplier portal solution and would like to learn how a supplier portal with the right building blocks can take your business to the next level? Check out our blog post "11 Building Blocks for a High-Performing Supplier Portal".

Manufacturing Q&A: 5 Reasons Your Business Needs a Customer Portal

2025-05-29T20:43:34Z

In today’s competitive market, manufacturers have to overcome a number of obstacles before they can successfully offer efficient and seamless digital experiences to both their customers and employees. But there’s a solution to these obstacles, one that:

Integrates and unifies disconnected systems and tools
Simplifies and digitizes processes
Adapts your products and services to ever-changing customer demands

If designed correctly, customer portals can help streamline your business operations while delivering the self-service functionality your clients have come to expect. The result is a unified, convenient experience with integration and automation tools that can help accelerate workflows and propel your business forward.

If you, as a manufacturer, are still not convinced about the advantages of a customer portal for your manufacturing company, take a look at this infographic which answers a number of questions you may have.

Want to discover more about how to design a solution that can make your customers and service teams more efficient? Check out our guide, Maximizing Efficiency: 6 Best Practices for Manufacturing Customer Portals.

Share this infographic on your site by downloading the full resolution image or the PDF version.

Top 10 Customer Portal Trends

2025-05-29T21:03:37Z

Keeping customers happy is essential to maintaining a healthy business. But recent disruptions like the global pandemic and economic uncertainty have made that harder than ever to achieve as customers expect more out of their digital solutions. To meet these changing demands, organizations need to have the tools and processes in place to support the customer experience from end to end.

Too often, however, companies lack adequate tools or use a disparate patchwork of tools, which creates a disjointed and frustrating user experience. So, what’s the solution? To empower your clients and customer-facing teams with a modern customer portal.

What Are Customer Portals?

A customer portal serves as a central location for your customers to access all the tools and information they need to manage their accounts and take full advantage of your company’s products or services. These spaces are usually private and secured through a customer login.

Customer portal software is designed to enhance the user experience by:

Providing self-service features to help customers update their personal information, manage their own orders and returns, or schedule a service request.
Personalizing what your customer sees in one view so that everything related to their purchase, such as documentation, order information, and announcements, is easy to access.
Helping users quickly get to the content they're looking for through a relevant knowledge base, community forum, or tailored list of search results.

How Can a Customer Portal Support Your Digital Customer Experience Strategy?

Not only does a customer service portal empower users to find what they’re looking for or resolve an issue without agent assistance, but it also frees up your staff to focus on higher-priority tasks. Additionally, it can help you track user behavior on your site so that you can improve customer experience over time. For example, your portal can use the data to automatically recommend complementary products or services to your customers and deliver more relevant content as they navigate through your site.

Ultimately, the right online customer portal should have the tools and functionality you need to make your internal teams and your customers more efficient.

But not all customer portals are built the same. To create an optimized, seamless digital experience and serve more clients while using fewer resources, every customer portal software should:

Centralize your systems to create an easy-to-access self-service platform.
Provide publishing tools to ensure content is up to date.
Enable your team to launch improvements over time.

Ebook:

5 Ways a Customer Portal Can Help Your Teams and Customers Be More Efficient

Read our ebook to learn more about the customer portal building blocks that help your team maximize efficiency

Download Now >

Top 10 Trends in Customer Experience

This is only a fraction of what a great customer portal solution is capable of. When it comes to meeting the demands of the modern customer, you might wonder what others in the market are doing and which trends you should consider implementing yourself. Here are 10 of the top trends we’re seeing in the customer service portal and digital experience spaces:

1. Customers Expect Greater Personalization

For the past decade, personalization has been at the forefront of most successful digital strategies. However, advancements in this area have made customer support more competitive while driving rising expectations. According to Gartner, 86% of B2B customers now expect companies to be “well-informed” about their personal information for each interaction. Customer portals are a great way to not only centralize personal information and capture user behavior in one place but also use the data to deliver tailored, relevant content on a regular basis. Automating this process allows you to consistently meet and exceed your customers’ expectations.

2. Leveraging Analytics and Data Is Essential

Most customer portal software provides you with a traditional analytics package that allows you to track things like user behavior, page popularity, and content performance. This is useful for making general improvements on your site over time. In fact, 84% of service and support leaders cited leveraging customer data and analytics as a top priority for achieving organizational goals.

However, the true power of a portal lies in its ability to connect to different data sources so that you can automatically pull data from separate systems and show them in one view or dashboard. This allows you to unlock new insights that can help you improve your business. For example, customer-facing teams can identify at-risk customers by cross-referencing CRM data with your ticketing system to see how service resolution times impact customer spending.

3. Businesses Want Data Privacy and Protection

While data enables the experiences that customers demand, it also comes with a responsibility to protect your users’ privacy and information. According to Gartner, 84% of businesses report data privacy as “the most valuable factor” when making purchasing decisions around new solutions. It’s essential that your customer portal software comes with strong built-in security features to keep your users and your organization safe from data breaches.

4. Customers Demand Faster Support

Outside of security, two-thirds of customers value speed as much as price, according to a new report from Jay Baer, a customer experience expert. In fact, over 50% reported hiring the first business to respond — even if it was more expensive. For B2B companies, this means your customer service portal needs to provide easy self-service tools that allow users to find the information they’re looking for efficiently.

5. 24/7 Availability Is the Norm

When it comes to customer portals, efficiency, and accessibility go hand in hand. Not only do customers demand fast response and issue resolution times, they also want flexibility in when they interact with your brand. In addition to speed, a portal offers 24/7 availability. Through a secure login portal, a user can access their account whenever they want and find personalized information.

6. Chatbot Adoption Is on the Rise

To further empower customer self-service, many organizations are taking advantage of chatbot advancements. According to McKinsey, around 65% of leaders reported a significant decrease in call volume after implementing these self-service tools. Chatbots offer speedy, 24/7 assistance to field the majority of customer questions, freeing up valuable time for customer support agents to focus on higher-value tasks.

7. Emerging AI Generates Human-Like Responses

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are pushing the boundaries of what chatbots and other self-service tools can do. With natural language processing, these intelligent, AI-powered bots can provide customers with immediate responses while allowing businesses to scale their support operations.

8. Mobile Support Is Essential

As younger, digitally native generations age into the role of B2B consumers, they’re increasingly demanding mobile-responsive customer support. Today, 78% of customers use their mobile devices to connect with brands for support. If your customer portal doesn’t provide a consistent experience across desktop and mobile devices, you’re likely missing out on valuable interactions and potentially driving away prospects and loyal customers.

9. A Seamless Multi-Channel Customer Experience Is Critical

Beyond moving from a website to a mobile app, today’s customers want a seamless experience across every touchpoint. It’s not enough for companies to use a patchwork of disconnected technologies that customers must navigate. Instead, organizations need to provide a consistent, omnichannel experience across web browsers, phones, email, messaging, and more — leveraging user data to personalize each interaction and save your customers time.

A customer portal can help you ensure a seamless experience by automatically routing your customers through an approval process or handing them off to the right service representative based on their inquiry. It can also make it easy for your teams to create content in one place and optimize the way it’s delivered and displayed on different channels, such as a smart/IoT device, kiosk, or virtual assistant.

10. DXPs Make It Easier to Manage Experiences

As customer expectations rise, many organizations seek individual tools to handle some aspect of self-service. However, without a platform to unify these tools in one place while providing a modern, comprehensive self-service offering, you can end up with a disjointed, confusing customer experience.

A digital experience platform (DXP) offers all of the tools you need to streamline customer support interactions and enhance visibility into user behavior. By connecting your organization’s existing systems and providing out-of-the-box self-service tools, the right DXP allows you to deliver a more reliable, consistent, and scalable digital experience for your users.

Build Incredible Digital Experiences with Liferay DXP

With a DXP like Liferay’s, you get a single platform to manage and unify the customer experience across multiple touchpoints.

Learn More >

What to Look For in a Customer Portal

So, what capabilities and functionality should you look for in a customer service portal? While it’s easy to find examples of exceptional customer portals, let’s take a look at some essential features.

At a fundamental level, your self-service solution needs to offer 24/7 accessibility, fast response times to questions or issues, and consistency across all channels and interactions. Beyond that, a customer portal should help your organization:

Connect Systems in Your Tech Stack: Your portal should connect disparate systems within your tech stack, providing a single gateway for customers to access all the content, tools, and resources they need while staying consistent with your brand.

Deliver a Unified Experience: Once you have a portal connecting your systems, you can create workflows, unlock insights, and streamline processes to deliver a better, more unified experience to both your customers and employees.

Streamline Customer Onboarding: A portal needs to offer a streamlined onboarding process so customers can start seeing the success of your product or service as soon as possible. This increases the likelihood that they will integrate it into their routine and recommend it to others.

Improve Navigation: Customers expect an easy way to answer their own questions. Your self-service solution should have a user-friendly interface, simple navigation, and powerful search features to help them find what they need.

Keep Your Portal Up-to-Date: Outside of the customer, a portal should also improve your team’s experience by equipping them with the tools they need to keep everything up to date.

Want to learn more about how a customer portal can benefit your customers and your business? Read our ebook to delve deep into the five building blocks of a modern customer portal or request a custom demo to see the possibilities of a customer portal in action.

What’s New with Liferay DXP: Q1 2023 Release

2025-06-27T17:48:11Z

Welcome to our newest blog post series, where we dive into release information for Liferay DXP, focusing on Architecture, Commerce, and Experience changes. This series highlights the business benefits of using the latest version, enabling our customers to launch solutions faster while lowering costs.

Platform Architecture

Reduce friction for customers.

404 Error Pages Customization

Create new 404 pages easily with the page editor
Error Pages can now be customized to your look and feel, ensuring a seamless user experience

Use a different search engine if necessary.

Solr 8 Support

Solr8 support is now back for maintenance mode so our government customers and others concerned about Elastic have an alternate search engine option
Available in Marketplace

Accelerate time to market and simplify upgrades.

Low-Code and Business Automation Improvements

Create and manage complex data models and automate manual tasks with minimal coding. New features include:
- Advanced fields
- Updates, notifications, and standalone actions that automate business processes
- Advanced data restriction by account for B2B scenarios
- Improvements to headless capabilities and ways to manage object-related experiences

Updates in Commerce Capabilities

Meet the increasing expectations of the B2B buyer.

Order Creation Simplified

New options to streamline the order creation process:
- Easy importing via CSV, past orders, wishlists, or favorites
- Quick add-to-cart capabilities
- Enhanced support for customer-specific defaults so customers don’t have to make the same choice twice

Empower business users to create their own product display pages.

Composable Product Display Pages

Non-technical users can add, remove, and change the layout of a Product Details page without using code

Improvements in Experience

Prioritize accessibility for your administrators, leaving no one out.

Admin Experience Improvements

We’ve reviewed the admin experience with an eye to improving accessibility for those with disabilities, implementing best practices in both design and development

Reduce costs with customizable editing experiences that fit your brand.

More No-Code Styling Capabilities for Page Building

Get more accurate previews with refactored page preview options
The Page Editor’s experience has improved for both fragments and the layout itself
More advanced design capabilities
Define and edit style value units easily

Apply your brand easily without a theme or code deployment.

Theme-less Theming Capabilities Enabled

Implement the new Theme CSS Client Extension type

Breaking Barriers: How Low Code is Empowering Business Users in Manufacturing

2025-06-04T19:36:41Z

In today’s highly dynamic and competitive marketplace, it’s crucial for manufacturers to be agile and adaptable in order to succeed. Manufacturing organizations need to be able to respond quickly to new market demands, adjust their business processes, and optimize their operations to stay ahead of the competition. However, when it comes to introducing new products or features that require some form of IT involvement, traditional software development processes can be slow and expensive, making it difficult for companies to keep up with the pace of change and efficiently enhance digital customer experience in manufacturing – before the purchase and in aftersales. This is where Low Code capabilities can play a significant role in empowering business users in manufacturing companies.

Develop Your Own Custom Applications

State of the art software solutions like digital experience platforms (DXPs) offer Low Code functionalities that enable business users to build, deliver, and manage their own applications without the need for specialized IT resources. Thanks to pre-built components and templates users can create custom applications with drag-and-drop interfaces and visual workflows, reducing or even removing the need for coding skills. This empowers them to take control of their own processes and make changes as needed, without calling up their IT department.

Not enough time to read the post? Check out this 2 Minute Video Summary!

To help business users create engaging digital experiences without relying on their IT teams, Liferay DXP comes with many out-of-the-box low-code capabilities. For example, manufacturers can leverage Liferay Objects to customize DXP, allowing users to create and manage objects, adding fields, object layouts, relationships, and define the scope for each custom object. Liferay Objects are fully integrated with existing Liferay DXP frameworks, such as Workflows, Headless and permissions.
Check out this two minute video summary that highlights how Liferay helps manufacturers empower business users with Low Code capabilities to enhance their customer experience and aftersales strategy.

The Benefits of Low Code

The benefits of empowering business users with Low Code capabilities are numerous. And many IT leaders have already recognized the advantages: In a survey conducted by Gartner, 42% of IT leaders reported that their organizations were using low code development platforms, and 19% planned to adopt the technology in the next 12 months.

Removing the reliance on specialized IT resources and building stand-alone applications independently not only saves time and resources. In manufacturing, it allows companies to focus on core competencies. This, in turn, can drive innovation, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Let’s take a detailed look at three of these benefits – and how they relate to the manufacturing sector.

Build, Deliver, and Manage Your Own Applications

One of the primary benefits of Low Code for manufacturing companies is that it enables business users to easily adapt their business processes to existing and future needs in a timely manner. Traditional software development processes can take weeks or months to deliver a new application because they typically require extensive coding, testing, and deployment. However, low-code-enabled DXPs like Liferay can deliver new applications much faster. This is the result of a visual approach to application development that is more accessible and user-friendly than traditional coding methods.

In the manufacturing space, this rapid application development capability enables organizations to respond quickly to new market demands, changing business requirements, and emerging technologies. For instance, a manufacturer may need to quickly develop a new application to support a new product launch, or to respond to a change in customer behavior. With low code capabilities, they can easily and independently create and deploy this new application in a matter of days or even hours.

With regard to post-purchase, Low Code could enhance the aftersales space by enabling business users to create and manage custom applications for customer support, such as a self-service portal or a chatbot. Additionally, Low Code could be used to create applications for monitoring equipment performance and detecting issues, allowing manufacturers to proactively address problems and provide maintenance services.

The examples above underscore how Low Code reduces the overall time-to-market for new products or services, enables manufacturers to stay competitive in a highly dynamic marketplace. But Low Code can also help to improve product quality, reduce downtime, and increase customer trust in the manufacturer.

Moreover, with the ability to create and deploy applications quickly, manufacturers can experiment with different approaches to business problems, and iterate on solutions until they find the one that best enhances digital customer experience for manufacturing clients. This empowers business users to take ownership of their processes and make data-driven decisions on how to optimize them, without needing to wait for IT support.

Thanks to Low Code capabilities manufacturers are also better equipped to keep pace with emerging technologies. As new technologies surface, manufacturers need to quickly adapt their business processes to take advantage of them. Being able to quickly develop new applications and integrate them with existing systems makes it easier to leverage new technologies to drive business growth and increase customer engagement in manufacturing.

Streamline Business Processes with Seamless Integration

When it comes to manufacturing, there are many different systems and processes involved, from production to logistics to sales and customer support. In order to ensure efficient and effective operations all of these processes need to work together seamlessly.

This is where the traditional approach to software development often results in disconnected systems, as different departments or teams may use different software that doesn't integrate well with each other. This can lead to a lack of visibility into critical data, delays in decision-making, and other inefficiencies.

Low Code platforms can help to overcome these challenges by enabling business users to build applications that integrate seamlessly with existing systems. With Low Code, it's possible to connect to different data sources and systems through pre-built connectors and APIs, which can be easily customized by business users to meet their specific needs.

This creates additional value because the integration of existing systems is crucial to provide a unified experience across the platform. Making all relevant data available in one place, makes it easier for users to access the information they need to do their job. It also reduces complexity and improves productivity by streamlining business processes and automating manual tasks.

For example, a manufacturer may use one software system for production planning, another for inventory management, and yet another for shipping and logistics. With Low Code, it's possible to create an application that pulls data from all of these systems and presents it in one place, making it easier for users to manage the entire process from start to finish.

The seamless integration of business applications also helps to improve communication and collaboration across departments and teams. With all relevant data available in one place, it's easier for different teams to work together towards common goals. For example, the production team can collaborate with the sales team to ensure that production schedules align with sales forecasts, while the logistics team can work with the warehouse team to ensure that inventory levels are optimized for shipping.

Reduce Cost and Speed up Time to Market for Complex Business Models

The benefit of speeding up development of business applications and thereby reducing the time to market has been mentioned above several times. It’s underscored in a survey conducted by OutSystems, where 74% of IT leaders reported that their organizations were able to deliver new applications faster with low code, and 69% said that they were able to reduce their backlog of application development projects.

Essentially, speeding processes up and making them less expensive is one of the most significant benefits of Low Code for manufacturing companies – especially when it comes to more complex business models.

Equipment-as-a-Service (EaaS) subscriptions, for example, require custom applications to manage customer subscriptions, track usage, monitor maintenance and provide personalized recommendations. Developing these applications from scratch can take months, and they can be expensive to maintain and update. With Low Code, business users can quickly build custom applications that meet their specific needs. This enables manufacturers to stay ahead of the competition and seize new opportunities as they arise.

Additionally, by empowering business users to build and manage their own applications, manufacturers can reduce their reliance on IT departments and third-party vendors. This can lead to significant cost savings, as businesses no longer need to spend money on expensive customizations or software development. With Low Code, business users can quickly create and deploy custom applications, reducing the need for expensive external resources.

Personalization and Self-Service Made Easy

Low Code platforms also offer additional benefits for manufacturers. For example, they can improve customer engagement and satisfaction before purchase and in aftersales by providing personalized experiences and self-service options. They can also improve data quality and accuracy by automating data capture and validation processes, reducing errors and improving efficiency.

In addition, a survey by KPMG found that 77% of respondents said that their organizations were experiencing improved productivity and efficiency through the use of low code platforms, and 73% said that they were able to reduce their reliance on third-party developers.

Conclusion

The empowerment of Business Users in manufacturing companies with Low Code Capabilities can be a game changer for your customer experience strategy in today’s dynamic and competitive marketplace. By reducing the reliance on specialized IT resources, Low Code platforms enable business users to build and adapt their own applications, reducing costs, improving efficiency, and driving innovation. With Low Code, manufacturers can respond quickly to changing business requirements, optimize their operations, and stay ahead of the competition.

Why Enabling Autonomous Maintenance is Critical for Great Aftersales Experiences in Manufacturing

2025-06-04T19:34:36Z

For companies in the manufacturing sector, product alone is no longer a sufficient differentiator. While current B2B preferences are shifting toward a more B2C-like experience, it’s becoming obvious that many manufacturers need to make up a lot of ground with regard to digital customer experience (CX).

In manufacturing today, exceptional CX includes offering top-notch aftersales experiences such as remote monitoring and diagnostics, predictive analytics, streamlined AI, VR and AR-assisted troubleshooting, training and assistance as well as comprehensive self-service functionalities, for example for repair and warranty services.

In particular, the potential of efficient self-service offerings in aftersales is often overlooked. This oversight is unfortunate because since self-service in aftersales empowers customers to handle their own issues without the need for human interaction, it can provide convenience and saves time and cost for the company.

Enabling autonomous maintenance for their products is one such example where manufacturers can offer customers online tools to diagnose and troubleshoot issues with their products. In manufacturing, autonomous maintenance refers to the process of empowering operators, technicians, or customers to take ownership of the equipment they use on a daily basis by performing basic maintenance tasks independently, without the need for specialized skills or support from maintenance personnel. This can include tasks such as cleaning, inspecting, and replacing worn or damaged parts. This way, autonomous maintenance can help to identify potential issues early on and take action to prevent them from becoming major problems, thereby improving the availability and reliability of your customers’ equipment and can also help to reduce their maintenance costs.

How Customer Portals Enable Autonomous Maintenance

The use of a customer portal can greatly improve your autonomous maintenance offerings – while at the same time reducing costs.

By providing customers with comprehensive knowledge bases, rich content and media, self-service access to information, and advanced customer service features, customers can quickly and easily solve problems and perform maintenance on their own, reducing the need for human interaction and support.

Create Comprehensive Knowledge Bases

A comprehensive knowledge base is a collection of information that is organized and easily accessible to customers. This information can include product specifications, troubleshooting guides, and technical documentation. By providing customers with this information, they can quickly understand and utilize your products and services, as well as solve related problems on their own. This can save time and reduce the need for customer support, ultimately reducing costs for the manufacturing company.

To create a comprehensive knowledge base, it is important to organize the information in a logical and easy-to-use format. This can include categories such as product information, troubleshooting guides, and technical documentation. Additionally, it is important to include search functionality so that customers can easily find the information they need.

Another important aspect of a comprehensive knowledge base is to keep the information up-to-date and accurate. This can be achieved by regularly reviewing and updating the information as needed, as well as providing customers with the ability to provide feedback and suggestions.

Enhance Products with Rich Content and Media

In addition to a comprehensive knowledge base, manufacturing companies can also enhance their products with rich content and media. This can include providing customers with relevant content, such as blogs, manuals, and data sheets. This type of content can also be used to educate customers about new products and services, which can lead to increased sales and revenue.

Rich content and media can also be used to simplify maintenance operations. For example, providing customers with installation videos, product demonstrations, and user guides can help customers understand and perform maintenance on their products more easily. This can also reduce the need for customer support, ultimately reducing costs for the manufacturing company.

Enable Self-Service Access to Information

Self-service access to information is another key aspect of a customer portal. This can be accomplished through the use of discussion boards, forums, media galleries, and Wikis. These tools can be used to share information and collaborate with other customers. This can enable customers to independently solve problems, reducing the need for customer support.

Discussion boards, forums, and media galleries can be used to share information and collaborate with other customers. This can include sharing tips and tricks, troubleshooting guides, and user-generated content. Additionally, Wikis can be used to provide customers with a centralized location for information and documentation.

To enable self-service access to information, it is important to provide customers with the ability to customize their experience. This can include the ability to personalize their dashboard, access their product information, and collaborate with other customers. Additionally, it is important to provide customers with the ability to search and filter the information to easily find what they need.

Take Customer Service to a New Level

Finally, customer service can be taken to a new level through the use of advanced features such as AI- and ML-driven chatbots. These chatbots can be used to answer search queries, check the status of an order, find consumables, and suggest spare parts. By providing customers with instant access to this type of information, they can quickly and easily solve problems, reducing the need for human interaction.

The ROI of Autonomous Maintenance

The amount of money manufacturers can save by enabling their customers to do autonomous maintenance can vary depending on a number of factors, such as the size of the company and the complexity of their products. However, there are several potential cost savings that manufacturers can realize by implementing a customer portal and enabling autonomous maintenance.

Reduced customer support costs: If customers are able to perform maintenance on their own, they will be less likely to need assistance from customer support. This can result in a reduction in customer support staff and associated costs such as wages and benefits.

Reduced downtime: By providing customers with the tools and information they need to perform maintenance on their own, manufacturers can help reduce downtime caused by maintenance issues. This can result in increased productivity and revenue.

Increased customer satisfaction: By providing customers with the ability to perform autonomous maintenance, manufacturers can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, which can lead to increased sales and revenue.
Reduced warranty costs: By providing customers with the information and tools they need to properly maintain their products, manufacturers can reduce the number of warranty claims and associated costs.

Increased efficiency and scalability: By automating certain customer service tasks with AI and ML-driven chatbots, manufacturers can increase efficiency and scalability, which can lead to cost savings in the long run.

2 Minute Video Summary

Get a 2 minute summary of how customer portals built with Liferay help manufacturers to efficiently provide your customers with the necessary information, guidelines and onboarding content to execute maintenance tasks autonomously. Check out this video:

Reduce Your Claim Costs With Liferay Customer Portals

Want to learn more about how enabling your customers to execute autonomous maintenance can help you improve customer satisfaction and save money on customer support? Liferay’s customizable customer portals increase the equipment's availability and dependability and can also assist in lowering maintenance expenses for your clients.

To start enabling autonomous maintenance, visit our manufacturing customer portals page.

Key Employee Experience Trends to Watch in 2022

2025-05-29T20:36:20Z

2021 was a year to focus on digital workplaces and the processes around them. Driven by the pandemic challenges or new competitors, organizations of all sizes are began prioritizing the employee journey. So, if 2021 was a year to build infrastructure for and accelerate processes for the employee journey, what are the trends that will shape success in 2022?

According to a report published by CMSWire, 77% of organizations consider digital workplaces extremely important in terms of organization’s priorities. Every piece of a digital workplace—portals, intranets, web applications, mobile applications—has a role in the grand scheme of business.

However, there’s a gap between simply owning and operating these assets and aligning them to a holistic business vision—like delivering a rich, engaging employee experience.

In addition to this, an increasing number of startups in many industries are creating an extinction event for those companies that do not recognize the mandate to create useful and meaningful digital experiences not only for customers but also for all business audiences.

Here are 5 major employee experience trends innovators will adopt in 2022:

1. Custom Cloud Solutions for Stability and Growth

More and more, the world of in-house IT is changing. By adding scalability and self-maintenance through cloud and SaaS solutions, organizations can build new, rich digital experiences without requiring a robust IT team to support them.

For large companies, cloud solutions give flexibility, service availability, and extra support for these technically challenging times. With minimal configuration and setup process, enterprise solutions in this category provide multitenancy, user management, robust backup, and recovery services—an overall rich platform that can provide a solid foundation for technology roadmaps for the next 5+ years for internal and customer-facing channels.

Unfortunately, some SaaS solutions sacrifice customization for attractive pricing. But the real competitive advantage comes when organizations leverage a cloud-based DXP to target business needs. This is something that we will be seeing a lot in 2022 for digital workplaces as we continue exploring new futures powered by these capabilities.

2. Mobile-First Design for Digital Workplaces

Employees have become accustomed to mobile access to nearly every piece of information they need after years of interacting with digital experiences that are CTA-focused, streamlined, and intuitive.
For 2022 and on, having a slow, clunky employee portal will no longer be enough. New and existing projects need to be seen through the lens of a mobile-first approach of designing and delivering digital experiences across channels that meet simplicity principles.

Thinking mobile-first means understanding the goals of each page or resource in a digital workplace, ensuring consistency, and simplifying your processes. These considerations should be used as a baseline for all your designs, no matter how big the screen is. It also means making sure your organization can reach all employees, including those away from a computer, such as frontline and field workers.

For us at Base22, a digital consulting firm with expertise in employee portals and intranets for large organizations, one of our best practices is to establish a mobile-first design system with templates, widgets, and dynamic components for your digital experience platform, so you can successfully create pages and content that’s ready to be served to business audiences without requiring development time.

3. Hyper-Personalized Experiences as an Ally for Productivity

Hyper-personalization comes from the simple understanding that users gravitate toward what feels most human when interacting with digital channels.

In the last two years, digital workplaces have become the primary channel of communication with the workforce. They are particularly important for remote workers and newly hired employees that have never met their employers or colleagues face-to-face.

To implement a hyper-personalization approach, your organization can leverage user attributes (personal information like role, seniority, and department) to deliver relevant content through an employee portal or mobile application. This makes a digital connection feel more real as it creates “moments that matter” for the employee that are more meaningful and fulfilling to their needs.

But the benefits of hyper-personalization go beyond connecting and strengthening relationships. Cluttered digital workplaces and work technologies can be an active source of distraction for employees, especially for employees less accustomed to the amount of noise a poorly constructed workplace can generate, as reported Udemy.

By curating content and tools, a modern intranet can help to reduce information overload and enable employees to deliver value to customers and businesses. It’s about making their jobs easier as soon as they sign in: less time wasted finding the information needed to work, less confusion regarding policy or procedures for each role, and less support time (from HR or IT) to achieve their tasks.

This approach is what allows organizations to build and maintain truly engaging, action-driven digital workplaces, and avoid unnecessary loss of resources. 2022 will be a year where hyper-personalization impacts businesses and organizations as a critical success factor for employee experience.

4. Holistic Digital Experiences: Engaging Employees and Business Partners

In business, technology should not only serve the consumer, but it should also enable employees, vendors, stakeholders, and distributors to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate.

Companies need to create better partnerships between customers, employees, and partners, with digital solutions and user experiences that provide the correct information when needed to complete a task.

Creating a holistic digital experience means infusing your brand promise into all digital solutions and orchestrating them to target business goals.

In a recent Salesforce survey, 85% of business buyers stated that the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.

Even at the backstage of our services, experience matters: user interfaces must be frictionless, and information must be available on-demand. To achieve this, technologies like DXPs are exceptional at creating holistic solutions from siloed ones and building cohesion in the employee experience across all interactions.

This year we will see more organizations (no matter the size) adopting this mindset of startups to be able to face new challenges. Disruptive companies begin with the customer and employee experience and work backward to supporting systems – they are not encumbered with legacy system limitations.

5. Single ID & ID Management to Improve Security and Access

Delivering “seamless experiences” is a top priority for executives in the digital workplace consolidation journey, according to the State of Digital Workplace report (2021 Q2). It is not surprising as access and logins are very tangible elements of the employee experience, with multiple interactions per user per day. As business audiences become more demanding, seamless experiences and ID management will be a present trend this year and on.

Having a single sign-on for their internal systems is a key component of holistic digital environments. This means each user has a unique set of credentials for all applications and tools, and that their access is managed and controlled by the IT team across the business environment.
This is a feature that provides benefits to all parties involved: it provides consistency to the end-users and resolves pain points of multiple logins, while allowing the IT team to have centralized control about user groups, permissions, and overall security for their technology stack.

Base22 and Liferay: Robust Digital Solutions with Agility

Base22 has found that Liferay DXP Cloud is built to deliver on these trends and create the digital transformation needed by established companies to avoid the extinction event. As a Liferay Partner, we have been able to deliver highly personalized experiences coupled with Single Sign-On capabilities to deliver a seamless experience holistically to employees, customers, and suppliers which are suitable for all form factors. Leveraging the Cloud Platform-as-a-Service capability will reduce both up-front investment costs and ongoing support costs.

Contact Base22 for a free assessment of your user experience and your digital readiness to address these trends created by the escalating customer expectations of all businesses to deliver digital solutions. Let us help you to think like a startup!

Learn More about Base22 >

Liferay DXP and the Skateboard Platform

2025-05-29T20:40:47Z

What is the skateboard platform?

The electric car is rapidly gaining market share in the automotive world. Every manufacturer is working on electrification in fear of being left behind. For the driver, the experience is transformative. Instant torque at zero RPM. Face distorting acceleration formerly only known to super cars can now be had at attainable price points. Quiet, vibration free experiences that formerly were only available in the most opulent luxury cars.

Underpinning the electric vehicle is what the automotive world calls “the skateboard platform”. It looks like a flat board, with four wheels at the corners, suspension, batteries along its length, and one or more electric motors. It looks like a high tech skateboard hence the name.

What is the value of the skateboard platform?

What makes it so attractive to manufacturers is its reusability. Are the masses demanding a crossover SUV? Put that body style on top of the skateboard platform. Are families asking for a minivan? Put that body style on the skateboard platform. Is there a wealthy segment looking for sporty sedans? Throw in a couple extra motors and put that body style on top of the skateboard platform.

Auto makers get economies of scale when multiple models share the underpinning platform. There is less R&D. Less tooling for manufacturing. Less supply chain management prior to assembly and less warehousing of spare parts for maintenance and repairs. Some manufacturers are even selling their skateboard platforms to other companies to build their cars on. This reusability means much lower costs to develop different car models, more competitive pricing for consumers, and more profit for the manufacturer.

The Value Applied to Enterprise IT

Liferay DXP is the skateboard platform of the enterprise IT world. Instead of a frame acting as a board, you have a flexible architecture that lets you code extensions in any language you want and integrate with all of your existing tech stack. Instead of batteries, you have experience management capabilities to energize gorgeous and functional user interfaces. Instead of wheels you have fine grain management of content, accounts, and users. Instead of suspension you have built in ecommerce capabilities that let you adapt to how different buyers want to do business with you.

With this reusable skateboard platform of the enterprise IT world you get scale and cost reductions when you plop on top different body styles. But instead of SUVs, minivans, and sedans, you have websites, customer portals, partner portals, intranets, and other solutions. And just like the auto manufacturers who are all rapidly going electric through the advantage of the skateboard platform, enterprises can reduce both cost and time when launching new tailored applications for a multitude of business needs.

The EV is transforming automotive manufacturing techniques, its business models, and also driver experience. Liferay DXP can transform your enterprise IT, your budget, as well as experiences for customers, employees, and partners.

Image Source - Hyundai Media Center: “Hyundai Motor Group to Lead Charge into Electric Era with Dedicated EV Platform 'E-GMP'.” This skateboard platform can be found under the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Hyundai Ioniq 6, Kia EV6, Genesis GV60, and is slated to be used for future cars including the Kia EV4, Kia EV9, and Hyundai Ioniq 7.

What are the structural barriers to change towards digital public services?

2025-05-29T21:11:06Z

Fallen Behind

Around the world, central and local governments are struggling with providing digital public services.

To move towards digital-first models, it is necessary to know where to start and where to go. So let's define the starting point: Is your agency mature enough? What is preventing you from implementing the projects you need to do?

There’s a lot of research on the state of digitization of the public sector. In a recent study, titled “E-Government Survey 2022: The future of Digital Government,” the Department of Economic and Social Affairs at the United Nations assessed the digital government landscape of their 193 Member States. The report reflects some general growth in global trends in e-government development, and ranks the top countries and local governments in terms of digitization. It also highlights areas for improvement. According to the report, there is still a long way to go towards a real and rethought digital public services offering for citizens.

And this journey will take some time depending on the region. Within the UN report, the Local Online Service Index (LOSI) study provides a score for the level of digitization for various city governments. Madrid and Berlin occupy the first positions by providing 98% of the services evaluated. Tallinn and Copenhagen follow closely behind while the fifth position is relegated to cities like Dubai, Moscow, New York and Paris.

These metrics are more important than ever and we can see that according to the scores, digital maturity falls off quickly once we get beyond the leaders. We are living through exceptional times that are testing government capacity. Governments cannot delay their transition to modern service channels that allow them to meet the citizens' needs at scale.

“We are living through exceptional times that are testing government capacity.”

COVID-19 provided an important lesson for the public sector by showing how critical online public services offerings are. “The pandemic has also challenged governments’ ability to adapt. In the past two years, many services no longer required a visit to a government service desk, enabling citizens and entrepreneurs to interact with the government from the safety of their homes. However, further progress is required to digitally transform governments”, said the European Commission on its eGovernment Benchmark 2022.

And this evolution brings with it dual benefits. First, it generates greater satisfaction for citizens who save time and reduces their aggravation with the government, resulting in greater engagement with institutions. Second, public sector employees enjoy a more efficient workplace, optimizing their time for more important projects, all while reducing the cost to serve their citizens.

At the time of writing, inflation, widespread energy crises, an economic recession, and the Russia-Ukraine war are contributing new shocks to existing social systems and structures. All this drives the mandate towards evolution to more efficient and agile processes within governments.

Not Optional

Digital transformation should be on the agendas of current political leaders. As Gartner argues: Technology leaders need to help agency and political leadership understand why maintaining the right level of digital acceleration is so important to government services. They can do this by identifying quick wins, aligning digital with political priorities, and improving the agility of their operating models.

“Government agencies that are unclear on what matters most to their customers risk wasting time and resources on the things that don’t. Finding out is the first step.”

At Liferay, we’ve got more than 15 years of public sector experience, and we recognize that each country and region will have unique needs. But, there are many common pain points and unmet citizen expectations that we think are among the top challenges that the public sector has yet to address. Being aware of these common challenges is crucial in the journey towards the implementation of digital public services.

What are the Critical Challenges that Public Administrators face?

Citizens have high expectations and demands. People today already live immersed in a highly digitized world. They prefer digital channels in order to avoid time-consuming in-person visits. There is a reputational and engagement cost for the agency that does not provide easy online services. McKinsey & Co., in the article The global case for customer experience in government, observes, “By investing in customer experience programs, we’ve found that agencies can address the priorities that matter to every government leader.”
Government agencies have outdated, slow, and expensive service models. In many cases, government services are still in-person, manual, and slow. They were designed for a long passed era. This results in high service costs, long waiting lists, and citizen dissatisfaction. This is an inefficient use government employees, who spend their hours processing paper forms that could be digitized. Once again, referring to the E-Government Survey 2022: The future of Digital Government, the UN observes: “There is, however, a clear push towards higher levels of digitalization whereby users will no longer have to download or print forms but can complete their transactions fully online.”
Old government websites and applications aren’t up to modern standards. Many government web experiences have dated looks. But modern goes beyond design. Sites should have unified experiences across departments and functions, access to digital services in one place, personalization for the visitor, and be fully functional and easy to use on both desktop and mobile devices. Strong integration capabilities are a must which leads to the next point.
Government tech stacks are old, disjointed, and inhibit the creation of good experiences. Agencies are often limited by sprawling legacy technology that can’t talk to each other. That makes it next to impossible to create unified digital experiences. On top of that, maintaining legacy tech is expensive. For example, according to the aforementioned UN report, the United States government still spends 70% of its $100 billion USD IT budget to support legacy systems, some of which date back to the 1970s!
There aren’t enough IT resources to go around. Dated web technologies depend on IT to update content, create new pages, or sites. This inhibits public sector employees from quickly getting information out to citizens or creating new digital services to replace manual ones. Giving regular employees the ability to create pages, sites, and apps with low-code/no-code, frees up limited IT resources to work on more challenging projects.
Government culture often has a lot of internal resistance to change. Global consulting firm McKinsey & Company estimates that around 70% of government transformation projects fail due to employee and management resistance to change. Identify easy wins and build on success. Leveraging a platform like Liferay DXP can make it possible to launch projects fast and support multiple follow on projects as well. Wins make it easier to break down resistance.

Now that the main blockers have been identified, let's approach the next phase: what is needed to move towards real public services systems? What do these new digital solutions look like?

Learn more about how real agencies have started their journey towards digital public services solutions.

Do you find yourself resonating with these challenges? Liferay has helped the City of Burbank (USA), the London Borough of Camden (UK), the City of Vienna (Austria), and hundreds of other public sector organizations drive transformational change that improves the lives of their citizens, cuts costs, and makes employees more productive. Read part 2 to see how we do that.

Industrial Digital Transformation: Why Use a Digital Experience Platform?

2025-05-29T20:34:30Z

Every industry has a unique relationship with digital transformation, but manufacturing brings truly unrivaled requirements to the table. After all, manufacturers are responsible for creating and distributing products necessary for everyday life, which means the demand for industrial digital transformation comes with particularly high stakes.

Luckily, there are plenty of tools to help guide and shape this innovation, turning industrial companies into leaders in digital success. One such tool is a digital experience platform (DXP) — a chameleon of a tech solution that can play many roles in manufacturing. Here’s a closer look at what these platforms can do and how they turn digital transformation into a reality.

A Look at Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Often known as members of a slower-moving industry, industrial companies are now rapidly implementing digital technology. In fact, many digital leaders in the industry have already recognized the value of this evolution. For example, according to a survey by Fictiv:

91% of manufacturers have increased their digital transformation and technology investments.
77% called this increase “significant” or “dramatic.”
95% said industrial digital transformation is essential to their success.

These numbers indicate one thing: Digital transformation is the future of manufacturing, and that future is already here.

Here are a few more things to know about industrial digital transformation:

The Value of Innovation

Aside from the obvious value of keeping up with modern solutions, there are many benefits associated with digital innovation through the use of artificial intelligence, automation, augmented reality, and other manufacturing solutions. For example, according to McKinsey & Co., an industrial digital transformation strategy can lead to:

30% - 50% reduction in machine downtime.
10% - 30% increase in throughput.
15% - 30% improvement in labor productivity.
85% more accurate forecasting.

Other benefits include:

Improved worker efficiency.
Increased workplace safety.
Streamlined communication at all levels of the organization.
Simplified, effective management of big data.
Reduced human error, downtime, and waste.

Challenges in Industrial Digital Transformation

While digital transformation has much to offer, it isn’t necessarily an easy process for the manufacturing industry. Consider these common hurdles to innovation:

Tools: With so much digital technology to choose from, it can be difficult to know what to invest in and where to look for results.

Cost: A poorly managed digitalization project can quickly become expensive. Worse yet, investment in the wrong tools can lead to reduced return on investment (ROI), which discourages stakeholders from trying more effective innovation techniques.

IT risks: According to Fictiv, 55% of surveyed manufacturers cited concerns over the potential for IT security risks. In some cases, more digital technology leads to more security vulnerabilities, especially without the proper defenses and visibility tools in place.

Updates: Digital initiatives are not a “one and done” project. It demands constant innovation, which leads many manufacturers to worry about the cost and scope of updates to come.

Benefits of a Digital Experience Platform in Industrial Transformation

It’s clear that the industrial digital transformation journey can be both incredibly rewarding and deeply challenging. To get more of the former and less of the latter, digital leaders turn to a DXP.

Digital experience platforms for manufacturers help simplify and streamline the transformation process. They act as a single source of truth — one tool to bring together the disparate systems, data sources, and users in your operation. Perhaps most importantly, they act as the framework you need to confidently and effectively organize your digital technology in ways that create visible value.

Let’s take a look at how a DXP can solve some common transformation challenges:

A Better Way to Acquire Tools

An effective platform can sit on top of your existing systems, creating an updated touchpoint that spans your entire organization. From there, you can easily integrate artificial intelligence, automation, and other solutions that gather data, simplify communication, streamline processes, and reduce downtime and human error.

Insight into ROI

Good DXPs have built-in analytics tools to help you understand how the platform is being used, where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and how your current or new technology is performing. This increases visibility and creates important insights into the benefits of digital transformation, putting ROI on display and giving stakeholders the clarity they need to set realistic expectations.

Low- or No-Code Architecture

Low- or no-code architecture makes it easy to upgrade your own platform or integrate new technology without waiting for IT support. Furthermore, fewer variables mean fewer security risks, giving you the peace of mind necessary to continue down the path to innovation.

Improved Collaboration

Perhaps the most important benefit of a DXP for industrial digital transformation is its ability to connect people and technology. Partners, suppliers, employees, and even end customers can all be served through a manufacturing platform, enabling one consistent, convenient experience across all facets of your company. This doesn’t just build better experiences; it also empowers you to collaborate more effectively and create your own competitive edge.

Platforms at Work in Digital Transformation

A platform can contribute immensely to industrial digital transformation — but what do DXPs look like in practice? Here are just a few examples:

Dealer Platforms

One way to use a DXP is as a dealer platform. These platforms create a digital workspace where manufacturers and dealers can collaborate, share data, review key information, and more.

This is exactly what MacDon, an agricultural equipment manufacturer, needed when it upgraded to Liferay DXP. The goal was to create a single interface where dealers could interact with MacDon in a straightforward, simple, and flexible environment, all without multiple logins or complex processes.

Results were impressive: Thanks to the improved dealer platform, dealers can now monitor purchase status, retrieve invoice data, check inventory, and more. The update also led to a 20% increase in sales and doubled the number of site visitors.

Self-Service Platforms

Another manufacturer — Mueller, Inc., which specializes in building materials — chose to plan their platform around self-service. Self-service opportunities come with a variety of benefits, optimizing the customer experience by allowing users to perform tasks on their own time. In this case, the manufacturer needed to simplify the sales process and provide a personalized product showcase, and self-service was the perfect solution.

The Liferay DXP allowed Mueller, Inc. to implement some of the most effective self-service features in the manufacturing industry. For example, customers can now try a 3D design tool that allows them to see their building come to life — and get a customized quote along the way. The platform creates internal benefits, too, using tools like complex workflow routing with Liferay Forms to send customers to the right Mueller, Inc. associates.

Customized Platforms

Manufacturing platforms don’t just come in dealer and self-service varieties. Instead, a platform like Liferay DXP allows you to customize features, functions, and services to create something that meets your unique digital transformation needs. You can:

Leverage internal and external views.
Create user-specific experiences to simplify interactions.
Keep employees informed on key operational data.
Build knowledge libraries for dealers, partners, end-users, workers, and other stakeholders.
Integrate existing systems and third-party apps (like asset performance management systems) for increased visibility into the different parts of your operation.

Better yet, Liferay DXP can be a low- or no-code platform, which means you won’t have to wait for IT involvement to make these changes or update your processes. Your customized manufacturing platform can take any shape necessary to help you optimize your technology investments, utilize automation solutions, and make innovation a reality.

Master Digital Transformation with Liferay

There are many ways to approach industrial digital transformation, but a DXP is one of the simplest, most effective solutions. That’s because it harnesses all your digital technology in one unified touchpoint — a single view of the truth. A platform can also help you connect with dealers, customers, and other partners, providing tools like self-service and personalized profiles to make your company stand out in the manufacturing market.

To begin your digital transformation, your first step is to find a platform that suits your needs. Explore Liferay’s DXP today to see how we can help you reach digital success.

Personalized Banking for Up- and Cross-Selling

2025-05-29T20:49:56Z

Back in 2001, research by Bain & Company identified that a 5% increase in financial or banking customer retention can lead to a profit increase of more than 25%. The financial services landscape has shifted significantly since then — but even with new tools for client acquisition, it’s still more profitable to invest in existing customers.

Existing customers tend to buy more from a company over time. They may even pay extra to continue working with you, especially if the alternative involves switching to a less reliable, less familiar competitor. They’ll also refer others to your company if this continued relationship remains strong.

One of the most effective ways to leverage existing customer relationships is, therefore, to capitalize on up- and cross-selling opportunities. Done properly, these aren’t aggressive strategies; rather, they extend financial services and address a wider range of customer needs.

The key to identifying and taking advantage of these opportunities is personalization. Here’s a look at how personalized banking through a digital experience platform makes it possible for financial institutions to up- and cross-sell effectively.

What Is Personalized Banking?

Put simply, personalized banking is the modern customer experience with a bank, credit union, or other financial institution. This approach utilizes digital banking solutions, customer data, and key metrics to deliver personalized service.

Personalized banking becomes ever more important as customer expectations rise. In fact, 72% of survey respondents said personalization was a “highly important” part of the financial services customer experience.

Here’s what personalized service can look like:

Business-to-Business (B2B)

In a B2B setting, personalized banking should turn financial institutions into strategic partners. For example, a B2B account should have separate interfaces for different users, each providing the information and tasks relevant to that user’s role. Similarly, commercial banks may serve customers from a variety of industries — including manufacturing, construction, health care, and more — who all have different financial needs. This creates a customer experience that can be tailored to fit individual profiles, permissions settings, accounts, and more. The result is a bank that’s more than just a bank, providing support for the customer’s entire company.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

Personalization for B2C banking customers can take many forms. Consumers may expect to see:

Highly personalized product and service recommendations.
Customized rates based on their financial history.
Offers that help them take control of their personal finances.
Rewards and incentives for using their credit cards.

How Personalization Improves the Financial Customer Experience

The biggest benefit of personalized banking is that it improves the customer experience while increasing profitability. When a financial institution uses customer data to identify the best services to present to an existing customer, value is created in multiple ways:

Relevancy: The bank or credit union doesn’t have to rely on guesswork or risk offering irrelevant services; instead, they know exactly what the customer needs and how to provide it.
Simplicity: Personalized interactions create value without being labor-intensive. Customers don’t have to spend time searching for what they need or making service calls; this, in turn, frees up representatives to focus on more business-critical tasks.
Satisfaction: The customer, whether B2B or B2C, sees their bank or credit union taking an active interest in their needs. The result is increased satisfaction without a significant demand on the financial institution’s time or resources.

Simply put, personalization makes customers feel happier with their bank — and this both creates and illuminates opportunities for up- and cross-selling.

How to Boost Up- and Cross-Selling with Personalized Banking

Personalizing the existing customer experience is one thing; using that personalization to leverage up- and cross-selling opportunities is quite another.

Say a B2B customer logs into their financial account with an urgent need. For example, to find relevant information or complete an important task. At this point, any up- or cross-selling attempt would be disruptive and may even seem inconsiderate; after all, the customer expects their bank to understand which tasks are business-critical and can’t be delayed. Even if the task wasn’t urgent, the customer might still feel frustrated if they were interrupted by an offer that seemed irrelevant.

To avoid this, financial institutions must use customer data and behavior to identify the right message and the right time. While human agents are often trained to do this, it’s now necessary to scale and translate this process into the online world.

Here are a few digital experience platform features that make this possible:

Segmentation: Banking customers can be segmented into groups based on individual profile and company information, behavior patterns, and more. Financial institutions can then personalize their offerings to meet each segment’s unique needs.
Rule creation: Digital banking rules help define which conditions need to be met before presenting an up- or cross-selling message. This reduces the risk of interrupting critical tasks or providing irrelevant offers.
Integration: For financial institutions with third-party systems, it’s important to find a platform with integration capabilities. This allows the utilization of pre-computed segments or existing customer data.
Experience management: Personalization of the banking customer experience requires careful management. A suitable platform should allow financial institutions to create page variations, promote specific content, and otherwise deliver unique experiences to each audience segment.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): AI and ML can make recommendations based on what consumers are viewing and what customers with similar profiles have searched for or purchased in the past.

Remember, the goal of a digital experience platform isn’t just to enable up- and cross-selling opportunities. Instead, the goal is to improve the customer experience — which, in turn, creates these opportunities.

Personalized Banking Use Cases

As personalization becomes a critical part of digital banking and the financial customer experience, industry leaders learn more about what these solutions should look like and how to implement them. Here are two examples of how financial institutions used digital experience platforms to perfect personalization and take advantage of the resulting up- and cross-selling opportunities:

B2B: ParcIT

Banking software company ParcIT needed a new B2B customer portal — one that could personalize their digital experience and enrich existing customer relationships. Their goal was to offer relevant services, ensure greater transparency, and increase sales among their customers. They turned to Liferay for support, and the results were impressive.

Now, ParcIT has a digital platform capable of notifying customers when new information or offerings are available for their current services. Better yet, all relevant data and offers exist in one place, so customers only have one touchpoint to interact with. This enables B2B customers to request changes or support and complete tasks according to their authorization and role in their company. The updated, personalized experience allows ParcIT to better understand their customers and make helpful, relevant up- or cross-selling offers.

B2C: KBC Bank Ireland

KBC Bank Ireland approached everything with a customer-first mindset — but unfortunately, their old website platform wasn’t keeping up. Customers struggled with simple tasks like submitting applications, while updates took far too long to implement, and customer needs tracking was all but impossible. Luckily, Liferay had just the customer-first solution they needed.

Today, the new platform is working wonders. Its updated self-service offerings help personalize the customer experience without a high demand for time or resources. Meanwhile, information is easy to find and readily digestible to help customers make informed decisions. The site has led to a 30% increase in customer conversion, improved security, frequent updates, and even a better tracking and monitoring framework to help KBC Bank Ireland learn more about customers. In fact, the platform even won an award for the best banking website.

Get More From Personalized Banking

Today’s customers, whether B2B or B2C, expect personalization around every corner — especially when it comes to banking experiences. Financial institutions need to keep up with their consumers by choosing platform solutions that enable sleek, powerful customer interactions at every touchpoint.

An improved, personalized customer experience comes with many of its own benefits, but it also opens the door for up- and cross-selling — good news for financial institutions and customers alike. Because digital experience platforms allow banks and credit unions to gather customer data and deliver relevant offers, customers can count on a better, more supportive partnership. This, in turn, means they’ll remain loyal and create even more opportunities for revenue growth.

If your financial institution is ready to turn digital banking into personalized banking — and, in turn, benefit from up- and cross-selling opportunities — a digital experience platform is the first step. Explore Liferay’s Financial Services Client Portal to see how personalized service changes the landscape.

Key Challenges in B2B Digital Commerce Transformation Programs

2025-05-29T20:36:11Z

The unprecedented global event of the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many enterprises across the globe to fast-track their digital transformation. CXOs and executives irrespective of industry verticals are planning to take up or have already embarked on this strategic initiative. Their common goal: to gain competitive advantages over the competition, provide better products and services to their customers, and improve the overall customer experience (CX). Digital commerce has been a top priority for organizations with digital transformation agendas, as digital commerce can drive the top line and significantly reduce the operating cost to increase the bottom line as well.

B2B organizations are no exception. Many B2B organizations have been forced to go digital. Along with the traditional sales channel, many B2B organizations are enabling digital commerce channels as well. As per Forrester, today around 42% of total global B2B transactions are made through digital channels – 18% through self-service eCommerce and 24% through rep-assisted eCommerce.

However, not every digital commerce transformation delivers the intended results. In fact, as per McKinsey, around 70% of transformations fail. B2B organizations face one, or more of these common challenges during their digital commerce transformation initiatives:

Traditional vs digital channel
Complex and disconnected technology stacks
Acute shortage of right digital talents

In order for B2B organizations to overcome these challenges and achieve their intended business objectives, let’s take a closer look at these hurdles and analyze the best way to handle them.

1. Traditional vs Digital Channel

Traditionally, B2B organizations depend on their well-oiled machinery of ground salesforce, dealer, and distributor channels for sales. Thanks to a robust supply chain and this traditional sales channel B2B organizations have achieved significant sales growth in the past. But the times have changed. The pandemic has disrupted the global supply chain (both in-bound and out-bound). It has also made it difficult for the salesforce to travel (due to travel restrictions) and meet the prospects or customers physically in order to convince them of their complex offerings. Adding to that challenge was the lack of any B2B digital channel which completely caught many B2B sellersacross various industry sectors off guard and forced them to consider digital channels.

However, many sales leaders still perceive digital commerce channels as a competitor for the traditional sales channel. Instead sales leaders should understand the importance of a B2B digital channel and learn to leverage it to augment the traditional channel by taking care of the day-to-day operational tasks. Whereas the ground salesforce can focus on the more strategic tasks of maintaining and growing accounts, relationship building, up-selling, and cross-selling offerings. At the same time, the digital channel must empower B2B buyers to perform self-service functions such as product browsing, placing orders, tracking orders, account management, etc.

Resolution: B2B organizations must select a B2B-first commerce platform capable of handling the complex, multi-stakeholder workflow needed in B2B use cases. Also, the platform must offer strong account and user management as well as workflow management capabilities to map and manage complex B2B organizations and their layered buying centers. Native functionalities such as sales representative support always prove to be an added advantage that equips the B2B sellers to manage their workforce effectively. This way, sales agents/representatives can have a quick overview of their customers and their activities via the eCommerce platform so that the sales agents can assist the customers easily. In addition, the sales agents can view relevant information about the products and services so that they can increase sales and support customer needs. The sales agents can review and approve new account registration requests, access the administrative view of orders, etc.

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2. Complex and Disconnected Technology Stacks

As business continues to grow, organizations tend to add multiple applications to their technology stack in order to automate various business processes. Also, adding new technologies and innovations is perceived as a way to make themselves future resilient. This results in a very diverse application portfolio and an inconsistent, disconnected customer experience. We have observed that many B2B organizations fall into this category and often suffer from convoluted, disjoined technology stacks as well as complex business processes. According to Forrester, the number one technical challenge facing digital experience leaders is inadequate integration with back-end systems.

Resolution: As the key objective of any digital transformation is to provide an integrated, seamless, and consistent customer experience, B2B organizations must focus on how to select a suitable digital commerce platform that can work with existing disjointed systems. The selected platform must create a solid foundation for digital transformation that enables digital agility for future needs by bringing everything onto one platform. The platform must be technology-agnostic and should not only provide enterprise-grade integration capabilities to connect with a variety of external and backend systems but also varying degrees of integration options to work on top of a disjointed backend stack.

3. Acute Shortage of Right Digital Talents

The sudden spike in the number of transformative projects (of various sizes) across the globe has created a big vacuum for digital talents. Emerging digital technologies across the value chain are evolving and maturing so quickly that it is difficult to hire, train and retain talents. Businesses looking at following a composable architecture feel this pain in particular as they require quite a broad range of skills to handle multiple diverse sets of technologies. All these have resulted in an acute market shortage of talents with the right digital skills. But without the right team, it is impossible to execute a digital commerce transformation initiative successfully.

Resolution: B2B organizations should choose an enterprise-grade commerce platform with a highly flexible technology stack and easy customizability. The platform must provide capabilities to reuse components, easy integration with legacy systems, and easy customization capabilities through extensions as well as minimize the development efforts for implementation. In addition, the platform should provide the necessary tools for business users to make required updates and changes easily, freeing up the bandwidth of the development team. A platform built on open-source technology with a large backing of very active community members and a robust SI network over the geography can provide the right resource from the market without any vendor lock-in, which is an essential component for successful digital transformation.

Digital transformation is a continuous journey. As customer needs and expectations shift, enterprises must be agile and willing to evolve their business accordingly. Yes, technology will play a significant role. B2B organizations must choose the right digital platform, a platform built for their special and complex needs along with a future-proof, well-guided strategy, the necessary tools, and a unified team to navigate through this transformational journey.

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Reducing Costs Through Automated Warranty Claims

2025-06-04T19:31:46Z

In today’s manufacturing industry, product alone often isn’t enough to stand out from the crowd anymore. Modern buyer behaviors are changing, with many preferring a B2C-like experience. It’s becoming increasingly clear that manufacturing companies need to provide an outstanding digital customer experience to differentiate their business — and that includes after-sales support.

One often-overlooked aspect of customer service is warranty claim processing. While many manufacturers consider warrant management to be a drain on revenue and resources, automation technology is reshaping this perspective. Not only can automating the warranty claim process enhance the after-sales customer experience, it also streamlines tedious workflows and saves money with each claim.

Warranty Claim Automation

The era of spreadsheets and paper-based processes is over. Due to an increasing number of issues in warranty claim processing, organizations worldwide lose thousands of dollars every year. This is driving the demand for better automation solutions, with the global warranty management system market expected to reach $6.24 billion by 2031, according to MarketWatch.

Automating warranty claim management enables businesses to streamline this tedious function while reducing manual tasks, increasing accuracy, and minimizing costs. Buyers can also see the benefits, as warranty claim automation improves customer service and the after-sales experience. To gain a better understanding of the many advantages of claim automation, let’s first take a look at the challenges associated with traditional warranty management.

The Challenges of Traditional Warranty Management

Manufacturers must keep track of multiple products, parts, and services — each requiring different pieces of information — and process them correctly. In the past, warranty management has been an intensive, highly manual process that hinders productivity and lacks efficiency. In addition to validating claims and client information and identifying quality issues, manufacturers also need to minimize the number of claims to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction.

Managing this process can be challenging for a number of reasons, including:

Data entry errors: Manual data entry is a time-consuming, repetitive process that is prone to human error. Any mistakes or redundancies can result in improper claim filing and sunken administrative costs.

Inefficient processes: Without automation, processing warranty claims is slow and susceptible to errors, taking up time that could be better spent on high-value tasks.

Poor reporting: Tracking and processing warranty claims in traditional spreadsheets offers little transparency. This lack of visibility, combined with mistakes in data entry, can lead to inaccurate reports.

Fraudulent claims: Validating warranty claims is another tedious task that can cost your business money if fraudulent claims are paid out. Manually verifying this information often results in errors that allow false and duplicate claims to slip through the cracks.

High indirect costs: With so much labor involved with inefficient, manual warranty processing, it’s understandable that businesses see it as a resource drain. On top of fraudulent and duplicate claims, the time it takes to process each claim adds up, costing businesses thousands of dollars.

Why Automate Your Warranty Claim Process?

Automating the warranty claim process brings myriad benefits to manufacturing businesses, from reducing manual labor and streamlining processes to boosting profitability and customer satisfaction. Here are a few major advantages that make warranty claims automation a competitive differentiator in the manufacturing industry:

1. Boost Efficiency and Turnaround Time

A warrant claims automation solution enables manufacturers to drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to process each claim. By only requiring information that’s relevant to quality issues, automated warranty claims management also boosts the efficiency of each claim. Plus, real-time data capture gives you the information you need to assess and validate claims as they occur for quicker turnarounds and issue resolution.

2. Improve Data Accuracy and Reduce Human Error

With automation technology, you don’t have to worry about the risks of manual data entry. Automating the warranty claim process enables seamless data transfers across systems to minimize human errors and improve the accuracy of your data.

3. Visualize and Validate Claim Data

The best automated warranty management offers out-of-the-box dashboards to help visualize real-time warranty process insights. Intelligent audit systems also validate warranty claim data to prevent false or fraudulent claims from getting through. With these measures in place, your business can rest assured that only authenticated product issues are eligible for payment.

4. Reduce Costs Per Claim

From eliminating expensive manual processes and errors to automatically validating claims for payment, warranty claim automation enables businesses to maximize workflow efficiency while minimizing the number and cost of claims. This also enables claims agents to assess and file claims faster, allowing more time for high-priority tasks.

5. Increased Customer Satisfaction

Today’s B2B buyers have high expectations for a streamlined experience even after their purchases. With efficient claims management and an easily accessible customer portal, your business can enhance the after-sales buyer experience, providing customers with peace of mind that their quality issues are being addressed promptly and with care. This increased customer satisfaction ultimately boosts their loyalty to your business.

What to Look For When Automating Business Processes

The right business automation technology should have the features and agility to support both your warranty management process and company at large. While there are a wide variety of tools available on the market, the manufacturing industry has some unique functionality needs to consider. The good news for manufacturers: Liferay DXP can easily handle processes that an automated warranty management software would normally do, or integrate with your existing systems.

To help you determine the right solution for your business, here are the key capabilities you should look for in business automation solutions:

Flexibility and Scalability

Your solution needs to be flexible enough to handle the wide range of products, parts, and services your business offers. This includes things like linking warranty data to product categories and generating unique serial numbers for specific products. In addition, your warranty automation system should be scalable to grow with your business, managing and supporting your expanding needs.

Integrations

A warranty automation solution shouldn’t stand alone in your digital ecosystem. It needs to be able to integrate with the rest of your enterprise software to ensure effective automation and data integrity. That means aggregating and organizing product, client, and claim data from various sources across your digital infrastructure.

Quality Assurance

Without automated quality assurance and claim validation, your agents may as well continue their manual operations, as there’s no way to identify false or excessive claims. By evaluating and authenticating warranty data with intelligent software, your business can eliminate the risk of paying out on fraudulent claims, driving profitability throughout the process.

Customer Experience

Creating a positive customer experience is paramount for manufacturers to stand out from the competition — and that includes after-sales interactions. Automating business processes with an intuitive customer portal allows your clients to file claims and provide the necessary information with ease. This enhances customer service and boosts satisfaction, creating a loyal buyer base for your manufacturing business.

2 Minute Video Summary

Get a 2 minute summary of how a Liferay customer portal can be built with powerful, out of the box tools that make it easy for you to automate business processes like warranty claims management and enable your business to streamline this tedious function. Check out this video:

Reduce Your Claim Costs With Liferay Customer Portals

Want to learn more about how automating business processes like warranty claims management can help you improve customer satisfaction and save money on claims? Liferay’s customizable customer portals empower businesses to optimize their after-sales experiences with self-service content and help centers for streamlined support and claims services.

To start reducing your claims costs, visit our manufacturing customer portals page.

Personalizing Customer Experience in Manufacturing: The Why & How

2025-06-04T19:30:25Z

Manufacturing is one of the most important industries in the global economy. Although manufacturers face challenges other companies may never have to imagine, their customers have many of the same expectations — especially when it comes to a personalized customer experience (CX).

Here’s what to know about personalization in manufacturing — why, how, and where to get started.

Why Personalize Manufacturing CX?

In today’s competitive manufacturing environment, high-quality products aren’t enough to stand out. Instead, manufacturers need differentiators — and often the best, most cost-effective way to create those differentiators is to personalize customer experience in manufacturing.

Personalization is becoming increasingly important in ways like this:

Customer expectations: Customers demand personalization in every interaction, no matter the industry. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company, 71% of consumers expect personalized CX and 76% get frustrated when it isn’t offered.

Business-to-business (B2B) necessities: B2B buyers have unique needs like specific ordering requirements that can often only be met via personalized CX. They want experiences that feel like those they have as direct consumers, and only personalization can deliver.

Increasing costs: Between supply chain disruption and rising inflation, everyday manufacturing tasks are more economically demanding than ever. Personalized CX gives manufacturers a way to simplify and streamline interactions to reduce costs without sacrificing quality — for example, by increasing aftersales revenue.

Better return on investment: According to McKinsey & Company, organizations that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from these activities than their competitors.

What Does High-Quality, Personalized CX Look Like?

The personalization of CX in manufacturing can take many forms. Here’s what the end result should look like for customers:

Simplicity: From data and content to a personalized portfolio, manufacturing customers want to find what they’re looking for instantly.

Seamless experiences: Customers interact with manufacturers across multiple channels and devices. That means manufacturing CX needs to be both omnichannel and seamless.

User-specific interactions: Site experiences should be different between users, responding to each customer’s unique preferences.

Tailored tasks: Actual data and behavior must inform tasks, opportunities, and experiences, tailoring every interaction to a user’s expectations.

Self-service opportunities: Self-service can include account management tasks, spare part orders, chatbot interactions, and more.

Benefits of Personalized CX for Manufacturers

Once you’ve created the ideal digital customer strategy and mastered personalization in manufacturing, your organization can begin to see a variety of rich benefits. These may include:

Financial Benefits

From increased revenue and improved customer lifetime value to reduced cost to serve, personalization can help bolster manufacturing budgets. Better yet, these benefits can be resistant to other industry disruptors like supply chain challenges and can continue supporting your budget even in challenging times.

Competitive Benefits

Personalized experiences help your manufacturing operation stand out from the competition. Customers will like doing business with you because they’re treated as individuals instead of numbers on a page. Plus, with increased conversation rates and reduced bounce rates, you’ll have a bigger share of the market.

Customer Benefits

Customers will see benefits, too, like increased engagement from your CX staff, more satisfying experiences, and quicker results. Options like self-service are especially valuable to manufacturing customers, helping them complete tasks on their own time without having to reach out to customer service representatives.

Getting Started: Personalized CX in Manufacturing

How do you personalize customer experience in manufacturing?

Simple: You need a customer self-service portal.

A customer self-service portal is a single, user-friendly platform that allows manufacturing customers to interact with your organization in ways that work for them. Some of the most impressive parts of this solution won’t even require effort on the part of your help desk or call center; instead, customers handle tasks themselves, using self-service capabilities to do things like:

Access data.
Update information.
Place orders.
Research products.
Track order deliveries.

By giving users control of their own experiences, you improve their satisfaction without having to spend more money on CX.

Self-service isn’t the only personalization solution, however; these portals also come with out-of-the-box, low- or no-code tools, allowing you to tailor the customer experience to each individual user. This can all be done without having to wait for IT involvement, which means fewer delays and faster response times.

A few key features of a self-service portal for personalized CX in manufacturing include:

Track Customer Profiles and Behavioral Data

Manufacturing customers create a lot of data when they interact with your organization. If you want to personalize their experiences, you can’t let this data go to waste. That’s why self-service portals should provide the capability to track customer profiles and learn from behavioral data. This information tells you who your users are, how they interact with your platform, where they’re getting the most value, which parts of the experience are frustrating or time-consuming, and how you can improve your personalization tactics to deliver better CX.

Create a Single View of User Information

To truly learn from your customers, you need a way to see their information in one user-friendly dashboard. Self-service portals should provide this single source of truth, allowing you to compare different user preferences, track the habits of returning customers, and anticipate consumer needs before your competitors do.

Group Users By Profile Attributes

Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. Instead, your platform should allow you to identify attributes shared between customers and design your CX around these unique elements. This gives you the support you need to build experiences that feel completely unique without “reinventing the wheel” for every new client.

Measure Content Performance

One key element of any customer self-service portal is the content library. How-to guides, explainer videos, blog posts, and other information must be readily available to help customers navigate self-service tasks and reduce the burden on your help desk or call center. However, a customer self-service portal doesn’t just make this content easy to find — it also gives you the visibility to learn how and when users are accessing articles and videos. With this information, you can measure content performance and make targeted improvements to further personalize CX.

2 Minute Video Summary

Get a 2 minute summary of how a Liferay customer portal can be built with powerful, out of the box tools that make it easy for you to offer the seamless and personalized experiences B2B buyers expect. Check out this video:

Start Personalizing Customer Experience in Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry faces many unique challenges, but CX doesn’t have to be one of them. With a customer self-service portal at your fingertips, it’s possible to improve the customer experience, cut costs, and deliver on user expectations all at the same time.

Are you ready to personalize customer experience in manufacturing? Take the first step by exploring Liferay’s Manufacturing Customer Portals today.

PaaS: What You Need to Know

2025-05-29T20:47:34Z

When it comes time to choose application solutions for your company, you can’t afford to rely on anything that will disappoint you, your employees, or your customers.

However, with so many tech solutions and software options available, it can be difficult to know where your research should begin. For this reason, we’ve compiled information about one such option — Platform as a Service, or PaaS — to help you understand what this service is, how it’s differentiated from other solutions, and why it’s a must-have foundation for your entire digital strategy.

Let’s take a look at PaaS.

What is PaaS?

Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a cloud computing and service model in which software, apps, and other tools are delivered digitally as part of a cohesive platform. These assets can immediately turn teams into application developers, enabling you to leverage internal design capacity for far more than basic apps.

Here are a few of the most important things to know about PaaS:

What Does PaaS Do?

A PaaS platform offers many capabilities and functionalities depending on your needs. However, its most important role is to support your work in application development and deployment. For example, you can use your platform to:

Design, test, and deploy applications.

Communicate with internal developer teams across multiple locations.
Provide applications to enhance customer experience.
Create self-service applications to empower end-users and reduce the cost of service.

Where Do PaaS Tools Exist?

Unlike some on-premises solutions, PaaS doesn’t rely exclusively on wires, hardware, or other physical components. Instead, PaaS is a cloud service. All of its data, software, development tools, and application information exist digitally and can be accessed remotely.

Do Users Host Their Own PaaS Platform?

PaaS is hosted by a platform service provider, or PaaS vendor, who acts as your partner in designing and utilizing the platform. This vendor manages and runs software on its internal infrastructure, which means your teams are spared the time, money, and energy required to install hardware and software in-house. The result is a foundation for the simpler, more efficient development of cloud applications.

What Advantages Does PaaS Offer Over On-Site Solutions?

Although on-site solutions have long been the default, digitization and mounting customer expectations have illuminated the true limitations of this approach. PaaS offers cloud computing as an alternative, eliminating the inherent risks and costs associated with an entirely physical infrastructure for designing applications. In place of these pitfalls, PaaS introduces a wealth of advantages:

Flexibility: Cloud computing allows you to reorganize or restructure your applications as desired, giving you the flexibility necessary to keep up with a fast-changing digital ecosystem. Unlike on-site solutions, a PaaS platform makes it possible to amend a strategy or update application offerings without significant downtime.
Reliability: On-site hardware is vulnerable to a variety of hazards, from theft and accidental damage to destruction caused by natural disasters. Cloud applications, on the other hand, can be digitally secured and aren’t subject to the same risks as physical hardware.
Accessibility: Accessing data can become complicated or even impossible when on-site tools create frustrations, limitations, and location restrictions. With a PaaS solution, your data and apps exist in the cloud — which means critical tasks can be completed from any location with internet access.
Cost savings: Physical components require maintenance, repairs, and constant care just to operate smoothly. PaaS overcomes these costs and delivers digital solutions without the need for high-priced upgrades to your hardware or software, allowing you to manage your cloud applications on more budget-friendly devices.

Note that, while it significantly reduces the need for on-premises hardware, a PaaS solution doesn’t completely replace your IT infrastructure. Instead, it helps you leverage your existing infrastructure to utilize the platform hosted by your service provider.

Different Types of PaaS

There are three main types of PaaS: public, private, and hybrid. These types are defined by their design as well as the ways in which they can be utilized.

Here’s a closer look at each type of PaaS:

Public PaaS
Public PaaS takes its name from the public cloud in which it’s most commonly used. It allows users to focus on their role as developers, enabling application testing and deployment while the PaaS vendor manages servers, operating systems, and other elements of the infrastructure. Examples of public PaaS include Salesforce Heroku and Microsoft Azure.
Private PaaS
A private PaaS solution, on the other hand, is used in your private cloud. It offers far more control over details like which cloud provider is used and how the infrastructure is managed. However, this also increases IT workloads, as internal experts are generally responsible for firewalls and other on-site elements of the infrastructure. Popular examples of private PaaS include Apprenda and Red Hat OpenShift.
Hybrid PaaS
If neither public nor private PaaS solutions fit perfectly into your business, the third option may be especially appealing: hybrid PaaS. As a combination of public and private cloud computing, hybrid PaaS maintains the flexibility and simplicity of the former while offering the control and granular visibility of the latter. One example of hybrid PaaS is the partnership between Google Cloud Platform and Nutanix, which utilizes both private and public elements.

PaaS vs. IaaS vs. SaaS

Although PaaS is a specialized offering and has a long list of rich benefits for companies like yours, its close relationship to other as-a-service models can lead to some confusion. Here’s a closer look at what makes PaaS unique from two other models:

PaaS vs. IaaS

Infrastructure as a service, or IaaS, is a cloud computing solution in which a third-party service provider hosts key elements of your infrastructure, including:

Networks
Data storage
Servers
Web applications
Cloud applications

Examples of IaaS include Cisco Metacloud, Rackspace, and Linode.

Note that PaaS and IaaS are closely related, as infrastructure-as-a-service is an integral part of platform-as-a-service offerings. However, while IaaS is a simpler self-service solution focused only on providing access to those IT elements, a PaaS vendor has an active role in helping scale and manage platform tools.

PaaS vs. SaaS

Software as a service, or SaaS, is another similar yet separate model. SaaS examples include DropBox and Hubspot.

The difference between SaaS and PaaS is in the distribution of responsibilities. While PaaS puts users in control of application development, providing the platform and cloud service as a foundation for internal creation, software as a service (SaaS) puts all of these responsibilities in the hands of a trusted service provider. That means companies using SaaS don’t design, test, deploy, or manage their own applications — instead, they’re accessing ready-made apps created and hosted by a third party.

A Closer Look at PaaS, IaaS, and SaaS

After identifying the differences between different as-a-service offerings, it’s important to take the next step — which is to analyze where PaaS stands in comparison to these similar models.

Put simply, PaaS is the “middle ground.” It offers the underlying infrastructure support of IaaS without the complete outsourcing required by SaaS, allowing your development team to outsource networks, servers, and other key elements of application or software development without giving up control of the overall process.

Here’s what that looks like:

IaaS provides infrastructure support but no framework for developing or deploying applications.
PaaS offerings include infrastructure and development tools, creating a solid framework without taking key decisions out of your hands.
SaaS is a solution best suited for those who would rather not develop their own software, allowing users to choose ready-made applications instead of designing their own.

In short, PaaS offers a balance between support and flexibility — an important differentiating factor in the as-a-service world.

Who Oversees PaaS?

Because any PaaS offering PaaS is inherently a partnership rather than a self-service tool, it’s necessary to determine ahead of time who is responsible for PaaS.

PaaS Provider Responsibilities

As the “owner” of PaaS infrastructure, a PaaS provider has certain responsibilities. These include:

Building and deploying software offerings within the PaaS solution.
Ensuring smooth, reliable delivery of service.
Helping companies scale PaaS platform tools to meet specific needs.
Maintaining PaaS software.
Providing services that align with agreed-upon expectations.
Troubleshooting and addressing technical issues.

User Responsibilities

As a user of a PaaS platform, you have responsibilities of your own. However, these are all predicated on the concept of a partnership: Your applications are built on a third-party framework. As such, you’re less responsible for the underlying infrastructure and more focused on the effective design and implementation of your apps. That being said, many internal stakeholders are involved in overseeing PaaS:

The CIO may spearhead PaaS implementation, acting as the main liaison between your company and your PaaS provider.
Developers, as main users of a PaaS solution, often have a say in its selection and deployment.
IT administrators are often responsible for integrating PaaS software into existing infrastructure and managing anything not covered by the PaaS provider.
Customer service experts may also have some involvement in the utilization of a PaaS solution, as their expertise can help create customer-facing apps that shape and support the customer experience.

Consumer Responsibilities

Although a PaaS provider offers tools and software which you use to develop and deploy cloud applications, the true end-user when developing customer-facing applications is your audience. Depending on how your application is designed, consumers may have minor tasks — for example, installing supporting software or maintaining their accounts — but they aren’t responsible for any hosting, maintenance, or updating tasks.

Explore As-a-Service Options

Are you looking for an alternative to expensive on-site tools for developers? PaaS is a far more effective way to design, build, deploy, and manage your company’s applications — and it’s accessible, reliable, and flexible due to its roots in cloud computing.

At Liferay, we believe customer experience is at the core of everything a company does. For us, that means supporting you with the tech tools and software necessary to create rich, efficient applications; for you, that means choosing the right as-a-service option to serve your own customers. Through our cloud-based solutions and comprehensive platform offerings, we can become part of your team — just one more way for you to deliver the unforgettable experiences your audience deserves.

Explore our platform to see what’s in store for your business.

Self Service Banking: How B2B and B2C Customers See Self Service

2025-05-29T20:57:48Z

A company’s customer service is perhaps the most telling part of its reputation. If the customer experience (CX) is user-centric, streamlined, and constantly updated to meet new expectations, it’s easy to see that the company cares about the people it serves. If, on the other hand, service is unreliable and frustrating, customers may feel they’re being treated as numbers on a page — only valuable when they’re generating immediate value.

This is especially true in the financial industry. Banks and other organizations must answer time-sensitive questions, explain complex banking processes, and help customers navigate potentially stressful situations regarding their private or business finances. Luckily, there’s a simple way to make these tasks more manageable: offering self service solutions.

Here’s what you need to know about self service banking: what it is, how it’s viewed by business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) clients, and which technical capabilities make it possible.

A Look at Self Service Banking

Self service has a long history in banking. One of the earliest and most important examples is the introduction of the ATM, which appeared for the first time on June 27, 1967. Although this first ATM was located in London, the rest of the world quickly followed suit; for example, the first ATMs appeared in the U.S. in 1969 and in China in 1985. This represented an important development for financial institutions: Customers no longer had to visit tellers or even their local bank branch to withdraw cash.

In many ways, the introduction of the ATM set the stage for an entirely new approach to banking. Although clients wouldn’t begin to expect full self service experiences until the internet popularized the “do it yourself” approach to many tasks, this early innovation signifies that consumers have long been interested in managing their own banking needs.

This explains where the concept of self service banking may have come from, but why are so many financial institutions still pursuing it today? Here’s a look at the “why” behind this approach:

Meeting Customer Expectations

Modern customers want the convenience of completing key financial tasks on their own time. Just as importantly, today’s consumers expect these tasks to connect seamlessly to in-branch interactions, creating a truly omnichannel banking experience. This is an important consideration for financial institutions, as positive customer experiences build loyalty and increase return on investment (ROI).

Creating a Competitive Edge

A 30% increase in conversions, a 30% rise in customer registrations — these are just two examples of how self service can help give financial institutions a competitive edge. If a client wants self service across multiple channels, they’re far more likely to choose a bank that respects their time by offering these options.

Empowering Service Representatives

Reducing the burden on service representatives allows them to focus on higher-value business opportunities. This empowers them to help drive more revenue, expand on their talents and support company goals in broader, more dynamic ways.

Reducing Costs

Digital self service can improve CX while minimizing costs — for example, by minimizing call volume to customer support centers. Driving more traffic to online touchpoints helps reduce cost-to-serve by letting consumers personalize their own experiences instead of making customer service representatives into “middle men.”

Self Service Banking for B2C Customers

Although it’s key to understand the history and value of self service banking, it’s equally important to appreciate the customer’s perspective. Let's look at this functionality from the viewpoint of B2C clients.

Sources: What Does Personalization in Banking Really Mean?, Digital banking redefined in 2021, World Fintech Report 2020

Simplicity: Customers are looking for products and services that make their lives easier. When offered effectively, self service does just that.
Entertainment value: As attention spans get shorter, B2C clients are increasingly interested in interactions that offer more value than just marking things off their to-do list. They want entertainment, promotions, and unique experiences — all of which can be attained through self service tasks.
Accessibility: These days, mobile access is more important than ever. Self service tasks are easy to perform on mobile, which means customers can bring their banks with them wherever they go.
Speed: B2C clients appreciate fast service. Luckily, self service provides for this demand by allowing users to complete tasks entirely at their own pace.

Self Service Banking for B2B Customers

Every individual brings unique preferences and expectations to banking interactions, but B2B customers are, in some ways, different from their B2C counterparts. That’s because B2B clients depend on financial institutions to help support and structure their own businesses, creating the opportunity for a deeper partnership.

That being said, even the best partnership doesn’t require constant person-to-person interaction. Instead, these customers need self service banking options to help streamline and simplify their B2B financial experience.

Sources: Finding the right digital balance in B2B customer experience, SMEs ‘More Reliant Than Ever’ on Digital Services in Wake of COVID-19

Reliability: Customer relationships are more complex in B2B scenarios. These clients want to know they can count on their bank whenever and wherever they need — something self service can help prove.
Efficiency: B2B clients are especially protective of their time, since every minute they spend on banking services takes away from their own ability to serve customers and deliver top-notch products. Self service provides the necessary efficiency by allowing B2B customers to complete tasks without waiting for help from a service representative.
Functionality: In the B2B space, it’s critical to have access to digital tools and modern functionality. COVID-19 forced commercial banks to innovate with solutions like self service, showing B2B clients they’re ready and willing to adapt to new demands.
Flexibility: When working with B2B clientele, multiple people may be using the same customer account with different roles in the business. Commercial banks need the flexibility to tailor tasks, touchpoints, and processes to individual customer needs.

How to Provide Key Self Service Capabilities

It’s clear that self service is incredibly important for B2B and B2C customers alike, not to mention the banks that serve them. To take advantage of these benefits, financial institutions need a simple, effective way to deliver self service capabilities — and the answer is often a self service customer portal.

These portals act as a platform for key features, functions, and tools, giving banking customers a single touchpoint for all self service interactions. Here’s what a portal should look like:

Support for Different Task Types

Self service shouldn’t be limited to only a few kinds of tasks. Instead, a portal should allow customers to:

Find product and service information personalized to their needs.
Complete onboarding digitally without having to visit a bank branch.
Update personal information without disclosing sensitive details over the phone or email.
Access sensitive data through a secure online connection.
Apply for loans independently.
Do everything in one place through a single URL instead of multiple logins and websites.

Experience Management

Banks need to empower non-technical users to easily create, manage, and personalize rich digital experiences without the help of IT teams. A self service portal should offer low-code or no-code functionality to make this possible, allowing users of all backgrounds to create pages and layouts without IT input. Tools like audience segmentation, personalization, and content recommendations help further manage customer experience, making every interaction both valuable and enjoyable.

User Management and Data Privacy

B2B and B2C customers alike need to know their data is protected. For example, self service account management allows clients of both kinds to update information themselves instead of sharing this sensitive data so a representative can make updates for them. Similarly, B2B customers can create roles for each individual who interacts with the portal, controlling access through permissions so the right tasks are accessible to the right people.

Powerful Search Capabilities

One key part of self service banking is a company knowledge base, which can be connected to chatbots and search tools. This allows customers to find articles, how-to videos, and more, all by using their own search terms and browsing personalized results. To make these things possible, a customer portal should offer powerful out-of-the-box search capabilities supported by knowledge base management tools and other solutions. The result is a single solution that improves CX while reducing cost-to-serve.

Software Integration

Banks often struggle to provide all services in one place because they have multiple systems for each different business unit. Acquisitions multiply the issue, forcing banks to juggle different systems for core services, business process management (BPM), Authentication (AuthN) and Authorization (AuthZ), and more.

A portal that sits on top of these solutions, integrating rather than replacing them, allows banks to simplify the digital transformation process. It also allows the connection of a customer’s preferred channels, including mobile apps, chatbots, and kiosks — all from a single source.

Effective Cross-Selling Features

Part of self service — and, in fact, CX overall — is offering the right message at the right time. Although cross-selling is an important tool when interacting with both B2B and B2C customers, it’s important for financial institutions to understand when and how to leverage these opportunities depending on the user, their unique banking needs, and their original intentions.

For example, say a B2C customer has logged onto the self service portal to complete an urgent task. At this point, cross-selling attempts would be distracting and perhaps even frustrating. However, this customer may be more perceptive after the task is completed, especially if the offered product or service is tailored to their profile or previous browsing behavior. The same is true for B2B clients: If a customer is involved in manufacturing, you can offer them financing options for new equipment and machines, helping expand your relationship while providing real value.

Self Service for B2B and B2C Banking Customers

Self service is, in many ways, the future of banking. It addresses fast-moving client expectations by putting them in charge of their own experiences, creating benefits for both the client and the financial institution. Although the value of self service is seen differently by B2B and B2C customers, it’s clear that this solution can address every banking customer’s unique needs.

Perhaps most importantly, self service eliminates the need to choose between cost-effective and excellent CX. By reducing cost-to-serve, freeing up employees to focus on high-value business opportunities, and building better client relationships, self service adds a rich new dimension to CX.

All of this is made possible through a flexible, powerful self service portal like Liferay’s Digital Experience Platform. To see how it supports financial institutions and their B2B and B2C customers, schedule a demo today.

Minimizing Unplanned Downtime: How to Support Your Manufacturing Customers

2025-06-04T19:27:04Z

Every company in the manufacturing industry faces unique challenges, but one hurdle unites organizations of all shapes and sizes: unplanned downtime. In other fields, downtime is frustrating, inefficient, and financially straining — but in manufacturing, it has the potential to be catastrophic if it interrupts delicate processes or delays complex supply chains.

Your manufacturing customers likely face unplanned downtime every day. To become more than just a vendor, you need to offer solutions that help overcome this challenge, positioning yourself as a valued partner. In this blog, we’ll explore one solution that makes it possible: a customer self-service portal.

The Costs of Unplanned Downtime

Unplanned downtime can impact every part of the manufacturing landscape, from raw materials acquisition to aftersales revenue. It has both direct and indirect costs, which add up to substantial losses for your manufacturing customers.

Here’s a look at the costs associated with unplanned downtime:

Direct Costs

Repairs: Machine failure is a significant cause of unplanned downtime, and resolution often requires repairs. This work takes time and eats into the overall budget.

Replacement parts: Although spare parts management is an important element of the manufacturing process overall, unplanned downtime interferes with calculations and forces manufacturers to use parts they planned on saving.

Process interruption: Because much of the manufacturing process is interconnected, unplanned downtime on a single machine can interrupt productivity across the entire plant. Workers may need to stop what they’re doing while repairs are performed, and processes may need to be restarted from scratch due to these interruptions — which, in turn, leads to wasted money.

Indirect Costs

Loss of efficiency: Unplanned downtime doesn’t just interrupt physical processes — it also causes workers to lose focus by forcing them to wait for repairs or abruptly switch tasks. This inefficiency is difficult to identify and track but nonetheless has a negative impact on overall manufacturing budgets.

Data disruption: Manufacturers rely on accurate, realistic data captured from machines and worker tasks. Unplanned downtime disrupts this data, which can lead to inaccurate assumptions and less productive decision-making.

Business relationships: Although unplanned downtime is a grim reality in manufacturing, that doesn’t mean business partners — especially end customers — can afford to wait while workers perform repairs or other solutions. Unfortunately, the immediacy of the modern market means unplanned downtime can lead to lost business relationships.

How to Help Customers Minimize Manufacturing Downtime

The good news is that you can help your manufacturing customers minimize downtime. The key is to leverage an effective customer self-service portal — a software solution providing one unified touchpoint so customers can make better use of your services.

Here are a few ways a customer portal can help overcome unplanned downtime:

Organization: Allow customers to keep all their equipment portfolios in one place. This organization helps users quickly track problems and identify the best solutions from your offerings.

Visibility: Past purchases, service records, and even Internet of Things (IoT) telemetry data can be stored in a customer portal. Users have a clearer picture of their assets, allowing them to interact with your services more efficiently.

Simplification: Regular maintenance is a key part of minimizing downtime. A customer portal simplifies these tasks by giving manufacturing customers a single source of truth regarding their equipment, schedules, and more. The portal can even provide recurring maintenance reminders to further simplify the process.

Education: Customer portals can offer built-in knowledge bases for engineers, field technicians, and other workers. This helps provide key information and keeps customers on your site instead of performing external research that could lead to competitors.

Efficiency: Regardless of how your customers use the portal, the end goal is all about efficiency. For example, customers can choose product bundles to simplify ordering, which reduces costly returns and helps avoid unplanned downtime caused by order mistakes.

Simply put, a customer portal acts as a bridge between you and your customers, creating a shared digital space for interactions, support, and communication. The result is a better experience overall, which leads to benefits like increased customer engagement and profitability.

Becoming a Valued Partner

You can be one of two things when you serve manufacturing customers: a vendor or a valued partner. The difference is in how you think about your clients. If they’re just numbers on a page, you’re likely to see the results of this approach reflected in reduced engagement and minimal loyalty. If, on the other hand, you think critically about their challenges and proactively shape your offerings to help overcome those hurdles, you’ll become a key part of their manufacturing landscape.

To position yourself as a partner instead of just a vendor, it’s imperative that you begin with an optimal digital customer strategy. This doesn’t just guide your acquisition of technological solutions like a customer portal — it also proves to customers that you’re actively analyzing their needs, optimizing their experiences, and working to create value for them.

With a digital strategy as your guide, you’ll create a mutually beneficial relationship. When you identify customer challenges like unplanned downtime and implement solutions that position your offerings to address those challenges, customers can engage with your brand more effectively. That means they’ll see benefits to their own bottom line and will likely take advantage of even more products or services — which, in turn, benefits your bottom line.

Remember, a vendor is passive; a valued partner takes action and works proactively to go above and beyond for their customers.

Implement Your Customer Portal With Liferay

Your manufacturing customers will always face unplanned downtime. To help them minimize this downtime and the associated costs, you need to position your offerings more effectively. A customer portal allows you to do just that, helping users track purchases, simplify ordering processes, receive regular maintenance reminders, and more.

If you’re ready to go beyond vendor status and become a valued partner for your manufacturing customers, you need a customer portal that compliments your offerings. Explore Liferay’s Manufacturing Customer Portals today to see how a single digital solution can make all the difference.

2 Minute Video Summary

Get a 2 minute summary of how customer portals built with Liferay help manufacturers to keep their customers operational and minimize their unplanned downtime by consolidating equipment portfolios, creating powerful knowledge bases, offering renewable subscription contracts and creating compatible product bundles. Check out this video:

Increasing Aftersales with Liferay

With the right tools, manufacturers can make it easy for customers to continue to do business with them. By unifying the relevant systems and information using Liferay, manufacturers can begin to increase customer satisfaction and drive aftersales revenue.

See how you can leverage Liferay for your business here.

Connecting through Liferay’s Open Source Community: Papa’s Story

2025-06-04T19:25:01Z

How do a university student in South Africa, an old laptop in the Netherlands, and a technology partner in Italy come together? Through the Liferay Community.

A Budding Young Developer Meets Liferay

While Liferay technology can be very powerful, the connections made through the Liferay open source community can be even more powerful.

Before Account Manager Greg Gatherer came to work at Liferay in South Africa, he met a young, passionate developer named Papa Vilanculo for an interview with his previous company. Papa was too young for the position, but even at 17, he was extremely bright and committed to learning and improving his developer skills.

Over the years, Greg and Papa continued to stay in touch and that’s when Papa expressed interest in learning Liferay. Since Liferay is open source and boasts a community of over 200,000 members, Papa was able to quickly learn how to develop on Liferay while finishing up his studies at the University of Cape Town.

“I choose the Liferay platform because it's open-source and saves time from a developer's perspective, it is simple to install and easy to learn. Liferay platform allows you to create web applications in a short space of time. It enables you to combine content from different sources so you can have multiple web applications on the same page like the blog, weather, wiki, etc.”, said Papa.

The community has been instrumental in Papa’s journey; as a developer not only has Papa been able to learn how to use Liferay to build apps and websites from the guidance of other community members, but he has also been able to forge connections with people from around the world!

From South Africa to Netherlands

Through the community, Papa was able to connect to different developers around the world, like Liferay Sales Engineer Jan, in the Netherlands. Upon seeing the solutions Papa had built with Liferay, Jan could tell that this young developer had great potential. But the version of Liferay Community Edition that Papa was using was extremely old; this was because of the limitations of Papa’s aging laptop.

Upon hearing this, Jan remembered the older laptop he had and wanted to give it to Papa so that he could access the newest version of Liferay to create even more powerful solutions.

Coming from a poor area of South Africa, Papa didn’t have access to many resources. In fact, around the same time Papa was connecting with Jan, he was mugged and had to go to internet cafes in order to use a computer. The package from the Netherlands came at a serendipitous time, allowing Papa to not only finish his schooling and projects, but also to work on the latest version of Liferay.

Papa continues to be an active member of the community as he finishes his final year at university. The community continues to provide opportunities for growth as Liferay partners in Italy have expressed interest in employing Papa once he graduates.

Currently, Papa is working on a pharmaceutical delivery platform that will enable customers to order from various pharmacies online. His goal is that “users won’t need to physically hand their prescriptions to the pharmacists and instead upload them online to get their orders delivered.”

Collaboration, Connection, and Community

None of this would have been possible without the support of the community. Developers and partners were able to come together from all parts of the world to guide and teach a budding dreamer to build and achieve new solutions. This is a story about more than just Liferay or technology, it is a story about the power of people growing and getting better, together.

Learn more about the Liferay community here.

3 Examples of Successful Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

2025-06-27T17:49:04Z

No one feels the weight of changing customer expectations more deeply than the manufacturing industry. As the beating heart of the supply chain, manufacturers must find ways to keep up with a world that seems determined to change every second.

Luckily, manufacturing companies don’t have to navigate this landscape with only hope and guesswork to guide their way. There’s a much better path through the modern world: digital transformation.

Digital transformation and the manufacturing industry are well-suited for one another. Because so much of their work relies on big data, analytics, and digital technology, manufacturers naturally need a way to bring all these tools together; meanwhile, digital transformation takes on new shape and meaning when informed by unique manufacturing challenges.

Here are a few real-world examples of digital transformation in the manufacturing industry.

Digital Transformation in Modern Manufacturing

Transforming the manufacturing industry isn’t just a best practice — it’s a necessity.

That’s because manufacturers, in many ways, play a vital role in shaping the future — not just via the supply chain, but also through:

Meeting consumer expectations concerning industrial products.
Using new technology or pioneering novel applications of smart technology, including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, and 3D printing.
Finding better ways to use big data.
Spearheading evolutions in the customer experience space through self-service and more.

Simply put, manufacturing and production are the framework for much of what happens in our world; it makes sense that digitization is especially important in this sector.

While manufacturing companies no doubt appreciate the significance of their role in global commerce, helping shape the future is often incidental. Far more important is any digital transformation initiative impacting day-to-day production and factory floor operations, which include:

Capturing data: Machines and plant workers create data every minute of every day. Manufacturers must be able to capture this data accurately, efficiently, and in real time to inform their choice of digital technology, production changes, and other digital transformation elements.
Managing data: The manufacturing industry is perhaps one of the most significant creators of big data, leaving manufacturers and their customers scrambling to perform data analytics and extract necessary insights. As such, any digital transformation strategy in this space must include substantial solutions to manage big data.

Preventing downtime: When machines break down, workflows are interrupted and the entire supply chain can suffer. Manufacturers need digital technology and data analytics tools that enable predictive maintenance, helping foresee and address issues that could cause breakdowns.

Navigating the supply chain: Supply chain interruptions often fall outside a manufacturing company’s control. However, when planned appropriately, digital transformation can help manufacturers navigate these uncertainties. It can also act as a cushion or safety net, creating solutions that pick up the slack or otherwise soften the blow of supply chain interruptions.

Offering self-service options: In the interest of saving time, streamlining the production process, and avoiding supply chain disruption, manufacturing companies often need software that enables self-service capabilities for users. Self-service options help simplify the ordering process, streamline production, make big data more accessible, and create value for stakeholders at all levels.

In short, manufacturers have needs that are uniquely addressed by digital transformation — and that’s why digital experiences are the future of manufacturing. It’s the next industrial revolution, and it’s all about digitized manufacturing operations.

MacDon: A Digital Transformation with Legacy Solutions

To fully understand the value of digital transformation in manufacturing, it’s often necessary to see these changes in real-world scenarios. One such example comes from MacDon.

The company

To see a manufacturing company shaping the future of our world, look no further than MacDon, a world leader in the production of agricultural and harvesting equipment. For over 70 years, MacDon has supported farmers in the cultivation of crops necessary to feed, clothe, and support the global community. As consumer needs grow, MacDon has adapted with impressive flexibility — but they eventually hit a wall with their legacy technology.

The struggle

MacDon offered a self-service dealer portal utilizing legacy Liferay software. While the platform was once robust enough to address the manufacturing company’s needs, new supply chain challenges and mounting customer expectations led MacDon to recognize significant pain points.

For example, MacDon’s high standards for user experience weren’t being met with their existing technology. The look and feel of the site were noticeably outdated, while mobile users routinely encountered issues when accessing the platform. Further, the impressive amount of data created by the company wasn’t being managed in an efficient manner, leaving platform users to waste time and effort on document management tasks.

The solution

MacDon knew it was time to begin their digital transformation journey. However, their legacy system required careful navigation and adaptation — a frequent need in the manufacturing space.

With help from a Liferay partner, MacDon was able to upgrade their platform without having to start from scratch. By migrating big data from legacy systems and taking advantage of the existing framework, this digital transformation journey addressed significant challenges while creating new functionality for users.

On the upgraded MacDon dealer portal, users can retrieve invoice information, check production inventory, create shopping lists, submit warranty claims, and perform key self-service tasks. Equally as important, the manufacturer’s big data is now much easier to navigate and control, enabling the efficient completion of document management operations.

The results

The new MacDon portal is a true testament to the power of digital transformation. It’s not just sleek, modern, and easy to use; it also delivers significant results:

Overall sales increased by 20%.
eCommerce transactions have increased by 50%.
Site visitor numbers have doubled.
Call, fax, and in-person orders have decreased thanks to easier self-service and online options.

Mueller, Inc.: A Digital Transformation with Self-Service Functionality

Another example of digital transformation in the manufacturing industry comes from Mueller, Inc.

The company

Mueller, Inc. has an impressive reputation as a producer and supplier of steel buildings, metal roofing, and other construction components. For more than 85 years, the company has provided the products, services, and materials necessary to work and live in the American Southwest.

As they navigated changing needs right alongside their customers, Mueller quickly came to realize their existing digital approach was no longer viable. They knew their users deserved better — and so did their internal stakeholders.

The struggle

Before their digital transformation, Mueller relied on an open-source content management system. Unfortunately, this system didn’t support their custom-developed web applications, offered very little in the way of self-service options, and severely limited the purchase experience.

For example, the outdated platform offered what was essentially a static digital clone of their print product catalog, providing no personalization to attract customers with specific needs. The system also failed to provide clarity into a user’s position in the buyer journey, limiting Mueller’s options for supporting and structuring the buying process. Perhaps most importantly, the platform didn’t have full capabilities, forcing customers to visit a local sales branch to complete their purchases.

The solution

Mueller knew there had to be a better way to do things — and digital transformation was the key.

They began by working with a Liferay partner to integrate or migrate custom Mueller web applications into a Liferay portal. The result was a single, powerful platform housing all their development tools, big data, analytics, and more.

Today, customers can complete every step of the purchase process from inside the portal. To help focus and visualize their ideas, users can bring visions to life with Mueller’s 3D model builder — which also creates an automatic quote. Specific requests can be routed directly to the relevant Mueller team while other steps can be completed with self-service solutions, vastly improving the digital buying experience for customers.

The results

Thanks to their new portal, Mueller now has the technology necessary to continue shaping the future of builders, workers, and companies in the American Southwest. They’ve seen measurable changes, including:

Quotes increased 73% per month, with some months as high as 163%.
Website traffic increased 250%.
The sales process is shorter and simpler thanks to self-service tools.
User engagement is easily tracked via shopping lists, digital catalog requests, and more.

Airbus: A Digital Transformation with a Knowledge Base

One final example of digital transformation in manufacturing can be found in Airbus.

The company

Airbus is exactly what the name suggests: the world leader in aeronautics and aerospace products and services. Like agriculture and construction, this industry represents a significant opportunity for manufacturers like Airbus to shape the future, creating a perfect position to support the vast possibilities associated with aerospace travel.

However, the industry also moves especially quickly and has demands, challenges, and expectations unrivaled by other business types. That means Airbus must consistently improve their offerings to stay competitive. To navigate all the digital technology, data analytics, and machine learning tools involved in their work, Airbus needed a digital transformation solution that could keep up with them.

The struggle

While Airbus knew what it needed, finding a solution that fit their unique manufacturing needs was more of a challenge.

They felt their current approach wasn’t user-centric, sacrificing the digital experience in ways that simply didn’t provide return on investment (ROI). They also had approximately 15 IT Service Management (ITSM) tools spread across various systems, limiting their ability to manage big data, perform data analytics, and confidently address their IT needs. One of the biggest pain points, however, was the fact that the Service Desk had to be constantly available for troubleshooting and incident management because the system wasn’t easy to navigate, creating frustration for users and wasting time for IT experts.

The solution

Because Airbus had decided to put users at the heart of their digital transformation, the natural next step was to leverage Open Source technology. This allowed the manufacturing company to consolidate its 15 ITSM tools into a single, user-friendly platform, allowing inspiration and innovation to happen at every level. Although one priority was to make users less dependent on the Service Desk, Airbus was most interested in creating a shared digital experience where self-service options simplified every step.

This vision was brought to life in the form of multiple new features, all custom-built to leverage Airbus’ unique position in the manufacturing industry. One such feature is the robust knowledge base, which allows users to perform keyword searches across a vast library of Airbus content; thanks to this knowledge base, users can often find answers to their own questions, thereby streamlining their digital experience.

The results

The new Airbus platform boasts plenty of results. Here are just a few:

10 months saw 290,000 visits and 2,200,000 page views.
Results peaked at 18,000 page views per day.
The Service Desk now manages 30% fewer incidents because the portal helps mitigate and manage issues.
Incidents are resolved more quickly.
Costs are easier to control.
The portal inspired the development of a mobile app, which offers the same features and personalized services has been developed.

Begin Your Digital Transformation with Liferay

Digital transformation may be an important topic in organizations of all kinds, but it’s especially important — and particularly well-utilized — in the manufacturing industry. Manufacturing companies like MacDon, Mueller, and Airbus prove that a huge variety of pain points and challenges can be overcome with the right combination of digital technology.

Perhaps more importantly, these manufacturers act as a shining example of how digital transformation can be adapted to fit any company’s needs, goals, and unique priorities. As leaders in production and important actors in shaping the future of the world, these organizations prove that, while there’s no “right way” to begin your digital transformation journey, you’ll only see results if you take the first step.

At Liferay, we know that first step can be intimidating. We also know manufacturers have especially complicated requirements, from predictive maintenance and data analytics to preventing machine downtime and navigating the supply chain. Increasingly, challenges like automating complex business processes and personalizing the customer experience are becoming important factors of success. That’s why our portal is highly customizable, allowing manufacturing companies to build their digital transformation around concrete goals and accessible metrics.

Are you ready to begin your digital transformation? Explore our Digital Experience Platform to see what’s in store for manufacturers (and all other movers, innovators, and creators of the future).

3 Ways Liferay Makes B2B Ordering Easier for Manufacturers

2025-06-04T19:22:10Z

When your customers need to purchase a spare or replacement part, how long does it take them?

Do your customers go through a tedious aftersales process and navigate to a catalog PDF in their emails, then look up product numbers in one channel, and order through a separate system?

These slow and disjointed processes will discourage customers from continuing to order, impacting profits and customer satisfaction.

Instead make spare parts ordering easier for B2B buyers and increase revenue with Liferay.

Why Focus on Spare Parts Ordering

Manufacturers can tap into huge revenue potential by improving their aftersales experience.

Aftersales is:

20-50% more profitable for manufacturers in comparison to new machine sales.
Securing high margins, with the potential to deliver over 50% of a manufacturer’s profit.
Operating at 2.5 times the operating margin of new equipment sales.

But manufacturers often struggle to deliver excellent aftersales experiences for customers due to disparate systems, legacy technologies, and outdated processes.

Use a powerful platform like Liferay DXP to bring data, applications, and processes together in a single solution that will bring customers back to purchase more.

How Liferay Makes B2B Ordering Easier

Manufacturers can rely on a powerful digital experience platform (DXP) like Liferay DXP to build solutions that can simplify complexity, reduce cost-to-serve, and ultimately make it easy for customers to do business with you.

With Liferay’s out-of-the-box features, manufacturers simplify the ordering process by:

Quickly Identifying and Surfacing the Correct Product

Buyers find it challenging to know which products they have to buy, especially when catalogs tend to be lengthy and out-of-date. But buyers also don’t want to have to call a customer service rep every time they need to identify the product they need.

With Liferay, manufacturers can build digital catalogs that are tailored to their customers’ existing machines and parts so that buyers can quickly identify and search for compatible products.

Additionally, manufacturers can help their customers identify the correct parts using clickable exploding diagrams.
Providing Different Ways to Order

Your buyers come from a mix of different roles and have distinct purchasing needs. Liferay provides the capabilities needed to offer a wide variety of buying experiences that make purchasing easy.

In addition to buying from the catalog, customers that are ordering in bulk can upload CSV files, copy previous orders, or apply requisition lists to purchase hundreds or thousands of SKUs at a time.

Store managers may prefer to use a digital-shelf or planogram view of products so that they can easily identify and replenish stock levels. And field technicians or engineers can quickly find the right product by drilling down into exploding diagrams.

Liferay streamlines all these processes into one seamless and easy buying experience.
Bringing Everything Under One Platform

Ultimately, customers don’t want to order through one platform, only to have to access information through a different system and talk to support representatives through another channel.

Use Liferay to unify these systems and resources under a single solution. Liferay’s powerful integration capabilities enables manufacturers to build a customer portal that unites:
- Purchasing and reordering capabilities
- Account information including owned products, order history, and user roles
- Onboarding, training materials, and FAQs so customers can learn how to get the most value from their products immediately
- Ticketing and maintenance scheduling processes in case issues do arise

Easy Ordering Experiences for B2B Manufacturers

Get a 2 minute summary of how manufacturers can drive growth with a Liferay customer portal and make customer experience a differentiator for their business in this video:

Increasing Aftersales with Liferay

See how you can leverage Liferay for your business here.

How to Personalize Cross Selling Insurance

2025-05-29T20:33:24Z

Customer acquisition is the driving force of any business, but it is especially noteworthy in the insurance sector. That’s because insurers spend more on customer acquisition than any other industry, with carriers spending about $900 per customer according to Amsive. Thankfully, there are other strategies beyond funneling in new clients to help an insurance agency increase revenue. And luckily, one of the best strategies for insurers is a win-win situation for everyone: providing more value to their current customers.

Cross-selling insurance is an effective way for agents to offer additional relevant products to clients they’re already doing business with. However, in order to cross sell effectively, insurance providers should focus on implementing tools that help personalize customer experience and offerings.

Let’s take a look at how insurers can use customer data to create tailored products just when their clients need it the most.

Cross Selling in the Insurance Industry

Before diving into the “how” to cross sell insurance, it’s important to first take a look at the “why.” The potential for success, profits, and loyalty with cross-selling is paramount for insurers. In fact, Market Metrics conducted a study showing the profit from selling to a new client is about 5-20%, while the profitability for selling to an existing customer falls somewhere between 60-70%. With the high cost of customer acquisition in mind, it makes sense for an insurer to focus on customer retention and leverage cross selling to their current customer base.

The Benefits of Insurance Cross Selling

Regardless of industry, selling an additional product or service has a number of benefits, making cross selling an attractive strategy for most organizations. A few advantages include:

Lowering acquisition costs.
Increasing sales revenue.
Selling bundled or additional services at one time.
Increasing sales volume of each transaction.
Retaining current customers.
Building trust and loyalty with clients.
Improving customer satisfaction.

Opportunities for Insurers

Hubspot found that only 3% of salespeople or marketers are seen as trustworthy. While that may seem like a setback for those selling insurance, it actually opens the door to lead with a more customer-friendly approach.

So, what’s a more consumer-centric way to sell? Not selling at all, and instead serving. Rather than looking to push any and all products on policyholders, insurers can utilize customer data and policy information to create more personalized offerings to customers. It’s important to note that in order for providers to offer value to policyholders, they need access to tools and digital solutions that make it possible.

Leading with Personalization

The modern customer is likely overwhelmed by offers, marketing, and sales tactics throughout the day. Regardless of what device they’re on or what platforms they use most, there are high volumes of offerings in front of them everywhere. This makes it difficult to sift through what’s relevant and what’s not — and that’s where personalization, cross selling, and the right digital tools step in. The more information insurers have about their customers, the more effectively they can cross-sell relevant products to them.

Another approach to personalization and cross selling insurance is with the use of a customer portal. When a customer logs into their portal, it’s expected that you have their attention for the next few moments. A customer portal can first help address their immediate needs - whether that is updating their account or paying a bill. Once their initial task has been completed, it’s an opportune time for insurers to present personalized offerings based on the customers current policies, demographics, region, and life stage.

Gathering and Storing Customer Data

According to J.D. Power, 74% of customers go online to research their insurance options. However, only 25% of people end up completing their insurance purchases digitally. Because those shopping for insurance are more likely to speak directly with insurers when they’re ready to buy, agents have the unique opportunity to gather valuable customer data.

Insurance agents can spend this time asking questions that will be useful for cross selling, whether that’s immediate or a few months or years down the road. This might look like an agent asking their client if they own their home or are planning on purchasing one in the near future. The insurance provider may discover that the customer is in the process of closing on their first home in the next few months. With this new information, an agent can make note that the customer may be interested in home insurance policies soon.

Leveraging and Accessing the Consumer Information

Once the information has been gathered, insurance reps will need a consolidated place to view the data. This allows them to discover opportunities to sell additional products and better serve their customers. A few areas agents can focus on when pinpointing cross selling instances include:

Detailed policy information. Current policy info helps identify what products a client already has and any complementary products that could go along with them.
Gaps in insurance coverage. Agents can see what types of insurance the policyholder already has, and offer information about insurances that haven’t been covered yet.
Lapses in coverage. Clear and accurate dates of coverage make sure reps know when to reach out and offer updated policies before coverage ends.

Liferay Portals and Cross Selling

Despite the huge opportunity insurers have with cross-selling tactics, not all organizations have pinpointed just how to position themselves as an all-in-one provider for their customers. Lead Squared found that with 61% of policyholders having just one policy with their agent, 29% holding two policies, and just 10% holding three or more, there is room for insurers to grow more loyal client bases.

Liferay DXP provides agent portals to help insurers personalize content, simplify the customer journey, and make it easier for agents to bring more value to policyholders. Here are some capabilities that Liferay agent portals offer:

Smart recommendations based on past purchases, similar customers, and related products.
Ability for sales reps to optimize customer orders and offer discounts.
Increased visibility with an order history dashboard.
Centralized customer data and product information storage.

Liferay also provides customer portals that improve the customer journey. Here are a few benefits of a Liferay customer portal:

Serve smart recommendations based on existing policies, life changes, similar customers, and related products.
Engage the customer at the most opportune time — when they’re logged into their insurance customer portal.
Make it simple to find new offers and insurance products and start the buying process to minimize the cost of sale.

Request a demo today to learn more about what Liferay Digital Experience Platform has to offer your insurance agents, policy holders, and organizational staff.

Three Characteristics of Digital Experience Platforms

2025-05-29T21:02:47Z

There is an ever-growing demand for a software platform that streamlines the process of creating, managing, and effectively utilizing digital touchpoints. The problem is well known: Digital leaders need software capable of eliminating the inefficiencies that slow otherwise-effective strategies.

One answer to this problem has been digital experience platforms (DXPs), which unite the disparate solutions currently used to manage interactions throughout the customer journey. There are three fundamental elements that make a DXP an effective platform to support digital transformation: 1) comprehensive customer journey capabilities, 2) broad integrative functionality, and 3) frameworks built to encompass future innovation.

What is a Digital Experience Platform?

Before analyzing the key components of a digital experience platform, it’s necessary to understand the definition of a DXP.

According to Gartner, a digital experience platform is, “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” Put simply, a DXP provides experiences that, without digital technology, would otherwise have to occur face-to-face.

The definition is broad, which can create difficulty for companies trying to identify key components of a digital platform. A few elements that add to this complexity are:

Functionality: A DXPs functionality shifts at each stage of the customer journey. A single digital platform can play multiple roles in a company’s overall strategy.
Flexibility: Each company has different expectations for the ideal customer and employee experience. The definition of a DXP remains broad to provide for these variable expectations.
Innovation: DXPs support the continuous evolution of the digital experience, forever changing with new customer expectations.
Business Model Variations: Different business models — including B2B, B2C, and B2B2C — have unique, inherent needs. A DXP may take one form as part of the B2B experience but deliver entirely separate functionality in a B2B2C setting.

These factors undoubtedly complicate the process of setting expectations for a digital platform. However, such a nebulous definition also creates one significant benefit: flexibility.

Because there are few strict limits on what a DXP can and can’t be, this technology lends itself to a huge variety of industries, applications, and needs. As long as these three key characteristics are present, DXPs can fill almost any gap — even working in tandem with ongoing digital transformation.

Three Key Characteristics of Digital Platforms

An effective DXP needs to be able to do three key things:

Comprehensive Customer Journey Capabilities

The first key characteristic of a digital platform is comprehensiveness.

A digital experience platform should provide support throughout the customer journey, even if its benefits are most clearly realized in post-purchase customer experiences.

If the platform focuses too heavily on customer acquisition, other elements of the digital experience will be neglected. The result is a platform with limited functionality, reduced benefits, and an emphasis on marketing that can leave post-purchase customer needs unmet. Additional online platforms or other solutions will be necessary to bridge this gap, reducing ROI.

But DXPs are equipped to address the entire customer journey. From acquisition to retention, businesses can use a single platform to serve their customers well.
Broad Integrative Functionality

The second key characteristic of a digital platform is the capability for structured integration.

To reduce friction, encourage reuse, and fuel insight, DXPs should be capable of integrating with a wide variety of other systems. This doesn’t just maximize the value of the platform itself; it also helps users effectively leverage systems like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning ERP), and product information management (PIM) software to get the most out of the existing and future tech stack.
Frameworks Built to Encompass Future Innovation

The third key characteristic is scalability.

Digital platforms should never force companies to choose a single approach; instead, it’s vital that the DXP framework be built to support future changes depending on market needs, developing technology, or new digital marketing models. Put simply, the customer journey is always changing, so DXPs should be capable of change as well.

How Digital Experience Platforms Evolve

While a digital platform with all three key elements can support any business model, deliver a strong customer and employee experience, and be a key element in a digital transformation strategy, there’s always room for evolution.

Here are a few trends we expect to see in DXPs over the next year:

Support for Long-Term Strategies

Digital experience platforms should be able to keep up with innovation. To get to this point, DXPs need to develop built-in support for long-term strategies, helping each company plan its future based on the foundation offered by its digital platform. That means businesses will no longer need to guess what technology or capabilities they’ll have access to in three to five years; they’ll be able to shape their own futures and build plans around their digital platforms.

This evolving capability must also have room for ample tech support. To create and adhere to long-term strategies, companies need reliable tech partners to help identify innovative solutions to complex challenges.
Faster Responses to Customer Expectations

Customer expectations shift rapidly. These fluctuations can cause undue stress when a company’s framework isn’t built to make small changes without completely unraveling. For this reason, the digital experience platforms of the future will likely have even simpler features, allowing companies to pivot at a moment’s notice.
Clearer Value Propositions

DXPs and their vendors will be focusing on making clearer statements regarding the functionality, utilization, and benefits of a digital platform. This achieves two things: clarification of existing qualities and the creation of a value-focused framework to guide the development of future innovation.

Business Model Shifts

For companies looking to shift from a B2B or B2C business model to the newer B2B2C approach, the transition can be difficult. As DXPs evolve, they should become more adept at helping companies navigate these shifts — not to blur the lines between business models, but to create a platform capable of adapting organically to progress (rather than needing to be restructured or redesigned after a significant change).

Digital platforms represent a significant opportunity for businesses. With a DXP, companies can digitally simulate the entire customer journey, creating a controlled environment in which customer needs can be catered to at the click of a button.

Digital Business Starts with Innovation

Digital experience platforms are an emerging product category capable of uniting some of the most vital capabilities in the digital world, allowing organizations to build a foundation for their digital transformation. However, for these platforms to truly excel, they must include three key characteristics:

Comprehensiveness, or support for the entire customer journey.
Structured modification, or broad, integrative functionality.
Prebuilt integration, or a framework that nurtures future innovation.

Not all DXPs offer this robust design. As such, it’s important to find a platform that serves the needs of your customers, supports your employees, and helps define your company’s future.

With Liferay, that platform is well within reach. Explore our digital experience platform to see how we empower your digital transformation.

Making Liferay a Great Place to Work 2022

2025-05-29T20:43:16Z

We are delighted to announce that Liferay has been recognized as one of the Best Workplaces in both Ireland and Spain for 2022.

This recognition comes for the 3rd consecutive year for our Dublin office and the first for our office in Spain.

Creating Great Places to Work

Especially in a time where work is flexible and looks different for everyone, we’re honored that these offices were recognized for the work their teams have put in to create a space (whether physical or digital) of growth, warmth, and trust.

“Achieving the Great Place to Work award for a 3rd consecutive year represents our ongoing commitment to creating a great workplace that can enable our people to reach their full potential. Throughout the past 2 years, our people continued to ride the waves of the pandemic all while being proactive in providing the best services possible to our customers. It is through our people at Liferay we consider ourselves a Great Place to Work,” says Leanne Stone, Senior HR Manager and Site Lead at our Dublin office.

For our Spain office, this is the first year they’ve been recognized and Cristina Moreno, HR Manager, says that the certification is really the recognition of what each employee brings to the company. “The commitment of Liferay is to accompany every person along their career, and to bring the support they need in their non-professional life. Our flexibility measures and our remote work policy improve the work-life balance and family needs,” adds Moreno.

The Life at Liferay

What makes Liferay a great place to work?

While we do have nice office spaces around the world, an employee volunteer program, and M&M dispensers, the true magic lies in our team members.

“It’s hard to package the incredible experience you get at Liferay into just one statement. But I’d say our employees truly are the Liferay experience. Our people are intelligent and highly skilled, but are still creative, fun-loving, patient, and humble,” says Matt Poladian, VP of People at Liferay.

No matter which of the 20+ global offices Matt would visit, he would see each of Liferay’s core values displayed in every team member. Even as the company has grown over the years, he has seen people work hard to retain and grow these values in their teams. And add elements of fun, nerdiness, and friendship along the way.

A perfect display of talent, nerdiness, and teamwork from the Spain office.

Learn more about what makes life at Liferay different here.

Come Join the Team

Be a part of the life that fuels Liferay. See if there are any open positions here.

The Benefits and Strategies of Cross Selling in Banking

2025-05-29T21:00:44Z

While cross selling is a strategy used across industries, it is especially effective and important in the banking sector. Because banks operate in a very competitive marketplace, getting the most value out of each client is crucial for long-term success. According to Forbes, it’s nearly 50% easier to sell to existing customers than it is to sell to new leads. Cross selling allows bank staff to do exactly this. Read on to discover why effective cross selling is so beneficial to both banks and their existing customer base.

Cross Selling vs. Upselling

Before diving into how banks can best leverage cross-selling, let’s address the difference between cross selling and its close relative, upselling. Both strategies are used to persuade customers to purchase more products or services in order to increase their profits and provide the client with more value.

While they have similar end goals, their differences are found in the approach. With upselling, the idea is to get a customer to purchase a more upgraded level of product or service than what they initially intended. On the other hand, cross selling encourages customers to buy items related to or that complement the plan they are already interested in purchasing.

Advantages of Cross Selling

What makes cross selling so effective in banking is the concept of customer retention vs. customer acquisition. As discussed earlier, it is significantly easier to sell to an existing client than it is to sell to a prospective customer. In fact, according to Outbound Engine, brands have a 60-70% success rate of getting a current client to purchase. However, the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%. Additional benefits of cross selling include:

No acquisition costs. Huify found that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than simply serving a current customer. Cross selling eliminates additional acquisition costs for new sales.
Creating brand loyalty. In banking specifically, offering multiple products to their consumers helps position their financial services as a one-stop shop for everything they need.
Increased revenues. By selling additional products when a customer truly needs it, banks can bring more money in while also serving their clients accordingly.

3 Cross Selling Best Practices in Banking

In order for cross selling to be a tactic that benefits both banks and their customers, the right strategies and practices need to be in place. Without the appropriate techniques and solutions, cross selling can appear to be an aggressive strategy to simply increase the bank’s profits. Throughout the process, bank staff should have a client-focused approach, meaning that bundled products are truly relevant and useful to the customer.

Focus on Personalization

With more access to customer data than ever, banks have the ability to get to know their customers on a different level. Tracking purchase history, payment behavior, channel preferences, and borrowing data can be extremely helpful in finding relevant and timely product recommendations. Consistent and accurate customer data lets bankers anticipate the needs of their customers in order to provide them with more value rather than pushing seemingly random products. A personalized and customer-centered approach allows clients to view the banker as a trusted advisor as opposed to a pushy salesperson.

Also See:

6 Crucial Technologies for Successful Personalization at Scale

Take your personalization efforts to the next stage by scaling personalized content to multiple audiences, through various channels and devices. Deliver excellent experiences in the digital age with these six features needed for personalization at scale.

Download the Whitepaper

Empower the Banking Staff

Customer-facing staff have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction since they are typically the ones handling questions, recommendations, complaints, and products. Ensuring that bankers have quick and easy access to all customer information allows them to make relevant suggestions when cross selling. Whether that means addressing a personal loan status, credit card approvals, or auto loan accounts, when banking staff have accurate data, they can build trust with customers. With more confidence in the bank, the cross selling process becomes simpler and more fluid.

Stay in Communication with Current Customers

These days, banking customers go into a physical branch far less than in the past. With access to technology and mobile banking apps, there isn’t much face-to-face interaction anymore. Because of this, it’s important for bankers to stay front of mind even if that means through devices and digital platforms. Frequent communication reminds customers that your services are there and available when they need it. This makes cross selling easier to do since customers feel more of a connection with the bank.

How Liferay Can Facilitate Cross Selling

Cross selling is extremely important and effective in the banking industry. However, banks historically have several operational challenges that can make cross selling difficult. Liferay helps create more streamlined processes that are crucial to a successful cross sell. Banks can leverage the Liferay Digital Experience Platform to:

Leverage customer data across disparate systems.
Empower bank employees with digital solutions providing valuable customer information so they can make meaningful recommendations.
Create personalized digital experiences for clients that deliver the right message at the right time, bringing cross selling activities to the online world.

Request a live demo to see how Liferay can help create a tailored solution so your bank can get the most out of cross selling efforts.

What Do Great B2B Customer Experiences Look Like?

2025-05-29T21:11:17Z

67% of customers say that their standard for good experiences is higher than ever, and yet more than half of customers in the same survey say that businesses fall short of their expectations.

B2B organizations are not exempt from these rising expectations, in fact, they need to improve their customer experiences if they want to retain customers and increase revenue.

But what actually makes a B2B customer experience great?

3 Factors that Impact B2B Customer Experiences

B2B customers aren’t just purchasing for their own benefit. They have much more at stake and far more opinions to balance than in their daily B2C interactions. B2B purchasing is lengthy and complex. For this reason, sellers must craft their experiences with the 3C’s in mind: convenience, consistency, and collaboration.

Convenience to Streamline Buying Process
B2B buying journeys often involve 6 -10 stakeholders and can take up to 6-12 months to complete. These complications and dynamics make it increasingly difficult for buyers to make purchases. According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers state that their latest purchase was very complex.

Sellers can alleviate some of these difficulties with self-service.

Sellers can simplify the purchasing process by implementing:
- Knowledge bases to consolidate common and important answers
- Personalized content and product recommendations
- Providing tailored buying experiences with flexible ways to order, such as through a spreadsheet, catalog, or digital shelf.
- Re-ordering with self-service. 86% of McKinsey survey respondents said that they prefer using self-service tools for reordering.
How a Leading Media Company makes Buying Easier
A Nordic media company who offers legislative educational and training materials to their customers is growing their revenue by providing customers with self-service access to subscriptions and digital versions of their educational and training materials. This allows customers to access more on their own, accelerating and simplifying the buying journey.
Consistency Across the Entire Journey

Great experiences need to be great at every touchpoint. To build loyalty and trust, organizations need to be able to deliver the same experience every time they interact with customers, no matter what channel they use.

McKinsey found that consistency is the key to happy customers. By and large, companies that deliver consistent experiences throughout the customer journey see higher customer satisfaction rates, increased revenue, and decreased overhead.

However, 73% of brands can’t actually provide a consistent experience across their digital channels.

Why? Because of lack of integration.

Many B2B organizations struggle to connect their systems and data together, in fact, 89% of manufacturing organizations reported struggling with integration, with 18% reporting losses over $1 million annually due to data silos and lack of connected systems.

By integrating systems, applications, and data together, B2B organizations can easily execute these experiences across the entire customer journey. What organizations need is a digital experience platform (DXP) to bring everything together on one platform.

How This Global Organization Brought Systems Together
Tag’s global B2B business was incredibly complex due to multiple ordering needs spread across multiple regions. This was only made more difficult due to numerous siloed applications and systems. To solve this, Tag brought their systems together using a DXP, simplifying complex ordering with a self-service platform. Not only is it easier for customers to purchase, but it has saved Tag significant cost and resources.
Collaboration within the Organization
Sometimes the greatest hurdle comes from within the organization itself. Customer experience requires support and buy-in from every team.

Businesses should empower and equip employees with the resources they need to be able to impact customer experience, whether directly building relationships with buyers or indirectly working on internal operations.

85% of respondents in a recent IDC survey said that improving employee experiences translated to better customer experience, higher customer satisfaction, and increased revenue.

Better customer experiences start with better internal experiences for the organization.

How This Aerospace Company Streamlines Internal Communication
Airbus has created a collaborative customers portal that has connected customers to all of their departments, systems, and applications, building communities that work together. The platform enables greater collaboration with operators through new features, such as an interactive map of Airbus Helicopters’ global network of service and training centers, a digital catalog of services and software, and online communities that foster open dialogue and collaboration.

Delivering a Great B2B Customer Experience

B2B customer experiences are more critical than ever to long-term success. Sellers need to invest and craft excellent experiences that will keep their buyers satisfied and coming back. Start by building an engaging customer portal.

7 Features Needed in Your Customer Portal >

GOTO "DEVCON 2022"

2025-06-04T19:38:03Z

What’s the best way to connect with developers all over the world? Reddit? GitHub?

How about joining other talented and inspiring developers to share insights, gain industry knowledge, and collaborate on projects and new ideas? Welcome to DEVCON 2022.

What is DEVCON?

The Liferay Developer Conference (DEVCON) is the largest gathering of Liferay developers globally, and is happening this year virtually! Join us to gain new perspectives, build on your Liferay expertise, and apply fresh knowledge to your current and future projects.

DEVCON 2022 is happening April 6th and 7th with more than 20 sessions and 12 hours of content!

Don’t miss out on:

What's next for the open-source community in Brian Chan’s, Chief Software Architect of Liferay, keynote
The ins and outs of low-code approaches to building solutions using Liferay Objects
Live demo of how to deploy Liferay DXP on a managed Kubernetes cluster in the cloud
Liferay's 2022 roadmap, what features are coming and when they're coming
Best practices for upgrading from Liferay 6.1 to 7.4
How to setup testing automation for Liferay developments
Plus deep dives into AI, fragments, intranets, blockchain, headless APIs, and more!

See the full agenda here.

Get Ready for DEVCON 2022

Sometimes the best <br> you can give yourself is to surround yourself with talented and inspiring developers around the world. Mark your calendars for April 6th and 7th for two days of learning, networking, and collaborating! Register for free here.

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Liferay Experience Cloud: The Next Evolution in Delivering Digital Experiences at Scale

2025-05-29T20:41:55Z

PLEASE NOTE:
The naming of Liferay's offerings have changed. For information and details on our current our deployment options, please visit our <<Offerings page>>.


For more than a decade, we’ve strived to create useful technology to help others reach their full potential. This dream started from a group of young, nerdy entrepreneurs, but now has grown to be the goal of over 1000 employees over 19 countries across the globe.

We continue to push ourselves to help organizations solve their complex challenges and we’re proud to unveil the next step in this journey: Liferay Experience Cloud.

What is Liferay Experience Cloud?

Your business challenges are complex. But the solution you use doesn’t need to be. We’re striving to provide simpler ways to help you solve business challenges more efficiently.

We’re combining the powerful capabilities we have built and grown over the years under our pioneer platform, Liferay DXP and are now offering a full-service SaaS offering: Liferay Experience Cloud.

Liferay Experience Cloud is an all-in-one solution that unites Liferay DXP and cloud platform capabilities with built-in analytics and B2B commerce functionality, reducing the time to market and allowing for accelerated innovation.

Leverage the full strength of Liferay to address the needs of your business ecosystem at the various levels and for the various business units that require it. In a single, secure platform, you have the capabilities needed to build and deploy an engaging customer portal, streamlined commerce site, powerful employee portal, tailored partner or supplier portal, among other solutions.

How Can Liferay Experience Cloud Help My Organization

Running these digital solutions across the globe can become very costly and difficult as users and business needs grow.

Instead, let us host and manage the infrastructure of your solutions so that you don’t need to worry about scaling, upgrades, security, or maintenance with Liferay Experience Cloud.

We automatically keep the platform up to date with the latest version of Liferay DXP and critical security updates so you can always count on the innovation velocity of Liferay, our partners and our global community without worrying about upgrades or keeping up to date with new features.

Learn more about Liferay Experience Cloud here >

Select the Deployment Option Right for Your Business

But what if you want to manage the solution yourself or use your own cloud solution? You can still self-host or self-manage Liferay DXP if that is the best fit for your business.

Contact a Liferay expert here to learn more about Liferay Experience Cloud.

What is the Cost of Liferay Experience Cloud?

With Liferay fully managing and hosting your solutions, you can reduce implementation time, eliminate upgrade and maintenance cost, and cut infrastructure and indirect costs.

Start with what you need today and scale your subscription based on the solutions you need for your growing business.

Moving Forward with Liferay Experience Cloud

This is the next evolution for Liferay DXP. With this shift, we’re providing a streamlined and powerful platform that will enable customers to deliver the solutions they need.

Learn more about Liferay Experience Cloud by contacting sales.

Why Do You Need a Supplier Portal

2025-05-29T21:12:52Z

What is the secret to B2B ecommerce success?

A robust commerce solution? Definitely. But there’s also another element that large retailers might be missing: a supplier portal.

What is a Supplier Portal?

A supplier portal is an integrated solution that allows businesses to communicate with their suppliers.

Imagine if suppliers had a unified hub where they could onboard through self-service, submit invoices, download important assets and resources, request approvals for qualifications or orders, or upload documents for regulatory purposes.

Where procurement once was grueling and time-consuming, a supplier portal not only helps suppliers save time, but also empowers them with more resources in a single location. Delivering better supplier experiences ultimately will help to deepen long-term relations.

Why are Supplier Portals (Especially) Important?

Dealing with disrupted supply chains in the face of COVID-19 has really highlighted the need for visibility, communication, and efficiency across the entire journey. Supplier portals are one way businesses can help alleviate some of these challenges.

So how can businesses begin to build a supplier portal that is not only useful to suppliers but also beneficial to their own business?

5 Essential Elements of a Successful Supplier Portal

While each business will have unique needs for their suppliers, generally there are a few basic features all supplier portals should implement:

Personalized Dashboards

A primary way business can help to increase supplier productivity is through tailored dashboards.

Different categories of suppliers and individual users need to access information unique to their product types, user type or vendor status. A supplier portal should be able to support dashboards that make it easy for users to find and view the information and processes they need to perform their job. For instance, someone in a supplier's accounting department will need a much different view that someone in the sales or logistics team.
Robust Content Management

Businesses will need to be able to manage quite a range of different content types, whether spreadsheets, PDFs, images, videos, Word docs, forms, government and health certifications, shipping documents, etc. And an enterprise level search capability is essential to helping users quickly find the information they need.
Automated Workflows

Further optimize routine processes, like uploading data or requesting approvals, with automated workflows. For instance, it may be necessary for contracts to be reviewed, amended, and approved by several departments and individuals. This type of process can be automated to make it faster to complete and easier to track and audit.
Self-Service Functionality

Another tactic to increase supplier productivity and satisfaction is through self-service. By empowering suppliers to do more on their own, they will be able to perform their jobs quicker and with more ease.

Imagine if suppliers could just access a knowledge base for important FAQs or be able to submit order requests without needing to contact a sales representative.

Giving suppliers more control of their own tasks helps improve the overall experience, opening the path for future orders and long-term loyalty.
Extensive Integration Capabilities

Probably one of the most important criteria for a supplier portal to work properly is its ability to integrate and work with other systems.

Digital portals, especially if they include eCommerce functionality, typically need to be connected to other systems, including ERPs, CRMs, PIM/MDMs, and procurement solutions just to name a few.

A robust supplier portal should also include both “front-end” and “back-end” APIs in order to deliver the best user experience.

Read about more features a supplier portal should have in this article.

Why Customer Experience Transformation Should Happen on Liferay DXP

2025-05-29T21:12:45Z

It no longer matters what industry you’re in, how many products your company sells, or how many locations you have. The secret to success in today’s highly competitive and fragmented market lies in customer experience (CX) transformation.

But how can businesses successfully bring CX transformation to their organizations? With a powerful platform like Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

The Need for Customer Experience Transformation

As of 2010, only 36% of businesses worldwide were competing on customer experience. However, a decade later, that figure has more than doubled, with over two-thirds of B2B companies using customer experience as their differentiator.

But both customers and businesses recognize that “good” customer experiences aren’t enough. Strategic businesses understand that customers are looking for better, more engaging, and connected digital experiences that will help them out against the competition.

So how can businesses implement CX transformation in their organizations? According to Mckinsey, there are 3 major building blocks to achieve a successful CX transformation.

How to Make Customer Experience Transformation a Reality

The three aspects that make up a customer experience transformation include: a clearly defined goal, a thought-out transformation approach, and technology that can enable that change.

McKinsey has found that companies that combine all three of these aspects are able to see powerful results:

15 - 20% increase in sales conversion rates
20 - 50% decline in service costs
10 - 20% improvement in customer satisfaction

The first step to achieving CX transformation is to align the organization on the type of experience the brand wants to deliver. Translate these aspirations into expected business outcomes by defining the specific changes in expected customer behavior.

Once businesses have prioritized the experiences with the greatest potential impact on customer behavior, CX leaders identify and plan the internal processes and technology capabilities they need to substantially reimagine them.

The last part of this process, and where we will focus on, is to find technology that will be able to meet these needs and enable transformation for the business.

Rely on an analyst-recognized platform, Liferay, for the foundation needed to build a truly differentiated customer experience. Liferay’s out-of-the-box capabilities and robust integration framework has helped customers around the world deliver excellent customer experiences.

Make Your Customer Experience Stand Out with Liferay DXP

DXPs are designed to act as an integration hub, bringing together different applications and systems to enable the creation, delivery, and management of digital experiences across the entire customer journey.

But as one of the leading DXP platforms, Liferay is uniquely suited to help your business build engaging authenticated experiences for your customer by:

Serving Customers How They Prefer to Be Served

Self-service is already becoming the preferred method of both B2B and B2C buyers to communicate. 86% of McKinsey survey respondents said that they prefer using digital self-service tools, rather than talking to a sales representative.

Not only does this help your business save money and time, but customers are also able to get the answers they need quickly and in a way they prefer, thus boosting satisfaction.

B2B organizations can leverage Liferay to:
- Enable customers to search for information through FAQs and knowledge bases
- Surface relevant content, products, and services for every customer based on behavior
- Automate workflows and approvals for forms, orders, and questions
- Enable customers to easily manage and update account information
No Service Like Self-Service
Agricultural equipment manufacturer, MacDon, was able to leverage these features when upgrading their portal to Liferay DXP. They were able to build a self-service portal that has:
- Increased e-commerce transactions by 50%
- Doubled website visits
- Decreased calls and fax orders
Bringing Everything Together on One Platform

Self-service and omnichannel experiences may seem standard to modern customer experiences, but in order to make these experiences a reality, your systems and applications need to be integrated.

However, integration continues to be a challenge for businesses. Many customer service technology stacks continue to contain disparate, overlapping systems, leading to disjointed customer experiences.

Aggregate the organization’s existing customer service systems and content into a single, unified experience with out-of-the-box features on Liferay DXP such as:
- Headless and decoupled CMS
- OpenAPIs
- Modular and flexible architecture
Bringing It All Together
Leading building materials manufacturer, Mueller, was able to transform their customer experience with a self-service site built with Liferay. They were able to simplify complex purchasing and jumpstart the sales process by bringing together all the tools customers needed to get a quote, increasing quotes generated per month by 73%.
Accelerating Time-to-Market of New Solutions
As businesses grow, they must consider how their solutions will expand and evolve as more customers get added in, technologies are implemented, and changes need to be made.

Liferay’s platform is supported on our PaaS offering, DXP Cloud. This means that our customers can develop on a cost-efficient and scalable infrastructure. Customers not only can modernize IT operations, but also easily grow and expand their solutions.

Preparing for the Future in the Cloud

Vodafone Business, a global telecommunications leader, revamped their customer portal with Liferay. Being on the cloud has not only resulted in lower, growth-friendly costs, but also put services in place that allow for future evolution and scaling. Now, functionality goes from idea to deployment faster.

Unlike other vendors, Liferay has the capabilities to address the entire customer journey, from the customer interface to the backend processes that make it possible. See how Liferay can help your business implement customer experience transformation successfully.

Request your demo of Liferay here.

The State of Digital Transformation in Wealth Management - 2023

2025-05-29T21:02:01Z

Continued Post-Pandemic Market Uncertainty

It’s an understatement to say that the wealth management industry is in the midst of significant change. Between digital transformation and the Great Wealth Transfer set to take place over the next few years, the entire industry is grappling with shifts in the way they do business in a post-pandemic world while respecting the client and relationship manager experience.

Perhaps the greatest lesson of the COVID-19 pandemic was the viability of non-traditional business models across the financial services industry. It is not only possible to provide personalized advice for customers through digital services like a wealth management client portal, but investors increasingly demonstrate their preferences for digital channels.

Meanwhile, 2023 began with significant market uncertainty. At the time of writing, there are a number of factors contributing to this. Inflation and rising interest rates carried over from 2022. World economies sit on the verge of a potential recession. Massive layoffs hit the tech sector, a strong client segment for wealth managers. Europe’s energy crisis isn’t over and neither is the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Already strained relations between the US and China look to be deteriorating.

As J.P. Morgan Wealth Management said in a recent sector analysis, “Brace yourself for a bumpy ride in 2023.”

Digital Maturity Among Wealth Management Firms

Much of the reason the wealth management industry has been slow to adopt digital transformation is in the nature of the work they do. They built their businesses on personal relationships and human interaction, qualities that have seemed at odds with technology. Add to this the confidence relationship managers have in their work, believing they can provide better services than impersonal robo-advisors and mobile apps.

To this end, institutional and alternative asset managers tend to show the greatest gaps in their digital adoption. Family offices are the furthest behind, with more than half of them lingering in the beginning stage of their digital journey. This may be due, in part, to the belief that they cannot automate their clients’ more complex financial situations without sacrificing the quality of service.

Company size also appears to be a factor in wealth management digital transformation, as larger firms have typically made greater progress than smaller companies. Among firms with more than $100 billion in AUM, 3% have just started digital transformation, while more than 40% of them are considered leaders in digital transformation. Yet, among mid-market firms, nearly 30% are considered digital transformation beginners and 56% of them are in progress.

What Are the Drivers of Digital Transformation and What Expectations Are They Creating That Wealth Management Has to Meet?

A ThoughtLab survey revealed these six megatrends currently driving the changes.

Shift to digital: Among survey respondents, 40% of investors want digital access to their accounts, and 89% prefer using mobile apps to manage investments and communicate with relationship managers.
Investing with purpose: Industry leaders expect to see a 34% increase in the number of investors deliberately seeking advice about social impact investing and ESG products.
Democratization: Clients want investment alternatives, including the option to invest in IPOs. More than half of respondents also said they want personalized financial planning and financial management services.
Higher standards: Nearly half of the respondents agreed the best way to build relationships with clients is to act in their best interest. Giving them the services they want (including digital) helps meet this need.
Lower, more transparent fees: Although more than one-third of the respondents said they are happy with their provider’s fees, this may be changing. Gen Xers are fee-conscious investors.
Switching providers: One-third of the respondents admitted they had moved 20% of their funds to providers that give them the services they want. Nearly half of them have plans to move more funds, presenting an opportunity for firms.

Wealth management clients are changing, and so are their expectations. They want a greater range of services than many firms can provide without digital adoption. Firms are already dealing with pressure from these challenges and must seek appropriate solutions to them.

Fee and cost pressures: Clients are increasingly fee-conscious and want to know what they’re paying for. At the same time, regulatory requirements continue to drive up costs.
Competitors delivering a better experience: Robo-advisors and FinTech are better prepared to offer products and services that match the digital expectations of today’s clients.
Client dependency on technology: Clients now enjoy real-time and curated content that caters directly to them, anywhere and anytime.
Client expectations: Clients want their investment firm to provide service on their terms — not the company’s.

CHALLENGES

The Great Wealth Transfer

Millennials and their financial habits may make the headlines, but Gen Xers are also next in line. They are now moving into a new era of their lives in which they have significant investable assets, and they stand to see the highest increase in the share of wealth through 2030, moving from holding less than 14% of U.S. net wealth to nearly 31% by 2030.

Not only are they actively building their own wealth (and doing so at a faster rate than their parents), but they are the recipients of the $83.3 trillion in assets Baby Boomers are starting to liquidate. Wealth management firms must start understanding the wants and needs of these new generations of clients.

Compared to their parents, Gen Xers and Millennials like to be more involved in their investing. They prefer to do their own research and want to understand the options available to them and how they fit in their overall investment plans. They pride themselves on their DIY skills, so earning their trust and business will take more effort.

Firms that think they can wait until tech-savvy Millennials are ready for their services will be left behind. Gen Xers value convenience, and more than one-fourth of them prefer communicating with their relationship managers by text. Nearly half of them would use video chat if the platform were available to them.

Pandemic Impacts on the Industry

The pandemic also affected the wealth management client experience and risk tolerance. Pre-pandemic, wealth management clients were risk-averse, preferring safer investments. Surprisingly, younger clients are already taking steps to lower their risk. For the foreseeable future, clients across the board have altered their investing outlook in the wake of the pandemic.

Encroaching Competition

Wealth management firms are facing increased competition from FinTechs and robo-advisors aiming for their market share. These groups can provide many of the digital offerings clients want, but they lack customer awareness. So far, wealth management firms have used this to support their higher fees, but that’s a position that will likely change.

Another interesting change is the way the wealth management industry segments clients. As they stop looking at them solely through the lens of wealth status, they are starting to see that some high-income clients may not be as profitable as they originally thought. With this perspective, firms that accept clients based on net worth may be losing out on revenue.

Hence, thanks to new technologies regarding device-independent client engagement over different interaction channels and automated investment solutions such as robo-advisory, the individual and mostly less complex requirements of many clients and wealth management potentials can be served with cost-effective digital and automated solutions.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Some wealth management firms have taken action by acquiring FinTech and robo-advisors and adding them to their existing suite of services. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs acquired E-Trade and United Capital. Schwab and Vanguard already offer automated solutions that can streamline stages like the wealth management client onboarding process.

There is no doubt that technology will play an increasing role in the advisory world. For that reason, analysts expect groups like Facebook, Amazon, and Google to enter the wealth management space. By adopting digital technologies sooner rather than later, firms will be better able to withstand that wealth management disruption.

CapGemini, in a recent 2023 wealth management trends analysis, predicted that industry consolidation would continue. M&A activity will boost a firm’s capabilities to reach new client segments and markets with new products and services. Consolidation becomes a means to achieve more scale.

How Pioneering Firms Are Addressing Challenges

Digitally mature firms are already addressing these challenges by shifting to a client-centered approach. Companies that adopt a client-centered approach are 60% more profitable than their product or service-oriented counterparts. This approach requires a 360-degree view of the customer and tools for anticipating customer needs and wants.

This is changing the role of relationship managers to a degree. They are still available for contact and personalized support. Resolving complex issues typically requires a human touch. Implementing automation, digital self-service, and a wealth management advisor portal actually boosts relationship manager efficiency and frees them up to be there for their clients when they need them most.

CapGemini observes that many firms in 2023 are focusing on automating core functions and accelerating cloud adoption in order to empower relationship managers with digital tools, actionable data analysis, and efficient digital workflows because client engagement and satisfaction improve when relationship managers manage their time well. They conclude, “Those who recognize and eliminate time consuming tasks, leverage advanced technology, and automate when possible can dedicate more attention to client-facing activities.”

Keeping the Wealth Management Digital Transformation Accountable

Digitally mature wealth management firms have noticed improvements across several key performance indicators. For example, firms reported a 13% increase in productivity, which led to an 8% increase in AUM and a nearly 8% increase in revenue. They garnered a 7.3% increase in market share and increased shareholder value by nearly 6%.

Making Digital Transformation a Reality

Ignoring digital transformation is no longer an option for wealth management firms. They need solutions to fill the gaps between the traditional business model and the increasing demands of the customers who want digital services.

As you begin developing and implementing your digital strategy, it’s imperative to prioritize your needs based on business impact. You don’t have to roll out the entire plan at once and will find the change easier to handle when it’s done in increments.

Accelerate the digital transformation and start seeing results sooner through a software platform like Liferay. Learn more about Liferay’s solutions for financial services and wealth management.

Outpace Disruption: 3 Digital Transformation Use Cases for Wealth Management

2025-05-29T20:46:38Z

Digital Transformation has come for the Wealth Management industry and no firm will be left untouched. The Great Wealth Transfer is looming. Massive client behavior changes have already started. Intensifying competition and new start ups are putting the pressure on. Firms have a lot of work to do.

Wealth Management organizations gain a competitive advantage when they place clients, advisors, and employees at the center of their business. Digital transformation projects must provide measurable results for the business. The following are three real world examples (plus a bonus!) of Wealth Management customers that built new solutions that improved experiences for different key audiences which all significantly impacted their ability to win new clients, improve existing client experiences, or operate more efficiently.

Websites

A Website That Drives Inquiries and AUM

Customer Notes

Multinational financial services firm
Provides services in retail banking, commercial banking, and wealth management
Project completed for US-based wealth management subsidiary
$80-90 billion USD in regional AUM

Project Benefits

Estimated 30% reduction in IT tickets from advisors, 5x increase in traffic, and 15% increase in prospect inquiries
Quickly created a robust marketing website with anonymous experiences for prospects and logged in experiences for clients using out of the box features which reduces internal IT effort
Easy to create and maintain templated advisor sites which makes advisors more self-sufficient
Prospective clients are able to effortlessly find advisors and content that fit their needs which drives more inquiries

This wealth management firm needed to update an aging marketing website that was predominantly a difficult to update digital brochure. They wanted a modern web experience for anonymous prospects as well as a login for clients to access proprietary research and insights. They were able to use out of the box functionality to create a wide breadth of page types including company details, services, product overviews, blogs, advisor bios, and resource library. Prospects can search for advisors by specialities and clients can access gated thought-leadership content and research.

Liferay DXP has made content management less costly to keep up-to-date, especially for high maintenance advisor websites with bios, investment philosophies, resource libraries, and contact forms. All of these are now templated sites that maintain brand consistency and quality with ease, reducing IT and Marketing support costs, and improving experiences for prospects and clients. Further, other business units like private banking, commercial banking, and regional subsidiaries are able to utilize the same corporate and advisor templates bringing additional value from the investment.

Advisor Portals

Advisors Save an Hour-a-Day

Customer Notes

Multinational financial services firm
Provides services in private banking and wealth management
Project at Asia Pacific wealth management subsidiary
$140-150 billion USD in regional AUM

Benefits

Advisors save an estimated 1 hour a day
1 hour a day x 240 work days per year x 1,700 advisors = 408,000 hours saved per year
Hours gained in productivity gives advisors more time to focus on high value tasks such as recruiting new clients and keeping existing ones happy

If each of us had the option to save an hour-a-day, it would be a no brainer. So, for this wealth management firm, finding a way to save their advisors an hour-a-day meant big gains when they multiplied that hour saved across the 240 work days per year for their 1,700 Asia Pacific wealth advisors.

Using Liferay to create their vision of an advisor portal, they were able to integrate multiple backend systems bringing crucial client information into one unified view. The advisor portal has features such as client portfolio tracking, portfolio performance, tracking against goals, alerts, security reports, orders, account statements, call reports, cash management, etc.

Combining client information from different applications into one application makes it easier for advisors to quickly review client accounts prior to client meetings, saving them on average an hour a day, and making every interaction more valuable for the client. It also means more time for advisors to recruit new clients as well as keeping existing ones happy.

Client Portals

Retain and Grow AUM in the Next Generation of Wealth

Customer Notes

North American financial firm
Provides services in retail banking, commercial banking, private banking, and wealth management
$3-5 billion USD in revenue and $80-90 billion USD in assets

Benefits

Provides a modern digital experience to couple with the white glove wealth advisor service for the next generation of clients
Reduced client support costs while improving their experience, retaining AUM that would have left for more modern experiences
Existing project was easily duplicated and repurposed for the Wealth Management audience
Created consistency of experience between products making cross-selling easier

This large regional bank recognized the need to create better digital experiences to complement the service that their wealth management advisors provide to their clients. They weren’t looking to replace the white glove experience, rather, couple it with a modern application that allows clients to visualize assets and cash flow, review goal oriented portfolio performance, read investment research, or schedule time to meet with their advisor.

What makes this project an even better value is the fact that they were able to utilize the development done for their SMB client portal, also built on Liferay DXP, set up new integrations, and adapt the UI to the Wealth Management audience.

That's 3 specific Liferay customer examples for digital transformation in Wealth Management. But there are others and having a digital experience platform to build on positions firms to be able to meet market demands much more quickly than the past.

Hence, the next example is of a customer using Liferay to build a suite of various experiences across their business as the needs arose. This is a bonus fourth use case of multiple uses cases.

Digital Operations

A Platform for Rapidly Creating Bespoke Solutions

Customer Notes

Global top 10 bank (ranked by assets)
Services include retail banking, commercial banking, and wealth management

Benefits

Created a suite of solutions on Liferay DXP, maximizing investment in software and development experience, solving multiple business problems with one vendor
One of their solutions is an official knowledge portal for proprietary investment research and strategies
This knowledge portal gets all of the institutional investors on the same page, aligns strategy, and reduces risk
Knowledge portal is also available to client investors who are interested in insights and education

This financial firm found it impossible to keep their thousands of institutional investors and financial advisors on the same page with investment strategies. To address this across the enterprise, they implemented a knowledge portal that consolidates all their proprietary investment research into one authenticated site for use by their employees and privileged clients. Fast, sophisticated, and secure, this portal keeps investors and advisors aligned on key strategies and maximizes ROI for clients while minimizing loss for the company.

But it doesn’t end there. One successful project begets others and this firm has implemented multiple internal solutions and external products on Liferay DXP, allowing them to gain economies of scale on their DXP investment. This firm found Liferay DXP especially suitable for their enterprise’s complex requirements and business.

Set the Pace In a Rapidly Changing Industry

Liferay’s financial services customers include 160+ banking and investment firms along with 120+ customers in the adjacent insurance sector. Companies with complex regulatory environments and challenging requirements have gravitated towards using Liferay DXP to execute their solution visions.

Within wealth management, there are four specific use cases that Liferay DXP is particularly well suited for: Websites, Advisor Portals, Client Portals, and a variety of Digital Operations.

Learn more about Liferay's financial services and wealth management solutions.

What is Low-Code and No-Code?

2025-08-07T12:05:03Z

Note: This article was last updated on August 7, 2025, to ensure all information is up-to-date.

Key Takeaways

Low-code and no-code platforms empower business users to build applications quickly using visual interfaces and pre-built components, reducing reliance on traditional coding and professional IT teams.
The primary difference is that low-code requires some basic coding for advanced customization, while no-code is designed for users with no coding experience.
Beyond speed, these platforms provide strategic benefits, including reducing development time by up to 90%, accelerating innovation, and increasing business agility to respond to market changes.
The rise of citizen developers – everyday users who build apps – enables organizations to solve problems faster and from the front lines, while also fostering collaboration between IT and business teams.
To succeed, businesses must manage challenges like shadow IT by establishing a clear governance framework, providing adequate training, and choosing a platform with robust security and integration capabilities.

Why should businesses use low-code or no-code development?

Low-code and no-code development are methods for building business applications faster without needing in-depth coding knowledge. This is particularly important in organizations where change happens quickly, and each individual business user must be able to make system edits independently.

Working with minimal coding experience, users can leverage graphical user interfaces and drag and drop features, to rapidly create and deploy the solutions they need in a fraction of the time.

The key difference between low-code and no-code development is that low-code platforms typically require some basic coding skills or programming knowledge for advanced customization, while no-code platforms are designed for users with little to no coding experience.

Why Low-Code/No-Code?

Ever needed an app or form created, but the request was delayed because the IT team was too swamped?

As the demand for digital solutions increases, businesses need to decrease their time-to-market. But traditional coding takes time, and IT teams can only handle so much. That’s where low-code and no-code capabilities come in to enable business users outside of these teams, making it easier for anyone in the organization to build apps without coding expertise. Low-code platforms can create applications for critical business processes, while no-code is generally limited to tactical apps for simple functions.

How Low-Code/No-Code Platforms Work

Gartner research says, on average, 41% of employees outside of IT – or business technologists – customize or build data or technology solutions. Gartner also estimates more than 65% of all business applications are already built using low-code. So what is it that makes low-code or no-code solutions so powerful?

A traditional coding approach relies heavily on manual coding and usually requires longer wait times. Low-code/no-code capabilities, however, minimize the need for these skills and speed up development by providing pre-built components and intuitive visual interfaces. In addition, pre-coded modules, forms, objects, workflows, and design patterns give non-technical, everyday business users the ability to create custom applications and automate business processes. Users can even extend functionality as needed without deep programming expertise.

Low-code lets users define the steps and agents required to move processes forward.

This table clearly outlines the key differences between low-code and no-code platforms:

Feature	Low-Code Platforms	No-Code Platforms
User	Requires some basic coding skills for advanced customization.	Designed for users with little to no coding experience.
Complexity	Suitable for building more complex applications.	Generally limited to simple, tactical apps for basic functions.
Flexibility	Offers more flexibility and customization options.	Tailored for simplicity and rapid app creation.

Benefits of Low-Code/No-Code Platforms

Beyond empowering business users, low-code and no-code platforms deliver a wide range of strategic benefits that impact the entire organization. Their ability to accelerate development and streamline operations is so compelling that, according to research, 69% of professional developers prefer working with low-code enhanced platforms.

These platforms offer several key advantages:

Efficiency Gains

Low-code app development is a powerful method for achieving efficiency gains, as it allows organizations to build applications without the need for extensive coding. Low-code/no-code solutions can reduce development time by up to 90%. This dramatically accelerates the software development lifecycle, leading to greater efficiencies for the organization as a whole.

Innovation Acceleration

80% of organizations state that empowering other users to develop has given IT departments more time and resources to focus on other initiatives. Low-code and no-code platforms can also accelerate the adoption of advanced technologies such as Machine Learning (ML), enabling organizations to quickly deploy ML models for automation and smarter decision-making. But low-code and no-code capabilities don’t just save IT departments time for high-value projects; the faster development times also enable rapid prototyping, quicker iterations, and more efficient app delivery.

Business Agility

Rapid iterations also allow businesses to test new ideas and adjust their strategies on the fly. Among IT teams using low-code solutions, business units were 21% happier with lead times than those without low-code. Plus, by reducing reliance on traditional coding and expensive, time-consuming professional developers – and eliminating the need to learn programming languages – organizations can adapt to market shifts and internal changes more quickly.

Cost Savings

Without the time and resources required to organize or outsource a large team of developers, businesses can save on operating costs while streamlining the development process. Moreover, low-code and no-code solutions, including no-code tools that enable cost savings through visual programming and drag-and-drop interfaces, simplify maintenance and updates to minimize the ongoing expenses associated with a custom application.

Flexibility in Integration

Flexible integrations are at the heart of any low or no-code solution, enabling seamless connections and process automation across various systems and data sources. With pre-built connectors and APIs, the applications developed in these environments can easily adapt as the company evolves to ensure continuity and efficiency.

Risk Mitigation

During the development stage, low-code/no-code solutions can also help mitigate risks by providing a controlled environment with pre-tested components and standardized processes. Not only does this improve accuracy by minimizing the likelihood of human coding errors, but the right solution can also reduce the risk of data breaches and non-compliance – just be sure your solution has robust security features in line with industry standards.

Strategic Technology Adoption

Last but not least, low-code/no-code capabilities are pivotal for strategically adopting new technologies. Users can skip the steep learning curve associated with complex programming and, without needing advanced programming skills, rapidly deploy innovative solutions to stay current with emerging trends and demands. This allows businesses to future-proof their systems, laying a strong foundation for ongoing digital transformation efforts.

Low-Code in Liferay DXP

To help business users create engaging digital experiences without relying on their IT teams, we have many new low-code capabilities in Liferay DXP.
Request a Demo to see the capabilities live!

Development Platforms for Low-Code and No-Code

Development platforms for low-code and no-code are designed to make app development accessible to a wider range of users, regardless of their coding knowledge. Low-code platforms provide more flexibility and customization options, making them suitable for building more complex applications that may require some coding. In contrast, no-code platforms are usually tailored for users who want to create simple apps without writing any code.

When selecting a development platform, it’s important to consider factors like ease of use, scalability, integration capabilities with existing systems, and robust security features. The right platform can accelerate app development, streamline business processes, and ensure that applications meet organizational requirements for security and performance.

Citizen Developers and the Rise of Low-Code Platforms

The rise of low-code platforms and no-code platforms has given birth to a new wave of innovators – citizen developers. These are everyday users – project managers, marketing specialists, operations staff – who, thanks to low-code development and no-code development features, can build internal tools, automate business processes, and address unique business needs quickly without relying on traditional IT teams. Or in short: They are able to solve real problems in hours instead of weeks.

Unlike traditional app teams, citizen developers:

Own their solutions end-to-end. They don’t just hand off requirements; they design, build, test, and iterate their own tools. This direct involvement boosts user satisfaction, since the person who experienced the pain point is also crafting the solution.
Form a grassroots center of excellence. As more citizen developers emerge, organizations often see organic “champions” who share tips, create templates, and mentor peers. Formalizing this into a Citizen Developer Guild or CoE helps scale best practices, from naming conventions to security checklists.
Drive measurable ROI. Early adopters report a 3–5× faster turnaround on department-level application requests. By tracking time saved and process improvements – rather than lines of code – leaders can quantify the financial impact of empowering non-IT creators.
Balance agility with governance. To prevent “shadow IT,” enterprises layer in lightweight guardrails: approval workflows, version control, and role-based permissions. This ensures citizen-built apps meet compliance standards while preserving fast delivery.
Tap into ecosystems and marketplaces. Modern low-code platforms offer built-in marketplaces of plug-and-play components, everything from chart widgets to ecommerce connectors. Citizen developers assemble pre-built modules rather than starting from scratch, further accelerating time to value.
Cultivate continuous learning. Successful programs blend on-demand video micro-lessons, peer office hours, and bite-sized certifications. As users level up, they graduate from simple forms to multi-stage workflows and integrations, expanding the scope of what “citizen-built” can achieve.

By investing in the people and processes that support citizen developers – training cohorts, reusable templates, and a clear governance framework – organizations turn these accidental innovators into a sustainable engine of rapid, secure, and cost-effective application development.

“I think [low-code platforms are] probably the most important technology tool that CIOs need to look at. We do not have enough staff and our staff who are strong at AppDev really need to focus on the customer-facing pieces that are going to move the needle.”
Isaac Sacolick, founder of Driving Digital, [via zdnet.com]

However, to ensure the success of citizen developer initiatives, organizations should provide adequate training and support. This helps maintain security, scalability, and quality across all apps built using low-code and no-code platforms.

When Do Businesses Use Low-Code/No-Code?

Although low-code/no-code capabilities vary across vendors, businesses commonly use them to build end-to-end solutions such as:

Simple business applications like HR employee reviews
Landing pages to attract and retain new customers
Content management systems (CMSes) to maintain and update digital content
Approval workflows needed to approve a purchase order
Forms to collect data like new hire information
App building for internal tools and automation
Code app and no-code apps for rapid development of business apps

"No-code" isn't just about helping non-coders build things. It's also about helping coders build things."
Sahil Lavingia, Founder Gumroad [via mailbrew]

Challenges of Low-Code

The ease that comes with using low-code and no-code capabilities as well as allowing any user to become a citizen developer also brings certain challenges:

Challenge	Potential Issue
Shadow IT	Solutions are created without the awareness or approval of the IT department.
Application Sprawl	An influx of overlapping applications that may not work well with each other or the existing tech stack.
Inconsistent Experience	Lack of unifying user experiences across different solutions built by various users.
Scalability	Apps may not be built with scalability in mind, leading to potential obsolescence.
Custom Code	The need for custom coding can complicate things, requiring traditional developers to get involved.

These challenges can be avoided by working with a low-code enhanced digital experience platform like Liferay DXP that leverages open-source technologies, integration tools, and robust governance capabilities. This ensures that all application developments undergo a structured approval process to maintain high standards of quality, security, and compliance across the enterprise.

Best Practices for Low-Code and No-Code

To fully leverage the benefits of low-code and no-code development, organizations should follow a set of best practices. Start by:

Defining clear business requirements to ensure that the apps you build address real business needs.
Choosing the right platform that aligns with your organization’s goals, considering factors like scalability, integration, and security.
Factoring in the managing, maintaining, and testing of apps built with low-code and no-code platforms as these tasks can drive up infrastructure and storage expenses.
Ensuring proper processes for testing and validation are in place as they are essential for data integrity and applications to function as intended.
Making security a top priority, especially when citizen developers are involved in app development.
Establishing governance policies to oversee the development process and provide ongoing training and support for all users involved in no-code development.

By following these best practices, organizations can empower citizen developers, maintain high standards for data integrity and security, and drive innovation while keeping costs under control.

Real-World Examples of Low-Code and No-Code

Low-code platforms and no-code platforms are transforming business processes across industries – for example, to manage inventory, to optimize supply chain operations, or track customer engagement and loyalty programs. According to Gartner, the low-code market is predicted to reach $44.5 billion in revenue by 2026, reflecting a strong growth trend.

These real-world examples highlight how low-code and no-code development can give organizations a competitive edge by enabling rapid application development, automating repetitive tasks, and empowering business users to create custom solutions. By adopting a low-code platform or no-code platform, companies can drive innovation, streamline business processes, and respond more effectively to changing market demands.

See If Low-Code/No-Code Is Right for Your Business

Traditional development and engineering teams will still be critical and central to any business, but user-friendly solutions like low-code and no-code, as well as low-code tools, can help reduce the backlog that many of these teams experience.

Businesses should evaluate whether low-code, no-code, and low-code tools can empower their teams to work faster and more efficiently.

PaaS vs SaaS — What’s the Difference?

2025-05-29T20:47:07Z

SaaS, PaaS, what do these acronyms mean? Let us help you break down what each cloud offering means for your business.

What’s the Difference Between SaaS and PaaS?

PaaS and SaaS are just two of the major categories (a third being IaaS) of cloud computing provided by a third-party.

But what do Platform as a Service and Software as a Service really mean?

An “as a service” cloud computing solution allows businesses to offload IT responsibility to a vendor that can provide the cloud infrastructure, security, uptime, and scalability needed to run modern digital solutions. And, unlike on-premise solutions, these can be easily accessed on any internet browser or through online apps.

So, then, what can you expect from PaaS and SaaS?

What is a PaaS Solution?

PaaS, or platform as a service, allows businesses and developers to host, build, and deploy consumer-facing apps. PaaS providers will host the hardware and software on their own infrastructure and then deliver this platform to users as an integrated solution. This means that developers can build, run, and manage apps in an environment that is available on day one — without the need for on-premise infrastructure. But businesses will need to manage their own applications and data. This gives the customizability that many developers look for, while providing the foundation for data protection, storage, and uptime that they desire.

In addition to the ability to deploy a PaaS platform immediately, this cloud computing model offers key benefits such as:

Greater flexibility and scalability.
Cost-effectiveness.
Ease of use.
Customized applications.
Zero software upkeep.

Businesses and developers often leverage a PaaS provider because they don’t have to worry about the underlying cloud infrastructure and PaaS solutions offer a high level of flexibility for customization.

Examples of PaaS solutions include Google App Engine, OpenShift, and Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed (SM).

What is a SaaS Solution?

SaaS, or software as a service, is the most comprehensive cloud computing service, delivering an entire SaaS application, managed by a vendor, through a web browser. This means that everything — including software updates, bug fixes, and maintenance — is handled by the SaaS provider. Customers don't need to install anything; they simply connect to the app via a dashboard or API.

As a highly scalable, easy-to-use cloud service model, SaaS products offer organizations a few distinct advantages, such as:

No need to manage, update, or upgrade your SaaS app.
SaaS apps won't take up your local computing resources.
Cloud solutions offer a faster time-to-market.
SaaS products are generally easier to use and access.

For these reasons, the SaaS product model has become one of the most popular cloud service models among businesses today.

Examples of SaaS solutions include Slack, Hubspot, and Liferay Experience Cloud.

What is an IaaS Solution?

There’s also IaaS, or infrastructure as a service, where vendors provide the same technologies and capabilities as a traditional data center but customers are responsible for managing their own applications, runtime, middleware, and data. Customers would still need to build out their own tech stack, making IaaS more similar to using on-premise systems from a practical standpoint.

While an IaaS provider only offers its servers and API, this means you have more control over your solution. This helps you build and manage data as you grow without the need for on-site infrastructure. In addition to greater control, the IaaS cloud service model also allows you to:

Use an external server without any required maintenance.
Pay as you go and only for the resources you use.
Scale your services up or down as needed.

Examples of IaaS solutions include Amazon Web Service, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

This visual gives a broad overview of what you can expect from each system.

Should You Use SaaS or PaaS?

SaaS, PaaS, and even on-premise solutions are not mutually exclusive; many organizations will use them in tandem. But the solution chosen must depend on what functionalities the business requires.

You can use this chart to determine what features, control, and benefit each can provide to determine which will be the best for your business:

	On-Premise	PaaS	SaaS
Cost	Costs associated with hosting an on-premise server include not only costs for hardware and dedicated staff, but also rent, air conditioning, energy, and security.	Users pay a fee or subscription to use the platform provided by the vendor. The fee is usually based on resources created for the project.	Users pay a monthly or annual fee to use a complete application from within a web browser or app. The fee is usually on a per-user basis.
Development	Developers will need to build environments and procure a technology stack from scratch if the business is only using on-premise systems.	PaaS solutions provide a complete tech stack with hardware and software to assist with app development, testing, and deployment.	Not all SaaS applications offer the same customization capabilities. Some limit users to out-of-the-box functionality while others provide added flexibility for customizations and extensions.
Control	Since the server is on premise, businesses have the greatest control over their application between the three options.	Using a PaaS solution means that while developers can build and run their own solutions, their data is still secured on a third-party controlled server.	Using a SaaS solution means that the third-party vendor will manage the application for you.
Data Security	Tied to control, on-premise servers provide the most direct access to your data. But it also comes with the complexity of implementing data security and compliance on your own.	PaaS solutions also implement security and compliance and may offer controls such as Bring your Own Key for encryption, but risks remain similar to those in SaaS deployments.	The SaaS vendor implements security and compliance; however, risks with unauthorized access and data theft remain. Industry-leading SaaS providers implement security measures to ensure their platform is validated by third-party organizations.
Performance and Uptime	IT and Development teams will need to monitor and manage the performance of the applications, servers, networking, and storage.	Development teams are responsible for ensuring application performance. Meanwhile, the vendor is responsible for maintaining performance of the underlying platform.	The vendor is responsible for maintaining performance and ensuring the application is running.
Integration	Building solutions from scratch allows developers to build with needed integrations in mind. However, badly designed integrations can create issues with performance and reliability.	Customizations may be needed for legacy systems to work with PaaS solutions, requiring significant investment.	SaaS applications may not integrate easily with legacy systems or other applications, depending on if they were designed to follow open standards for integration.
Capacity Elasticity	Scaling can be implemented but is more complex and costly. An on-prem solution may require software procurement and the set up of additional physical servers.	The vendor provides the scaling capability, a small amount of tuning may be required.	Scaling is completely transparent to end users and all configuration and additional resources are provided by the vendor.

How to Choose the Right PaaS or SaaS Provider

PaaS and SaaS services can fundamentally change how organizations operate. As these cloud computing services continue their exponential growth, the market for solutions gets ever larger. While this means you now have more options than ever, it's easy to slide into choice paralysis — especially when every provider claims they're the best.

So, how can you ensure you're making the right choice for your business, whether it's a SaaS or PaaS provider? Here are three key aspects you should look for:

Compliance: When researching any cloud service provider, it's critical to ensure they adhere to industry standards, best practices, and regulatory requirements — such as an ISO 27001 certification or HIPAA compliance.

Reliability: Reliability is an obvious but crucial feature for any PaaS or SaaS provider. Whether it's a platform or software product, the vendor needs to have proper disaster recovery practices and strategies in place to ensure availability during planned and unplanned downtime.

Data Security: PaaS and SaaS models offer unparalleled convenience by hosting your data on third-party servers, but that means security is mostly out of your control. Check up on the validity of their security certifications and look into their history for any past data breaches. Be sure that any provider you consider has the protection, processes, and policies needed to guarantee the security of your data.

Time to Move to the Cloud

Regardless of what solution is chosen, the future is in the cloud. Savvy business leaders understand that the wisest way to scale and grow their business is by deploying solutions through the cloud.

Also See:

How Liferay Experience Cloud Lowers Total Cost of Ownership

Liferay Experience Cloud is our all-in-one solution that unifies Liferay DXP and cloud platform capabilities. With Liferay Experience Cloud, you can accelerate your time-to-market while cutting your total cost of ownership. Discover how in our ebook.

Read the Ebook

Turn Your Onboarding Headache Into The Start of a Great Relationship

2025-06-27T17:51:59Z

While COVID-19 may have pushed financial service organizations to digitalize, these companies have no plans of stopping even after COVID’s effects lessen. In fact, 77% of traditional financial institutions plan to increase their focus on digital transformation to improve customer experience.

But there’s one critical stage of the customer journey that businesses must improve if they want to be successful: client onboarding.

Challenges with Client Onboarding in Financial Services

When customers are onboarded successfully, they have a significantly higher customer satisfaction score in comparison to those who don’t, according to a study done by J.D Power.

But while onboarding can be done online, it still can take an average of 32 days and require 8 different interactions.

In fact, 52% of wealth management firms worry that they’ll lose their clients during onboarding, which can take up to 4 weeks.

Onboarding is painful and costly across the entire industry as shown here:

It takes 7 days to onboard retail customers and 90-120 days to onboard corporate banking customers
There is a $40 million average spend to onboard new clients
63% of consumers in Europe abandoned a digital application due to poor onboarding
12% of corporate customers switched banks as a result of poor onboarding

But onboarding can be a critical driver of customer satisfaction and retention if done right.

In order to build lasting relationships with customers, financial services organizations need to ensure that onboarding is smooth and personalized, so customers will desire to remain a customer.

How to Improve Onboarding Financial Services Clients

Financial organizations can leverage these 3 digital transformation features to enhance onboarding:

Self-Service
Empower customers to sign up and complete the entire or majority of the onboarding process without needing to contact or check in with an agent.

In fact, 79% of customers now expect organizations to provide some level of self-service functionality, and this is predicted to increase as we move into a post-COVID world.

Use self-service not only to satisfy customers, but also to reduce internal resources and costs.
Automation and Workflows
Onboarding is a complicated process, not only involving multiple departments, but also requiring compliance with changing regulations such as Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML).

These steps often are what cause bottlenecks during onboarding, resulting in a disjointed and lengthy process.

By setting up workflows, financial service organizations can break down the barriers to a smooth onboarding and accelerate the entire process. When the necessary systems and regulatory processes are connected, the customer won’t realize the different actions being taken on the backend and only see a seamless experience.
Personalization
Speed isn’t the only component to success. Onboarding is also where financial organizations can and should make a good first impression to their new customers.

Banks can leverage personalization to offer guidance and tailored content during the onboarding process. This can help set up long-lasting relationships as clients feel their banks care and value their financial performance.

And customers are not hesitant to switch if they aren’t given the tailored guidance they want. Wise leaders will get ahead of this and retain the customers they worked so hard to earn.

But the benefits of personalization also extends beyond new customers onboarding to recommend new services to existing customers. Leveraging existing information, financial services organizations can reach and onboard customers to new products and services they might not have known about before.

Decreasing Abandonment with Better Onboarding

As one of the first steps in the customer journey, onboarding is critical to financial service success. Ensure that customers are able to get started quickly and painlessly, so that they’ll want to start a long-lasting relationship with your business.

Make Customer Experience a Differentiator for Your Business

Onboarding is only the first step in the customer journey. Learn how to further your customer experience with this whitepaper >

2022 Digital Transformation Predictions from a B2B Marketing Executive

2025-06-27T17:58:21Z

Marketers are no strangers to change. You’ve operated in a world where consumer preferences are always shifting, where technology is always evolving, and the market is always moving. This has been especially true in the past two years where so much of our realm has been disrupted.

But these changes are not slowing down. As we look forward, we foresee a few major trends that will be impacting marketers.

We sat down with Liferay’s VP of Marketing and former analyst at Forrester, Jonathan Tam for his insights on what digital transformation trends will be most critical for marketing success in 2022 and beyond.

Cutting Out the Noise

With over 46% of businesses worldwide increasing their digital maturity to continue to serve customers in the pandemic, it’s becoming more difficult to stand out amidst the competition.

“Since we all moved online, there's been more content, more ads, more webinars, just more noise. I think back to when email first went ‘mainstream’ in the early 2000s, but now we get hundreds of emails each day. Even if there’s a well-crafted email that makes it to my inbox, it’s like trying to search for a needle in a massive haystack, and I’m not willing to dig,” says Jon.

But being online doesn’t necessarily equate to strong digital capabilities, especially when everyone else is also trying to capture customers’ attention.

That’s why successful digital transformation is critical for marketers in 2022. It’s not enough to just be online, those online experiences must be superior.

Here are the 3 big digital transformation trends this B2B marketing executive believes will be most prominent in 2022:

Digital and In-Person, Not Either Or

“Even as the world opens up more, digital isn’t going away. If anything, it puts the stress on companies to deliver both excellent in-person AND digital experiences. It’s never going to be an either or situation anymore,” said Jon.

“Customers will be expecting virtual options even when things are safe to attend in-person. There will always be a population that will want virtual. Especially as companies evaluate hybrid work and more individuals want to continue to work remotely,” adds Jon.

Marketers must capitalize on this trend and must not only continue to enhance their digital offerings, but also weave it together with amazing in-person experiences.

But according to a survey conducted in 2020, only 9% of respondents have a seamless experience across all their offline and digital touchpoints.

In order to deliver a truly omnichannel experience, businesses will need to invest in integration, to unite different systems and applications on a single solution.

According to Scott Brinker’s Martech 5000, there are over 8,000 marketing technology solutions alone as of 2020. Consider how large this number becomes as you start including applications your support teams, IT department, sales representatives, and others across the company need to manage and maintain.
Better Data for Better Personalization

The most direct way to cut through the haystack and ensure customers can find your message is through personalization. But that’s also the hard part, especially given how many other businesses are vying for the customer’s attention.

Personalization is by no means a new tactic; however, it’s one that many organizations still struggle to execute successfully. Either it’s not relevant enough or it’s too invasive.

According to a 2020 survey conducted by NTT, 86.5% of respondents have either no personalization or only partial personalization.

What are these companies missing? Advanced tools? Staff?

Jon believes the answer lies deeper, in the lack of relevant data. “A key element to personalization success is the ability to aggregate and collect data from different touchpoints and channels. Otherwise you don’t have a complete picture of the buyer. A lot of tech stacks are still being built in silos, with individual departments and teams using their own technologies and applications. These don’t always work together, leading to disparate data that’s locked away and unable to be used to better understand the customer,” says Jon.

So, if marketers want to enhance their digital experiences, they will need to invest in integration technologies that will help eliminate silos and bring data into a single location to build a complete picture of the customer.
Increase Digital Agility

It’s no longer enough to be digital. This past year proved that businesses must be able to go to market faster.

While we don’t foresee another global-scale crisis happening soon, companies can prepare now to make sure that their businesses are equipped to shift and change according to customer needs.

But to do so will require investment in digital capabilities that will accelerate time-to-market. These include:
- Equipping non-technical and technical users with low-code and no-code capabilities.
- Leveraging cloud to ensure business continuity and scalability, instead of having IT teams maintain and update on-premise infrastructure.
- Improving internal operations by implementing self-service for employee

Digital Transformation for 2022 and Beyond

While adapting to change is an integral element of a marketer’s day-to-day tasks, the core of what marketers do still remains the same: bringing value to the customer.

“Digital transformation is not just a platform or a technology, it’s an integrative strategy that has the buyer at the center. So no matter what tactics or applications you leverage, the focus must still be on the customer,” says Jon.

Also See:

Struggling to Successfully Digitally Transform Your Business?

Digital transformation? Easier said than done. Most businesses will run into these 5 major roadblocks. Download this e-book to learn how to avoid the pitfalls and reach the finish line.

Ready, Set, Digital Transformation

Jonathan Tam leads Liferay’s marketing team and is responsible for streamlining Liferay’s marketing strategy and communicating the business value of Liferay Digital Experience Platform and the solutions made possible by Liferay’s product portfolio. He joined the Liferay team in August 2019 after previous roles as an industry and marketing analyst at Forrester Research/SiriusDecisions.

How Integration Reduces Cost and Improves Efficiency

2025-05-29T20:31:23Z

A simple CMS might have been enough when your business started. But as it grew, so too have the number of systems, technologies, and applications you use.

Now your tech stack has become a monster: your data is jumbled, your employees struggle to find what they need, and your customers are having difficulty navigating your systems. This is holding your business back from its true potential. How can we tame this beast?

Through system integration.

What is Integration and Why is it Important?

Integration is the process of connecting separate existing components to form a unified experience.

Every day, businesses utilize varying technology to communicate with customers, partners, employees, and more, but bringing all this data from separate systems to create a seamless online experience is not an easy task, as these systems are often not built for each other.

According to Scott Brinker’s Martech 5000, there are over 8,000 marketing technology solutions alone as of 2020. Consider how large this number becomes as you start including applications your support teams, IT department, sales representatives, and others across the company need to manage and maintain.

Failure to integrate your tech stack will be costly and exhausting to handle. Your systems need a break, and so do you.

What Will Happen If I Don’t Integrate?

You might be thinking, “Our systems are running just fine now. Is there really an issue if tech stacks aren’t integrated?”

But the lack of integration will only feed the growing tech stack monster, eating up resources from your internal teams and causing harm to your customers.

Internal Problems	External Problems
Misplaced or lost data	Repeat emails that confuse or irritate customers
Lack of focus and communication across the teams	Overlap of conflicting or wrong information
Resources overspent manually maintaining/upgrading systems	Delays in inquiries and feeling of neglect

In the long run, constantly trying to fix, maintain, and upgrade your technology to just “make things work” will inhibit your business from growing. Instead, integration can resolve your outdated and siloed systems and create a unified experience across the company.

Benefits of Integration

Tame the beast and unify your systems to not only run your business more efficiently but also provide better digital experiences.

With an integration platform, like a digital experience platform (DXP), businesses are able to unite millions of data points across systems, equipment, and processes and derive actionable insights across the entire value chain, everything from product design to operations to customer support.

How Integration Reduces Costs

With a robust integration platform, there’s no need to exhaust resources to manage individual softwares and rack up unnecessary maintenance costs.

With a consolidated platform, businesses are able to leverage their systems to work alongside each other to provide more seamless experiences, instead of trying to spend money and resources trying to force incompatible technologies to get along.

Additionally, integration helps to reduce costs by:

Providing clean, connected data in one place
Increasing scalability of technologies
Streamlining implementation of new technologies

With systems that are able to work alongside each other, your business can be equipped to provide a digital experience that can efficiently address customer needs in the ever-changing market.

How Integration Improves Efficiency

One specific way integration boosts productivity is by improving data accessibility, eliminating the need for employees to:

Manually import data
Share the same information across different systems
Duplicate tasks

Consolidating your software into one cohesive platform can increase the productivity of your IT teams by freeing them to focus on higher prioritized tasks. Rather than spending time piecing together different information, they can now devote their time towards being innovative and efficient.

The Freedom of Integration

Integration can be difficult, but don’t let routine or comfort keep you from growing as a company. Make the beast work with you, not against you. By integrating your systems, you’ll be giving the power back to your teams to operate your business efficiently and effectively.

See what technologies can help your business bring technologies together.

Making Digital Experiences Easier for All with Liferay DXP 7.4

2025-05-29T20:43:09Z

In the face of immense change in the past 18 months, businesses’ need to be agile and pivot quickly has proved to be a critical factor for success now, more than ever.

Agile businesses are not only able to shift efficiently, but are also able to improve financial and operational performance by 30% compared to less agile companies, according to McKinsey.

But how can businesses achieve enterprise agility?

Becoming More Agile with Liferay DXP 7.4

In addition to a shift in strategy and culture, truly agile businesses are empowered by technologies that allow them to respond effectively to fast-changing conditions.

That is why we’re excited to announce the release of Liferay DXP 7.4.

Since the release of Liferay DXP, we have been striving to build a platform that allows users to scalably build and improve digital solutions. Improvements in Liferay DXP 7.4 make it even easier for all users to deliver and optimize digital experiences.

"The release of Liferay DXP 7.4 reflects the need for all users to have more accessible, affordable, and customizable options for B2B digital solutions," said Damian Rochman, VP of Product Management at Liferay. "We are excited to deliver new and improved capabilities that allow technical and non-technical users to work smarter and faster to create and launch unique solutions on the Liferay platform.”

Here are just a few notable ways Liferay DXP 7.4 enables users to easily deliver more valuable digital experiences.

Liferay Enterprise Search Experiences. Business users shouldn’t be completely reliant on IT teams to help build or modify their digital experiences. With low-code and no-code capabilities, such as Blueprints, on Liferay DXP 7.4, users can easily manage and create the experiences they need. Part of the new Liferay Enterprise Search Experiences application, users can alter Liferay’s default search behavior by building their own custom search algorithms (i.e. boost a term, filter out results, include geolocation, etc) using a no-code visual query builder called Blueprints.
Low Code Application Builder. Additionally, business users can also build their own applications, freeing up IT teams to handle more complex and strategic issues. Users can leverage Liferay Objects to customize DXP, allowing users to create and manage objects, adding fields, object layouts, relationships, and define the scope for each custom object. Liferay Objects are fully integrated with existing Liferay DXP frameworks, such as Workflows, Headless and permissions.
DocuSign Integration. To streamline contracts and workflows, Liferay now integrates with DocuSign. This allows users to view the status of sent documents and download signed forms, all within Liferay.
Click to Chat Connector. Customers can easily communicate with sales reps through chatbot integration on 7.4. Liferay provides out-of-the-box connectors for a variety of providers, including Liveperson.
Accessibility and SEO Audits. Quickly check a page’s compliance with best practices for performance, accessibility, and search engine metadata. Users will be able to see warnings and tips to improve each of the categories.
Auto-translation of Web Content. Content creators can save time by focusing on polishing automatically translated web content, rather than needing to start from scratch.

To see a full list of new features, visit our product page here.

Providing Superior Digital Experiences, Effectively

These improvements further enhance the platform that has been named the only 11-time Leader of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms since the report’s inception.

We believe that Liferay has been recognized as a Leader due to strong integration capabilities, support for complex business use cases, and low total cost of ownership. These strengths can help businesses bring systems, data, and processes together to increase enterprise agility and help future-proof the business.

See What Else is New in 7.4

Join us as we celebrate and discuss the exciting improvements coming!

Learn More Here >

Print(“Hello, /dev/24”)

2025-05-29T20:53:43Z

What can you do in 24 hours?

You could fly from LA to Tokyo and back. You could walk the entire island of Manhattan. You could swim across the English Channel. Or you could gain the latest Liferay insights and tips from peers and industry experts at /dev/24.

What's /dev/24?

/dev/24 started last year as a way for the developer community to still gather in the midst of the pandemic. Our customers, partners, community members, employees, and other Liferay developers came together for an interactive 24-hour livestream event. Everyone came together to share solutions they’ve built, challenges they’ve tackled, and cool insights they picked up.

But, this wasn’t the traditional webinar format. Less PowerPoint and more browsers, instances, and environments where we collaborated and shared our learnings.

And we’re bringing it back again this year!

Your Invitation to /dev/24

So we’re calling all those who deal with {curly braces} for a living, those who use Liferay, and those who are a part of our community to join us for 2021’s /dev/24!

This year’s event will offer even more engagement, interaction, and insight than last year!

Transport yourselves into our Workadventu.re virtual world!

“Bump” into other attendees, speakers, and developers to start up a conversation.

Roam around the environment to explore booths or solve some puzzles in addition to watching the sessions.

Once the doors open, you’ll be able to join sessions to learn about:

Not-so-well-known API tricks and features
More awesome Content Page features
How to implement a “code-less” site
The power of collections in the real world

(You can see the full agenda here.)

Mark your calendars for November 3rd and 4th as we bring you another jam-packed 24 hours of new features coming in Liferay DXP 7.4, tips and tricks, engaging Q&A sessions and really a celebration of what peers and fellow developers have been able to accomplish.

If you’re a developer or have developers on your team, sign up for /dev/24 here.

What is B2B2C?

2025-08-19T16:53:27Z

Note: This article was last updated on August 19, 2025.

Key Takeaways

Business-to-Business-to-Consumer is a business model where businesses serve end customers through a third party.
B2B2C models benefit the manufacturer or primary business as they are able to expand their market reach, reduce operating costs, lower customer acquisition costs, and improve customer acquisition by leveraging partners' platforms and networks, as well as have access to deeper customer insights.
However, B2B2C is complex and will require infrastructure modifications in order to be successful.

You’ve heard of B2B. You’ve heard of B2C. But how much do you know about the B2B2C model? Many companies arrange themselves around either a B2C or B2B model. Although these models are still highly relevant in today’s business landscape, another option is becoming more popular in the age of digital tools and mounting consumer expectations: B2B2C.

The B2B2C business model combines the benefits of each approach, allowing a B2B company to leverage the B2C experience and reach a larger customer base. Though taking cues from more familiar models, B2B2C introduces new considerations to the business world.

Let’s explore what a B2B2C strategy is, what benefits these businesses enjoy, and what types of challenges they might face.

What is Business-to-Business-to-Consumer (B2B2C)?

B2B2C, or business-to-business-to-consumer, is an business model where a company partners with another company to access a wider consumer market or offer services that would be difficult or costly to provide independently. In this arrangement, two businesses work together: one business supplies a product or service to another, which then delivers it to the end consumer. The process often involves multiple sales channels and distribution channels, allowing companies to reach consumers through various avenues and optimize their sales channel strategy.

This partnership is mutually beneficial, as it enables companies to expand their customer base, enhance the customer experience, and unlock new revenue streams.

For example, a grocery store may collaborate with a delivery service to offer online ordering and home delivery, providing customers with a convenient and seamless shopping experience. By leveraging each other’s strengths, B2B2C models enable companies to reach more customers and deliver services that might otherwise require significant investment or resources.

Here’s a closer look at how that compares to other models:

B2B

In the traditional B2B experience, one company markets products and services to another. From software companies to office technology suppliers to wholesale retailers, B2B eCommerce encompasses a wide range of transactions in the supply chain.

B2C

A B2C eCommerce model allows a business to interface directly with the consumer. Most consumer brands use this model. The only difference between this and a traditional B2C approach is the form of transactions, which occur online via websites or apps instead of in a physical store — though a B2C company can use both eCommerce and brick-and-mortar strategies.

B2B2C

The business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) model is a dynamic business model that blends the strengths of both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) approaches. In a B2B2C model, one business partners with another business to deliver products or services directly to consumers, creating a bridge between the business world and the end customer. This hybrid model has surged in popularity as companies seek to provide a seamless customer experience, drive revenue growth, and streamline operations. B2B2C models are especially prevalent in industries like ecommerce, retail, food and beverage, and financial services, where collaboration between business partners enables companies to reach more customers and deliver greater value. By combining the reach and resources of two businesses, the B2B2C model offers a powerful way to meet evolving consumer expectations and stay competitive in today’s market.

In the B2B2C commerce model, there are three parties involved: the primary business or brand (e.g., a dealer or manufacturer), the intermediary—often a service provider who acts as a middleman—and the final customer (the end consumer). Consumers are fully aware they’re buying from the primary brand; the purpose of the intermediary company or service provider is to provide more direct service at customer touchpoints, creating a mutually beneficial situation for both businesses and the end consumer.

Managing the customer relationship and customer relationships is crucial in B2B2C, as both the primary business and the intermediary may interact directly with the end customer. This shared customer ownership requires careful coordination to ensure a consistent and positive experience across all touchpoints.

Key Characteristics of B2B2C Models

B2B2C models stand out from traditional business models due to several defining characteristics:

Partnerships Between Two Businesses: At the core of B2B2C models is a strategic partnership between two businesses working together to deliver products or services to consumers.
Seamless Customer Experience: These models prioritize creating a smooth and integrated customer journey, often making it easy for consumers to access products or services through familiar channels.
Use of Online Platforms and Digital Channels: B2B2C businesses frequently leverage online platforms, mobile apps, and digital marketplaces to reach and engage consumers efficiently.
Strong Business-Consumer Relationships: There is a focus on building lasting relationships with end consumers, often through personalized service and direct communication.
Personalized and Targeted Marketing: By combining resources and data, B2B2C models enable companies to deliver tailored marketing messages and offers to specific consumer segments.
Data-Driven Decision Making: The use of analytics and consumer data is central to optimizing operations and enhancing the customer experience. In the B2B2C model, leveraging data not only improves the end consumer’s experience but also strengthens the partnership between businesses, ensuring long-term success in a competitive marketplace.

Companies like Instacart and Uber Eats exemplify these characteristics by partnering with local businesses to deliver food and other products directly to consumers, using online platforms to facilitate seamless transactions between two businesses and the end customer.

Examples of B2B2C Business Models

While B2B and B2C models may be easy to spot, it’s less common to see a B2B2C company in the current marketing and commerce landscape. Here are a few examples of companies using the B2B2C model:

Instacart

Instacart is a startup B2B2C platform that mimics the grocery shopping experience digitally. Because traditional grocery stores haven’t typically undergone the digital transformation necessary to offer this service, Instacart acts as a platform partner and go-between. The resulting B2B2C model allows Instacart to leverage the brand recognition, existing customer base, and inventory of grocery stores, while the grocery stores benefit from Instacart’s digitized customer experience.

Pladur

Pladur, the leading drywall provider in Spain, has a B2B2C eCommerce platform as a competitive differentiator. Employees, distributors, and customers all use the same solution, enabling simple purchase experiences, connected logistics, and manufacturing management, resulting in significantly reduced lead times in order fulfillment processes.

Tuff Shed

Tuff Shed, a manufacturer of storage sheds and garages, has stores across the U.S. Through a B2B2C partnership with national retailers such as Home Depot, the individual consumer can access Tuff Shed’s online product builder through devices located in chain stores. This approach expands Tuff Shed’s reach to people who shop at these national retailers while allowing Tuff Shed to maintain branding and customer data collection.

AZA Finance

Supporting more than 115 countries, AZA Finance has a simple goal: to “make it easier to do business in Africa.” This B2B2C partner acts as the middleman between other companies and their consumers, offering financial technology solutions spanning multiple currencies to enable simpler international commerce.

Benefits of a B2B2C Relationship

As customer expectations grow more complex, companies struggle to scale operations and manage orders. To address new challenges, many B2B businesses choose to partner with others through a B2B2C model.

B2B2C Benefits

Access a 360-Degree View of Customers

A B2B company faces limitations in the collection and utilization of customer data. Companies using the B2B2C business model have direct access to the final consumer, enabling the creation of personalized offers and solutions. The result is a more robust digital experience that benefits all three parties.

Reduce Operating Costs

Operating costs increase with growing customer expectations; in response, the B2B2C approach allows companies to eliminate logistics costs and decrease overhead. This makes the B2B2C model a cost-effective solution for businesses. Similarly, while a large amount of capital is required to enter a new industry or deliver new solutions, a B2B2C partnership distributes these costs between multiple companies.

Increase Revenue Opportunities

B2B2C businesses also have the opportunity to expand their potential for economic growth. By partnering with others, a company can enter new markets, access a broader customer base, utilize existing resources, and ultimately share the financial burden required to explore new avenues. Collaborating with partner companies and partner businesses facilitates access to new customer bases and improves efficiency.

Retain Control Over Their Branding and Pricing

Under the B2B eCommerce model, businesses often have little control over the positioning and sale of their products. This often results in a loss of brand identity, which means the end customer isn’t aware of the original manufacturers or suppliers responsible for the quality they’ve come to expect. A B2B2C model eliminates this issue by involving a business more directly with B2B buyers. When a brand has more control over the price, presentation, and marketing of its products, that brand has a better chance of becoming a “household name” and winning new customers.

B2B2C Challenges

Like any other business model, B2B2C eCommerce has both benefits and challenges. Because of B2B2C’s newness to the market, however, the model hasn’t yet had the time or wide adoption necessary to spark the creative solutions other models have.

Let’s take a closer look at what could prevent the B2B2C eCommerce model from skyrocketing in popularity:

Increasing Demands
While B2B2C businesses have more resources to manage increasing customer demand, they still face the same challenges as other companies: How can brands create personalized, seamless experiences without compromising return on investment (ROI)? This question drives some businesses to the familiarity of other eCommerce models, where they won’t have to take a chance on a comparatively new approach.
Complex Partnerships
A B2B2C partnership has more stakeholders than a traditional B2B or B2C model. Businesses must navigate relationships with intermediaries as well as end customers, balancing partners’ needs with consumer expectations to create an optimized selling environment
Customer Experience Management
As with any significant change, switching to a B2B2C model requires companies to rethink their relationship with consumers. Since B2B2C introduces a middleman into traditional transactions, the primary brand needs to consider how this will impact the customer experience and whether a more hands-on management approach is required.
Required Investment
Switching from a B2B or B2C business model requires an upfront investment. This includes the cost of a robust eCommerce platform that can interface with customers while integrating with third-party business solutions. It’s also necessary to invest in tools capable of distributing consumer data between parties, enabling all stakeholders to be key players in the commerce ecosystem.
Infrastructure Modifications
The final, and perhaps most prohibitive, challenge associated with B2B2C businesses is the need to modify or entirely rethink the underlying infrastructure. When commerce has been conducted in a set way for years, it can be difficult, time-consuming, and even unsettling to make the switch to something new. As business goals change, so too must personnel roles, financial considerations, target audience, and more. In many ways, these modifications can feel like a complete redesign of the original company — and for some, that much change is simply frightening. Overcoming these logistic and cultural hurdles can keep organizations from making the jump.

Discover the Modern Ecommerce System That Fits Your Needs

To create a B2B2C model that maximizes benefits while dodging significant challenges, you’ll need to cross boundaries between consumer needs and partner requirements. Since these elements are often viewed separately, your business must merge the two perspectives to create something new and promising.

For this reason, it’s crucial for your approach to excel in four areas:

Self-Service Account Management
A robust self-service system empowers B2B partners, such as resellers or distributors, allowing them to independently manage their accounts, place orders, and access pertinent information. This autonomy fosters stronger B2B relationships and reduces the reliance on manual support, resulting in cost savings.
Order Management
In a B2B2C scenario, where diverse customer expectations must be met, effective Order Management is crucial to accommodate various order types, quantities, and fulfillment specifications, catering to the unique needs of both B2B partners and end consumers.
Buying Experience
Offering great Buying Experiences is pivotal for simplifying complex transactions, catering to diverse audiences, building strong relationships, enhancing customer loyalty, enabling personalization, ensuring efficient order processing, and differentiating the business in a competitive market. This contributes to overall customer satisfaction and long-term success in a complex business ecosystem.
Product Content Experience
By informing diverse audiences, facilitating informed decision-making, enhancing user engagement, and enabling personalization – or in short: by offering a great Product Content Experience – you create a positive and cohesive experience throughout the complex B2B2C business ecosystem.

A truly seamless B2B2C experience requires all four capabilities to be united in a single system.

With Liferay, that single system is never out of reach. Check out Liferay’s Digital Commerce capabilities or contact one of our B2B2C experts to see how Liferay can transform your eCommerce strategy with a flexible, integration-friendly platform.

Also See:

4 Must-Have Ecommerce Capabilities for Modern B2B Selling

Download our e-book to find out more about these 4 must-have ecommerce capabilities and discover what this could mean for your business.

Download Our E-Book

What is the Difference Between Using a Point Solution and Holistic Approach for Your Portal Solutions?

2025-05-29T21:12:09Z

In addition to deciding whether to buy or build portal software, IT teams have another critical business decision to make:

Is it more beneficial to use a point solution for a portal or use a holistic approach?

What is a Point Solution?

According to PCMag, “A point solution is a tool or system that is designed to solve a specific problem, without regard to related and other issues.”

For example, if an HR department is searching for a way to improve employee engagement, they might look for a solution that only makes employee portals.

Using a point solution can be likened to using a pre-assembled bookshelf as the solution to organizing the books and materials in an office.

What is a Holistic Approach?

Another method businesses can leverage is a holistic approach, for example, by using a platform.

Hubspot defines a platform as a, “Set of software and surrounding ecosystem of resources that enables growth through connection and integration.”

For example, the HR department we mentioned before is only solving a specific challenge within the department with their portal. That portal solution cannot be extended beyond that need to meet the requirements for customers or partners as that is not what it was intended for.

Alternatively, platforms provide for a more holistic approach. While these systems may not be able to solve problems from the outset, platforms deliver the foundation IT teams need to solve a range of challenges. So IT teams get to reap the benefits of building in-house, but on top of a pre-built foundation that increases time-to-market and reduces costs and maintenance.

If we return to organizing the office, instead of using a bookcase that has already been built, leveraging a platform can be likened to getting all the necessary components to build a bookshelf. This gives you the freedom to determine what size you need based on how many books or decorative items you’d like to display. You can also customize the color, wood type, metal, and layout.

When compared to point solutions, platforms provide a wide collection of out-of-the-box features that enables businesses to:

Build tailored portals efficiently and connect them alongside existing technologies
Streamline management, maintenance, and scaling of these portal solutions since everything is created on one platform
Expand and grow these portals easily as future needs arise

How to Decide Which to Use

Here are some considerations to take into account when deciding whether a point solution or holistic approach is more beneficial for your organization:

Number of existing technologies
As businesses continue to add more applications and systems, leaders must take a look at their tech stacks and weigh the benefits of adding yet another system.

ROI of either option
While point solutions are generally more affordable and require less upfront costs, platforms help reduce costs and IT resources in the long-run.

Time needed to implement and maintain
While point solutions are much easier and faster to get up and running, consider how much time and resources might be needed to support the solution in the long-term.

Upgrades and support required in future
Where will the organization be in a few years? Will the IT team still be able to leverage the solution to achieve future goals or will significant work be needed?

So what’s going to be the best for your business? Will it be the quick, more direct point solution or the overarching holistic approach through a platform?

Do I Buy or Build My Software?

To buy or not to buy, that’s the question we aim to answer in this blog.

Find Out the Solution Here >

IIoT Data: From Sensing to Predicting with Liferay and Timbergrove

2025-05-29T20:34:04Z

Abstract

In this article, we take a step-by-step look at how a successful Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) project works—from the data origins (e.g., a physical sensor) to data capture, transmission, and analysis. We also discuss some of today’s challenges implementing a successful IIoT project, specifically on issues pertaining to data access. Finally, we look at a real-world IIoT project example and what you can learn from it.

Introduction

When it comes to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), many of us are amazed by how far we’ve advanced in remote sensing and analytics. But for Ian Uriarte, CEO of Timbergrove, a Liferay Service Provider Partner and expert in IIoT and manufacturing solutions, the real wonder is how much farther we can develop IIoT projects to improve manufacturing processes and efficiency.

Where Data Comes From

In the world of the IIoT, data comes from many sources, including third-party systems, equipment sensors, and human-initiated data like uploading an image from a mobile app. We’re going to focus on the data that starts at a sensor (i.e., a physical device that can translate a real-life condition like pressure or vibration into an electrical signal).

While the IIoT is relatively new, professionals still incorporate many best practices of telemetry and telematics in their IIoT projects, such as optimal sensor and transmitter placement. Sensors are the link between the digital and physical worlds of IIoT, and it’s here where human expertise is critical. A sensor can’t determine if it has been correctly mounted and calibrated. Additionally, humans are required to ensure proper capture and analysis of the data. For example, machine learning can play a role in detecting that something is not working and, based on historical data and changes in patterns, provide an alert to a human who will check on what’s happened and take necessary action.

The Data Highway

After taking measurements and recording data, sensors must then transmit the data to a central location known as “the beach.” Depending on the circumstances, this might be via a wired internet network, a control network bus like Profibus or Fieldbus, wireless protocols such a LoRa WAN or xbee, WiFi, a cellular network, or even a satellite connection. With potentially hundreds of sensors taking thousands of measurements each second, data volume can quickly become an issue. Today it’s cheaper than ever to send data, but imagine sending gigabytes of data an hour, 24 hours a day—the data bill adds up. One way to make data transmission more efficient is through edge processing, that is, analyzing data at the sensor itself. The sensor then needs to only transmit the processed output data to the beach.

But data transmission is only part of the challenge. Very few people have the capacity to physically store so much data on their own servers. That’s why on-demand cloud computing platforms like AWS and Azure are so popular in the IIoT programs. The “on-demand” component means that clients can easily expand or shrink their storage allotment so that they only have to pay for the space they use. The elasticity of the cloud allows for flexibility in cost and availability of resources. Changes in production and manufacturing can be managed fluidly without penalty for “buying” larger or smaller virtual spaces. The ultimate goal is to have a single platform to access all sensor data at once on a consistent and reliable basis.

Data Analysis

The first step after receiving data is to make sure it’s complete. For example, a company may want to filter out data without a timestamp or identify unusual measurements for causation. As an example, camera footage can confirm whether a person was blocking a light sensor. The key is to understand ahead of time which variables you want to measure.

“It’s important to understand that the IIoT data is rarely analyzed by itself. Instead, data is pooled with other relevant datasets into an enormous “data lake.” For example, an engine manufacturer may have a data lake that includes sensor measurements from thousands of customer power plants and other engine-powered equipment over several years. Or, a manufacturer may want to create a data lake of sensor and other assembly line data from facilities around the world to compare, contrast and analyze operational efficiencies and need for equipment maintenance. By consolidating data, it’s possible to present, evaluate, and apply data trends more accurately,” says Uriarte.

Many manufacturers use the IIoT data today for equipment monitoring and prediction. The IIoT data analysis can help predict the optimal maintenance interval for industrial equipment based on external factors such as operating profile and even ambient temperature. If data analysis of the IIoT can make such detailed predictions, one may wonder why we don’t use the IIoT to directly control equipment for optimum service life.

“Unfortunately, even the fastest connections are just too slow to effectively control machinery in real time. But I predict that the introduction of 5G and 6G networks will completely change what’s possible with the IIoT as real-time remote control becomes a reality,” says Uriarte.

The Question of Data Access

One of the biggest debates in the IIoT revolves around data access and ownership. Today, the question of who has access to the IIoT data depends a lot on who’s collecting the raw data and the intended use of that data.

For the management of any sort of industrial facility, it’s easy to see how a single system involves components and products from different original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) around the world. Yet, all of these products work together physically to form a system that works for the manufacturer. Right now, this is not the case with an IIoT project. The equipment manufacturers tend to protect information about their equipment and send data directly to their own data hub for analysis.

“While OEMs are happy to send their clients the results of their data analysis, clients need to push for more access to the raw performance data if they want to make better real-time decisions at the system level. Clients hold the power to access more of their equipment data; they just need to work together to agree on a standardized data consortium,” adds Uriarte.

Even within the same company, data silos that isolate data sets often result in inefficiency, poor decision-making, and a lot of frustration.

Overcoming Today’s IIoT Challenges

Let’s consider an example in the oil and gas industry and how data integration made a positive difference. Drilling for oil is an expensive and delicate operation. A Timbergrove client was using an IIoT program to monitor and improve performance. One key drilling measurement is mud pressure. When analyzing the data, a sudden change in mud pressure might mean that the drill hole has collapsed. The problem is that it could also mean that another team of operators is (intentionally) raising the drill.

“When it came to cleaning up the pressure data, it was impossible to tell which team provided different pressure measurements because each team recorded data in separate systems. We created a solution that enabled the client to capture time-stamped events and match these events with recorded historical data to “annotate” the data so that the context of the sensor reading was clear for more accurate and useful daily reports,” says Uriarte

In short, technology used with the IIoT is a powerful tool that can completely change how business leaders and operating managers make informed decisions. The key is to avoid data silos and instead promote data integration wherever possible. This will help make your IIoT projects all the more valuable.

How Timbergrove and Liferay Can Help

Take the next steps in developing a successful IIoT project by establishing clear goals for your organization. More than 25% of IIoT projects stall at Proof of Concept due to the lack of a good strategy.

To combat this, Timbergrove and Liferay are offering a free consultation on your next IIoT project. In this technical consultation, we will analyze your specific business needs, analyze your current road map, and assess where you are on implementing that road map.

About Liferay

Liferay helps organizations solve digital challenges with omnichannel intranet, portal, commerce, and integration solutions. Our platform is open source, reliable, innovative, and secure. We try to leave a positive mark on the world through business and technology. Thousands of organizations in financial services, healthcare, government, insurance, retail, manufacturing, and multiple other industries use Liferay. Liferay. One Platform. Endless Solutions.

About Timbergrove

Timbergrove is a team of free-spirited, out-of-the-box thinkers who specialize in creating custom software and product development to solve operational pains for the manufacturing, oil and gas, and healthcare industries, among others. We’re in the business of solving problems; technology like IoT is simply the tools we use to achieve the end goal of making life better and easier for the organizations we work with. Check us out at www.timbergrove.com

Liferay Vision: Entering the Future of Liferay Events

2025-06-04T19:18:24Z

When a group of developers huddled together in a conference room of a German hotel to talk about portlet specifications, they wouldn’t have predicted the conversation would be the start to over a decade of awesome Liferay events and gatherings.

Encouraged by the amount of knowledge transferred, ideas generated, and relationships built, we’ve since held over 70 events across 44 cities with over 18,000 attendees. Our attendees have brought their fresh perspectives as we’ve connected on topics like, “how to improve customer experience,” “efficient solution development”, and even “the best yoga poses to do in your chair” (we recommend the Chair Pigeon).

However, we’ve wanted to improve and unify our events for a while. The pandemic gave us the push we needed. So, we are excited to announce our first truly global virtual event, Liferay Vision.

Pushing the Boundaries

We’re looking forward to creating a space where leaders and peers alike can be inspired by the possibilities that digital experience offers across geographies, languages, and professions.

This has truly always been the goal of our organization.

By having our product available through open source, we’ve been able to collaborate with and gather insight from brilliant users who participate in making Liferay better.

So, we want to bring this spirit to our events by moving beyond physical boundaries to connect customer experience and digital transformation leaders, marketing executives, tech leads, and industry experts from around the world, under one Vision.

Save your spot at Vision 2021!
Register Here >

Bringing Liferay Vision into Focus

“At Liferay Vision, we want each attendee to have an experience where they can learn new skills, get inspired, and create valuable connections. As Liferay’s mission statement says, we want these events to help our attendees reach their ‘full potential,’” says Melissa Saint-Pierre, Strategic Events Manager.

We were able to provide individuals with these valuable experiences earlier this year when our Latin America offices gathered over 2,000 registrants across 10 countries at our first LATAM Vision event to discuss how to create more human-centric digital relationships.

“Even though the event was virtual, the new Vision format allowed attendees to still end the event with a lot of human interaction and industry insights like they would’ve at our in-person events,” says Marketing Specialist, Clarissa Ivens, who was managing communications for the event.

Bringing Liferay Vision to You

But we don’t want to limit these benefits to any one region. That’s why we’re scaling Vision worldwide.

We are thrilled to invite you, regardless of geographic location or primary language, to Vision 2021.

No longer tied down by travel limitations, COVID restrictions, or time zones, attendees will be able to come together to “share information, industry trends, and topics of interests with peers and leaders,” says Liferay’s VP of Marketing, Jonathan Tam.

For prospective attendees, those who join will be able to hear from analysts from Forrester and IDC and join discussions about trends, challenges, and opportunities in the market.

Come and be a part of our Vision for the future of events, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. Grab your spot today!

Register for Your Spot to Vision!

2 Days. 40 Sessions. 60 Speakers. Don’t miss out on these valuable content and insights! Sign up here >

How the U.S. Navy Increased User Satisfaction of their Career Resources

2025-05-29T20:31:46Z

The U.S. Navy is one of the most powerful naval forces in the world, with over 870,000 sailors, officers, and specialists. But this impressive workforce also brings with it a daunting challenge:

How could the US Navy effectively and efficiently support each naval member with the resources, education, and training needed to manage their careers throughout their military service?

Disparate Apps Make Data Integration Impossible and Employee Experience Terrible

To help sailors manage their career, the Navy had created over 60 separate applications, each handling its own, highly specialized task like requesting leave.

Having all these applications caused:

Duplicate work and lack of data integration across applications
High maintenance costs of maintaining and managing each separate application
Employee dissatisfaction due to uncertainty of where to access critical information

To combat the lowering performance levels and lack of accessibility, the Navy decided to move everything to a single location that would provide an enhanced digital experience to their sailors.

Learn more about the Navy’s unique digital challenges in this podcast with Carashoft.
Listen Here>

Unifying Digital Experience a Single Platform

With the help of partner IBR, the Navy moved everything onto a single solution that could meet their performance requirements and and deliver a great digital experience: Liferay.

The Navy chose Liferay to build their portal because of the platform’s out-of-the-box instances with limitless customization.

With Liferay, the team was able to build the MyNavy Portal which allows the Navy to:

Manage content without involving developers or technical teams
Personalize content and functionalities based on user preferences, role, location, and clearance
Implement new services and features quickly through integration or flexible development

Now the MyNavy Portal provides sailors with an intuitive and unified solution for everything they need to manage their career paths.

To learn more about how the Navy was able to improve the performance of their solution and boost user satisfaction, read the full case study here.

How the US Army Leverages Digital Solutions to Help Soldiers Transition

2025-05-29T20:31:51Z

According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 47% of US soldiers say their transition back into civilian life is very difficult, compared to 21% for pre-9/11 veterans.

Additionally, given evolving technological skills needed in the workplace, this figure is only predicted to rise.

The U.S. Army might be preparing their men and women for active duty, but how can they help these veterans transition after their service ends?

The U.S. Army’s Portal Challenges

Even though Army service members are specially trained and highly competent, the skills they acquire while in service, like handling large machinery or weaponry, are not easily transferable to other roles in the civilian workforce.

The Army quickly realized that they needed to equip their soldiers with the education, training opportunities, and credentials to make their transition more seamless.

However, their existing portal was:

Not equipped to support these changing policies and procedures
Inaccessible for mobile devices around the world
Expensive to operate and did not take advantage of modern technologies, such as cloud architecture

So the Army enlisted Deloitte, using Liferay, developed ArmyIgnitED, their new credentialing assistance program.

Education, Credentials, and Support all on a Single Portal Solution

Now over a million users are able to sign into the new system to:

Sign up for over 1,500 credentials, from pilot private licenses to certifications to commercial drivers without needing to fill out physical forms.
Connect and interact with career counselors worldwide. These counselors can now see all the soldier's information in one location, making it easier to provide them with helpful counsel.
Access in-person and virtual training through a network of over 2,500 schools and training providers

Soldiers love how easy the new portal solution is to use and enroll in the programs they want. The experience is on par with many commercial consumer apps. And now the savings that the Army has realized on this project can be applied to providing a better experience for soldiers.

What Else is the Army Doing?

Hear our full conversation with Raj Iyer, Managing Director of Deloitte, to see how the Army is improving the transition for their service members here.

The Secret to Effective Intranets

2025-05-29T21:01:43Z

This past year, we’ve had to trade in our commutes to the office and lunch with coworkers for make-shift home offices and loungewear. This mass transition to remote working has forced organizations to rely on digital tools to connect and engage their workforce.

This is where the company intranet comes into play.

An intranet can be a very powerful asset in a business’s toolkit: connecting departments and people together, streamlining internal communication and processes, and empowering employees with the tools they need to succeed in their jobs and accomplish their goals.

However, a tool is only powerful if it is actually put to use. Likewise, it’s not just enough to have an intranet in place, it must be a tool that employees find beneficial and want to use everyday.

Why bother with intranets at all?
In addition to raising productivity, here are other key ways intranets benefit organizations >

How to Get Employees to Actually Use Your Intranet?

Organizations cannot have “If you build it, they will come,” mindsets when it comes to technology, especially not their intranets.

Just having an intranet in place does not automatically boost employee engagement. Employers must be strategic with how they build, rollout, and promote their intranet solution.

Having a People-First Mindset

A well-designed intranet is one that has been customized to fit unique workforce needs. When employees have a tool that has been built specifically for them, they will be much more likely to adopt and use it.

Companies such as Apple, Google, Best Buy, VW, and Canadian Tire have adopted a human-centered design thinking approach that not only applies internally, but also shapes their customer-facing environments.

This human-centered approach needs to be applied to every business, especially since the jarring and rapid shift to online business due to COVID-19 made it even more important to create a sense of belonging and engagement with each employee. This means that the intranet is more of a strategic imperative than ever before.

Here are the four secrets to getting your organization to adopt your intranet:

1. Implement Personalization

A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works for intranets. Employees need to access different content and tools based on their role and department.

For example, employees who work on the warehouse floor or out in the field may have very different access requirements from those who work in an office environment. Serving the needs of individual employees will lead to more efficient and more highly satisfied employees.

2. Improve UX/UI for Faster Adoption

Employees have grown accustomed to sophisticated yet simple digital experiences in their private lives but are faced with complex structures and systems in the workplace. The lack of investment into excellent employee experiences can result in decreased productivity, engagement, and retention rate.

To improve UX and UI, implement simple navigation, consistent site structures, and helpful features like custom menus, favorites, and personalized dashboards.

3. Encourage Mentoring and Knowledge Sharing

In a survey by Deloitte, 8 in 10 executives ranked corporate learning as “important” or “very important.”

Deloitte noted that “this focus on learning seems appropriate, as learning opportunities are among the largest drivers of employee engagement and a strong workplace culture—they are part of the entire employee value proposition, not merely a way to build skills.”

Dominos is a fine example of a company that uses its intranet for education and mentoring. Dominos offers a notable worldwide, online mentoring program for women and minorities. This creates a great environment for knowledge sharing in a positive and engaging way, which is even more important when employees are unable to meet together.

4. Build the Technical Foundation to Support Remote Work

In 2019, almost half (47.9%) of businesses’ network infrastructure assets were aging or obsolete compared to only 13.1% in 2017.

With the advent of COVID-19, organizations have had to rapidly address their underlying infrastructure to cater for the business challenges of today.

If employees are unable to access their intranet from home because of poor infrastructure, then why would they even use the intranet? IT teams need to make their company’s technologies available to their workforce outside of the office so that employees can access the content and applications they need, securely and easily wherever they are.

The Intranet Imperative

Your intranet does not need to be an unloved tool in your technology stack. But in order for your workforce to value it, intranets need to be transformed beyond file storage. Learn what it takes to transform your intranet beyond file storage to boost employee productivity, increase collaboration, and optimize business operations.

Building an Intranet Employees Actually Want

Hear tips and strategies from HR and tech leaders on how to turn your intranet into a beloved tool.

Watch the On-Demand Webinar Here

About Veriday

Veriday, a Platinum Liferay Solution Provider Partner, provides award winning marketing software and services. Veriday builds intranets, websites and connected experiences on Liferay and world-class technologies for companies in a variety of industries.

Gartner Awards Liferay Highest B2B and B2E Scores in Critical Capabilities for DXP

2025-06-27T18:01:17Z

We’re pleased to announce that Liferay has received the highest scores in the 2021 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) among evaluated vendors for both B2B and B2E experience use cases.

What is the Gartner Critical Capabilities Report for DXPs?

Every Magic Quadrant report that Gartner releases is accompanied with a Critical Capabilities report. The Critical Capabilities report helps shed light into specific use cases.

According to Gartner, “a Critical Capabilities document is a comparative analysis that scores competing products or services against a set of critical differentiators identified by Gartner. It shows you which products or services are a best fit in various use cases to provide you actionable advice on which products/services you should add to your vendor shortlists for further evaluation.”

The Critical Capabilities report for DXPs analyzes the digital experience space across three primary use cases: business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-employee (B2E).

We’re proud that Liferay has scored the highest among evaluated vendors in B2B and B2E use cases. We believe that this honor, in addition to our announcement as an 11-Time Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXPs, reflects our commitment to helping organizations around the world solve their complex business challenges.

Liferay Received Highest Scores for B2B and B2E Use Cases

Liferay is unique among the vendors evaluated because of our portal heritage. This, coupled with our deep technical roots, allows customers to use Liferay’s functionality to deliver the authenticated experiences needed in complex B2B and B2E use cases.

Download the Critical Capabilities Report Here

Read the Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms to see why Gartner has awarded Liferay the highest scores for B2B and B2E use cases among evaluated vendors.

Access your complimentary report here

“We believe that our recognition by Gartner as the highest rated offering for B2B and B2E experience use cases for the second year in a row is a testament to our dedication to product excellence,” said Ed Chung, Vice President of Global Product Management at Liferay. “As a portal-heritage vendor, Liferay has placed integration, security, and interoperability at the heart of everything we do for 17 years. We develop all our products internally to ensure their tight integration and actively work with our partners, customers, and open source community to ensure that our offerings meet the needs of today’s leading enterprises.”

Recent Releases and Improvements

We remain committed to serving these use cases by:

Streamlining business operations with improvements to app builder, workflow, and forms
Providing content analytics with a content dashboard and performance metrics
Simplifying site building with fragments, layouts, and display pages
Improving DevOps toolchain and providing support for decoupled front ends

Furthermore, every feature we create revolves around providing greater integration and interoperability with other systems.

Liferay DXP allows Liferay web services to be exposed in a number of formats including SOAP, JSON, XML, REST, and GraphQL. This long-standing focus on integration and interoperability, combined with our powerful features, are why we believe Gartner has scored us as the highest ranked offering for B2B and B2E use cases in the 2021 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms.

B2B and B2E Digital Experiences

How do our customers use Liferay in order to meet complex B2B needs and engage with employees?

Tag, a global marketing and communications leader, was able to simplify ordering of over 10,000 products for their B2B customers. Get a closer look at their self-service ordering platform here.

Materion, an advanced materials manufacturer with over 2,600 employees, used Liferay to build an employee-centric intranet that saw an increase in engagement and page views. Dive into the intranet solution here.

Using the Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities Together

Together, the two reports help provide a clearer picture of the DXP vendor landscape. Equipped with these resources, IT and business leaders can begin to evaluate which vendor is best suited to help meet their goals.

Grab Your Copy Here >

Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms, Irina Guseva, Mick MacComascaigh, Mike Lowndes, 26th January 2021.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Staying Nerdy Viva La Vida(ray)

2025-06-27T18:01:43Z

On the outside, our teams may just look like talented developers, marketers, and analysts but dig deep and you’ll find amazing musicians, video editors, and even a flamenco dancer! Our team in Spain got to utilize their talents in a different way by gathering people together to inspire a little hope during the pandemic.

Viva La Vida(ray)

It started like any other standup call, Carlos, one of our Frontend Engineers based in Madrid, was discussing his progress with a fellow developer when the Liferayer on the other end noticed the guitar hanging on Carlos’s wall. He had played the guitar for years and was even in a band, but had since then traded in the life of a budding rockstar for a dedicated Frontend Engineer at Liferay.

The Liferayer asked Carlos to play something for him and the joy he experienced in that moment sparked an idea: Why not dust off these skills for a project that would bring the Spain office together?

Talent is Everywhere at Liferay

Seeking out talent among our Spanish employees was not difficult; our team members double up as musicians, singers, video editors, producers, dancers. Carlos proposed singing Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” together because he felt the message was appropriate especially during this time of quarantine.

Recording the video was definitely much harder to coordinate with everyone staying at home. However, these moments gave the participants an opportunity to overcome challenges together to grow as a team and be closer, even while being in lockdown.

The song itself took two weeks to record and Carlos took another two weeks to edit.

The video, first shared internally then uploaded onto YouTube, not only increased collaboration within the Spain office but helped break down the barriers of remote work and gave a sense of encouragement to other offices as well.

Reaching New Audiences

The video was met with high praises online and even attracted the attention of one of the most well-recognized visually impaired developers in Spain. With his assistance, Carlos was also able to create a version of the video that is accessible for those who have visual disabilities.

The team enjoyed making this cover so much, they’re already looking forward to the next cover! Stay connected with us on our social channels to make sure you don’t miss the encore!

Life(ray) Goes On

Life seems to have halted; the days blend together, and the promise of returning to normality still seems hazy. But life moves on, and so do we. But we will continue to move forward, seeking new and creative opportunities to encourage one another and to serve our community.

Spreading Hope Together >

Liferay DXP Cloud Multi-Cloud Capabilities

2025-05-29T20:41:00Z

The enterprise cloud computing market has evolved a lot in 2020. Companies are continuing to move workloads from on-premise to the cloud at a rapid pace. At the same time, we see an increase in the number of providers being utilized. A recent Gartner survey shows that 81% of respondents are using two or more cloud providers.

Although these numbers continue to grow, the challenges of dealing with multiple providers remain the same. Portability, procurement, and feature pairing are a constant struggle that enterprise customers face.

Liferay DXP Cloud is about to change that. Instead of dealing with multiple providers, Liferay is providing an abstract layer that allows customers to run applications on multiple cloud providers, such as Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. This will empower companies to deliver world-class solutions to their users.

Enable Global Expansion with Liferay DXP Cloud

Data residency is a crucial aspect of any cloud computing strategy. The physical location of an organization's data can raise concerns around local laws and regulations. Therefore, where you store your data is a decision that shouldn't be taken lightly.

Liferay DXP Cloud offers you the ability to control where your database, network, and storage are located. Each environment can be placed in a different location, which enables you to have well-defined data sovereignty policies.

Let's say your organization has an engineering team located in India and your application's users are primarily mostly located in the United States. You could opt for a development environment in Mumbai and a production environment in Oregon.

By leveraging this new multi-cloud strategy, Liferay DXP Cloud customers can now access a much broader range of geographic locations. The most recent region is located in Dubai, opening new opportunities for the Middle East market.

List of regions available on Liferay DXP Cloud as of December 2020

Drive Business Continuity

Disaster recovery protocols are the cornerstone of a good business continuity plan. Knowing what to do and how to respond to major disruptions like a natural disaster, cyber attack, and data loss can determine the success of your cloud implementation.

Liferay DXP Cloud performs an automatic disaster recovery strategy by replicating services between three availability zones in different geographic locations within the same region.

On top of that, it also provides cross-region disaster recovery procedures, which allows customers to set up a production environment in one region and a mirror environment in another region.

These existing solutions already contribute to a very strong business continuity plan. Still, multi-cloud opens another level of disaster recovery that couldn't be achieved before.

Now customers can have a production environment on Google Cloud Platform and a mirror environment on Microsoft Azure, for example. Multi-cloud is a major opportunity for companies to secure their systems and procedures even more.

Build Best-In-Class Solutions

The future of enterprise cloud computing is bright. We are confident that Liferay DXP Cloud can address the most complex business challenges and deliver great solutions to customers.

Let's build the future together.

What is Personalization at Scale

2025-05-29T21:12:03Z

Personalization is not a new concept; however, it’s one that businesses are expected to deliver and compete on. But now businesses are expected to take personalization to the next level, with personalization at scale.

What is Personalization at Scale?

What Do You Need for Personalization at Scale?

In order to start scaling your business's personalization, read up on 6 technologies you'll need to implement.

Get Started Here

Liferay DXP 7.3: A Game-Changer for B2B Organizations

2025-05-29T20:40:34Z

The early 2000s brought us MySpace, the iPod, and The Lord of the Rings movie franchise. At the same time, one developer would also create a framework that could produce multiple websites in a shorter timespan; this framework would become Liferay.

Introducing Liferay DXP 7.3

Liferay was founded around a shared vision to build better and more efficient ways for users to deliver superior experiences, but also to serve communities and non-profits. Now a global multi-product enterprise, located in 19 countries with over 1,000 employees, our commitment to that mission has only strengthened.

In critical times like these, we are even more focused on empowering our customers and community members to succeed, which is why we are excited to announce the release of Liferay DXP 7.3.

"We're proud of our exceptional strength in addressing the needs of authenticated users in complex B2B, B2E, and long-term B2C use cases like partner and dealer portals, intranets, and self-service customer portals," said Ed Chung, VP of Global Product Management at Liferay. "The innovations in Liferay DXP 7.3 extend our historical strengths by helping businesses speed up the process of content creation, improve experience management, and digitize operations to the benefit of both IT and business users."

Since the release of Liferay DXP, we have been improving the platform to allow business users to directly create, measure, and audit digital experiences, allowing organizations to do more with less and roll out and modify digital solutions faster than ever. Liferay DXP 7.3 offers enhancements to site building, content intelligence, forms, workflows, and SEO management, with a few select features shared below.

Site Building - Visual Fragment Composition

Create, save, and reuse fragments to speed up page creation and ensure consistency across the site.

Content Intelligence - Content Dashboard

The new content dashboard allows authors to access, filter, sort, and view all content they’ve generated across all sites and asset libraries in a Liferay instance to easily find and identify gaps, and repurpose content.

Content Intelligence - Content Performance

Integrated content performance shows traffic trends and data so users can create and adjust their content strategy based on live information.

Forms - Data Privacy Features (GDPR Compliance)

Built-in data erasure and data export features have been updated to help with some of the many steps involved with GDPR compliance.

Workflows - Workflow Process Apps

Build custom form-based applications powered by workflows to help with linear business processes.

SEO - Open Graph Preview

Tailor and preview in real-time the way links are shown across social media sites and search engines, allowing you to optimize formatting and get the most attention for your content.

To see what else is new, visit our product page here.

Providing Superior Digital Experiences, Effectively

These improvements further enhance the platform that received the highest scores among evaluated vendors for both B2B and B2E use cases in Gartner’s 2020 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms. Liferay DXP delivers the engaging experiences that your customers, partners, dealers, and employees are seeking.

By using a single, agile platform, enterprises can solve both the most common and the most complex business challenges, including:

Driving employee productivity with a modern intranet
Increasing online B2B revenue with a digital commerce solution
Decreasing customer support costs with self-service
Unifying disparate systems with a robust integration layer

With Liferay, you can bring together systems, data, and processes to streamline operations and provide exceptional experiences across every touchpoint to your customers, internal or external.

Want to hear more about what’s new in 7.3?

Join us as we celebrate and discuss the exciting improvements.

Watch the Webinar

How to Increase Employee Engagement with a DXP

2025-05-29T20:32:54Z

Even though employees may be present at the office, they might not be putting energy or passion into their work. These disengaged employees are more common than one may think; more than half of U.S. workers are present but not engaged or inspired at work. Gallup estimates that this costs companies $450 to 550 billion in lost productivity per year.

Employee engagement refers to the emotional commitment an employee has to the organization and its goals— it doesn’t necessarily equate to employee happiness or satisfaction, though it may encompass those attributes. Highly engaged employees will work because they care about their work and how it will affect the company, not simply for a paycheck.

Benefits of Improving Employee Engagement

Organizations who invest in employee engagement efforts will start to reap positive ROI such as:

40% higher productivity
2.5 times more revenue growth in comparison to competitors
25 - 65% lower turnover rates
41% reduction in absenteeism

Carol Rozwell, an analyst at Gartner, says that “engaged employees will be more willing to collaborate, take on challenging roles and provide coaching if they are excited by their work and see the opportunity for growth in the changes being requested of them.” So how can organizations improve their employee engagement?

According to a Gallup Poll, 70 percent of employees feel disengaged due to collaboration barriers. One way to overcome those barriers is by providing employees with a modern intranet tool.

Engaging Employees with a Modern Intranet

What sets a modern intranet apart is the unification of a robust, technical foundation with an employee-first strategy. Use a digital experience platform (DXP) to build an effective intranet solution.

A DXP provides the architecture for organizations to build effective and personalized collaboration tools, such as an intranet. These custom intranets provide far greater flexibility and scalability for large and complex enterprises than a “one size fits all” point solution.

Building Out Better Employee Experiences with a DXP

With a powerful DXP, re-engage your workforce by buidling an intranet with a few of these common features:

Workflows: Actively engage your team with streamlined processes that make it easy for them to do their job more effectively. Create unique workflows with a drag-and-drop designer and assign them accordingly.
Blogs: Build up employee engagement by encouraging team members to write and share about their team updates and achievements through blogs. When individual team members post regular updates, they can feel the impact of their work while the rest of the workforce is being brought up to speed on their progress. Empower your employees by inviting them to be active participants and contributors to the well-being of the company. Extending a voice to your team members through a full blogging platform supported with commenting functionality and inline videos can increase their sense of value and commitment to the organization.
Forums and Message Boards: Set up more casual channels to encourage frequent and open interdepartmental communications. Increase engagement as employees actively come together to solve issues, discuss ideas, and share knowledge. Being able to connect with other team members easily helps to increase a sense of teamwork but also motivates employees to actively participate and add to the well-being of the organization.
Social Network: Give employees an experience that matches other social media sites that have become a part of their daily lives. Enable users to connect across departments with @ mentions, comments, and individuals profiles and sites that they can follow.

While these tools may be helpful, technology alone cannot be expected to reverse disengagement. Supplement your intranet tools with intentional leadership to ensure the success of your employee engagement strategies.

Leadership-Driven Strategies for Engagement Success

Although there’s no “one size fits all” employee engagement strategy, any successful initiative will be headed by leaders who seriously want to increase engagement levels but also genuinely care about their workforce. Here are suggestions for leaders to begin with:

Developing Relationships: First and foremost, leaders need to show genuine care for their employees. Highly engaged employees respond much more favorably to the question, “Does my supervisor care about me as a person?” than disengaged employees. So invest time into building team exercises that focus on building deeper relationships with one another. Encourage your employees to be open about their problems as well as their successes. These relationships will be the foundation of a highly engaged workforce.
Collecting and Acting on Feedback: Encourage your employees to provide feedback on how these initiatives and tools could be improved. However, it’s not enough to simply collect feedback — action needs to be taken based on employee input. Make changes and explain to your workforce the reasoning behind the changes. When employees see that their input is taken seriously and regarded as important, they will be more invested in efforts to better the organization, even if that goes beyond their paycheck.
Rewarding Engaged Employees: Praising employees who are actively engaged will not only further motivate them to continue, but will also encourage others around them to do the same. These rewards do not need to be monetary but can include team lunches or dinners, social events, or even public acknowledgement on the company intranet. Celebrating high levels of engagement will also encourage peer recognition, building even stronger bonds between team members.

Your company may be struggling with a disengaged workforce; however, changes to a company’s collaboration tools and leadership style can help instill higher levels of employee engagement that will create long-term benefits for your organization.

Ready to reap the gains from employee experience?

Increasing employee engagement is just one collaboration challenge that can be alleviated with a modern intranet built using a DXP. To learn how to cultivate a culture of collaboration within the business, download this whitepaper.

Start Here

Rise of the Modern Intranet: Becoming a Workplace Hero

2025-05-29T20:57:33Z

Does the term “intranet” conjure up nightmares of cluttered file sharing or a never-ending page of links that make it impossible to find what you need? According to Forrester, this poor user experience and lack of employee-centric functionality found in most intranets has led many employees to rank it as their least loved workplace tool.

However, intranets are still very critical to employee success, and therefore vital to the business. But in order to benefit both the workforce and business, these intranets need to be transformed into modern intranets.

Intranets: Workplace Hero or Employee Nightmare?

Intranets first came on the scene as a way for companies to host information for their employees privately. To fulfill this need, traditional intranets provided basic web content management functionality. However, as technology evolved, they quickly became, as Gartner puts it, “static websites in a dynamic world.”

This raises the question: Why bother with intranets at all?

Let’s check the stats. A modern intranet can:

Raise the productivity of workers by 20 to 25% by encouraging communication and collaboration
Increase sales by 20% by connecting and engaging employees
Save enterprise-sized companies an average of $62.4 million per year that they could have otherwise lost due to poor communications. (Smaller companies lose an average of $420,000 per year.)

In short, a modern intranet is a powerful tool that, when used correctly, can exponentially improve employee experience (EX).

Today’s employees demand timely delivery of relevant content via their preferred consumption channels — web, mobile, or expressed in the context of other essential enterprise applications. Forrester’s Employee Experience Index reveals a correlation between technology satisfaction and employee engagement: employees who are the most engaged in their workplace are also highly satisfied with their collaboration tools and their ability to access the information they need to do their jobs.

Especially in light of the recent shift towards remote work, intranet tools are becoming key drivers for communication, culture, and collaboration for teams that might not be meeting face-to-face anymore. Modernize intranet solutions to be a tool that employees actually want to use.

So What Makes a Modern Intranet Modern?

What distinguishes a modern intranet solution from a traditional, outdated one? (Other than, of course, the very clever and innovative name.)

A robust, technical foundation combined with an employee-first strategy sets apart a modern intranet from its more traditional counterpart. Along with new features that satisfy employee needs, the modern intranet should:

Integrate and aggregate applications and tools, empowering employees to do all their work and find relevant information through a single hub.
Personalize and target information based on employee role, location, or preferences
Be easily accessed and used by in-office, remote, and deskless employees
Drive corporate culture by delivering consistent employee communications in one location
Optimize business operations by digitizing manual processes and resolving employee needs quickly

Ultimately, for an intranet to help increase employee productivity and impact the bottom line, it must leverage enhanced technical capabilities to improve employee experiences.

Giving Your Intranet a Boost

With this understanding of modern intranets, your next question might be, “how do I apply this to my existing, outdated intranet?”

To build an effective backbone for your overall employee experience strategy, bring together stakeholders from IT, Legal, HR, and other necessary parties to answer the following questions to clarify the intranet’s purpose.

What are the key organizational drivers for employees?
What does success look like for employees?
How does employee success fit into the overall organization’s success?
How do people prefer to conduct their work?
What are employees’ biggest frustrations in their daily work experience?

The answers to these questions will help you create a foundation that will not only guide the design and functionality of the intranet, but also clarify what metrics to track to determine success and identify areas of improvement.

Intranets do not need to continue to be an unloved tool in your technology stack. Learn what it’ll take to modernize your intranet in order to boost employee productivity, increase collaboration, and optimize business operations.

Best Practices for Building a Modern Intranet

From our decade of experience helping enterprises modernize and transform their intranet solutions, we’ve put together a collection of best practices here.

Download the Guide

Manufacturing in 2020 and Beyond- Becoming Data-Driven

2025-05-29T20:43:31Z

As if manufacturers weren’t already concerned about evolving technologies and industry standards, COVID-19 has only added more pressure to search for ways to protect their businesses from further disruptions and quickly changing circumstances.

But this should not be shocking; manufacturers need to develop rapid response capabilities in order to make smart decisions as close to real-time as possible.

Hello Disruption, My Old Friend

From the steam engine to assembly lines, the manufacturing sector is no stranger to industry-wide change. Manufacturers now need to employ internet technologies and connected devices in the latest industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0, in order to collect integrated and reliable data to make informed decisions in real-time.

By using the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), manufacturers can collect, analyze, and present real-time data and analytics in easy-to-understand and highly customizable formats to make informed decisions, especially during periods of uncertainty.

Embracing Industry 4.0 is not just an opportunity, but an imperative for manufacturing survival.

Data! Data! Data!

In order to ensure that their businesses succeed beyond this pandemic, manufacturers must monitor and analyze their machine and process data in-real time to:

Improve overall productivity, efficiency, and quality
Increase data accuracy and integrity
Eliminate unnecessary downtime by identifying production and maintenance issues ahead of time
Enhance overall decision making
Respond quickly and profitably to changing demands

However, capturing and analyzing high-value data isn’t as elementary as it seems, considering the vast amount of data available in a manufacturing environment.

A Mistake to Theorize Before One Has Data

Before looking for the latest IIoT technologies to add, there are a few questions that must be considered:

What data is needed and how is it prioritized?
Which systems does the data come from?
What will this data help accomplish?
How can this data be used to enable efficiency and innovation?
What data needs to be shared?
How can the necessary parties access this data?

The answers to these questions will help provide a foundation for a plan to determine what technologies and systems will enable a data-driven environment.

However, a fair warning: even with the latest IIoT technology, many businesses will still have legacy systems that will first need to be integrated alongside these newer technologies for proper use and analysis of the data.

To learn more about how data can empower manufacturers to tackle the challenges of COVID-19 and an evolving industry, hear what this panel of experts have to share in this webinar recording.

Not Business As Usual

Manufacturers can no longer lag behind if they want to be successful in this evolving industry. Join industry leaders as they talk about what manufacturers must do in 2020 and beyond.

Watch Now

The Importance of Connecting Content and Commerce

2025-05-29T21:01:28Z

As modern customers gain greater control over their own experiences and become less likely to be influenced by online vendors, companies must change their approach to digital commerce. Much like modern in-store experiences, such as those created by Apple, today’s customers often want access to products and services with less interference from business representatives. Consumers often want to be in charge of testing products and becoming educated on what they are interested in purchasing before getting involved in the sales process.

This desire by consumers to self-educate on products prior to interacting with representatives and making a purchase means that the connection between commerce and online content is more important than ever in the customer journey. By better understanding how strong online content and a well-planned commerce experience work together, businesses across industries can reshape their digital presence to the expectations of today’s customers.

Supporting the Commerce Journey with Content

The online customer journey covers a wide variety of experiences, ranging from social media interaction to website browsing to, when successful, the purchasing of a product or service. However, the divisions between these aspects are more blurred than ever, with content-related aspects, such as websites and email promotions, increasingly integrated with product demos and transactions. As such, modern businesses must work to ensure they are creating valuable, high-quality content that supports and improves the customer journey by adhering to the following guidelines.

1. Coordinate Marketing and Product Departments

Informative webpages, helpful blogs, tutorials, overview videos and more can all play a part in creating meaningful content that gives audience members the insights they need while working in tandem with commerce. However, the key to creating needed pieces of content and properly implementing them with commerce strategies requires improved collaboration between a company’s marketing and product development departments, according to EContent Magazine. If product and marketing departments are working independently of one another on the same product, they can easily create conflicting language and talking points that confuse and complicate the buyer’s journey. However, working in tandem will play a vital role in creating a consistent experience that smoothly flows from content to commerce.

2. Inform, Don’t Sell, With Your Content

While this content should work in the larger overall scheme of pushing consumers toward making the decision to buy a company’s product, it should not be commercial in nature. The most valuable content a customer can find during the decision-making process is content that provides a rich and informative experience. It is best if this form of content emphasizes the benefits and value of a product over its details and price. As a potential customer seeks to learn more about a product, whether it is from a specific company or about a type of product in general, the content provided by a business should give them the insights they need without imposing stipulations.

3. Build a Relationship with Visitors

By engaging with the content provided by a company, potential customers can build familiarity with the product and begin to form a relationship with the business before they make their first purchase. In doing so, they can become more likely to make purchases and see the business as a source of knowledge. The end result is a customer relationship that extends beyond individual purchasing experiences so that an online presence gains greater value while commerce strategies are supported by the larger customer journey.

Connecting with Customers Through Liferay Commerce

While online content and digital commerce may present themselves differently to users, having them naturally connect through back-end systems is crucial for a smooth, complication-free customer journey. By building both sides on a single platform, businesses can connect customer interests to products and services, better understanding audience needs through the data they generate and naturally leading them to a purchase without intruding on their desire to self-educate.

Liferay Commerce helps businesses create intuitive online shopping experiences that simplify the customer journey through simplified checkout processes, tailored price lists, catalog browsing and more. With personalized experiences for customers and the ability to better manage back-end systems, companies can find greater success in their online commerce efforts.

Learn More about Liferay Commerce

Liferay Commerce can help you reach your customers and better leverage your products and services online. More information can be found in our product overview.

Read the Liferay Commerce Overview

What Government Agencies Need to Improve Digital Citizen Experience

2025-05-29T21:11:42Z

The verdict is in: while many businesses understand the importance of digital customer experience, government institutions have been slow to implement similar tactics for their customers: citizens.

According to a survey done by McKinsey, most governments across the globe underperform in customer satisfaction. In fact, even though 81% of government agencies want to become digital organizations, only 47% of citizens are willing to respond positively regarding their digital interactions.

What Government Agencies Need to Do to Be Digital

Customers’ expectations and needs are constantly changing and to serve citizens well, governments must provide citizens with the digital tools that are able to address these requirements quickly.

Becoming a truly digital government agency will require uprooting outdated systems and technologies. The following infographic explores three challenges and presents solutions in order to provide citizens with a more intuitive and reliable experience.

Next Steps for Government Agencies

By addressing these pain points with better, more modern technologies, like a digital experience platform, government agencies can provide intuitive citizen experiences by leveraging capabilities such as:

Connecting Disparate Systems
Legacy systems that lack integration capabilities and scalability are common challenges for agencies. Hindering the goal of optimizing digital experiences, outdated technology also results in fragmented and incomplete data. Yet, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, more than 80% of government IT spending is on operating and maintaining legacy systems. Successful digital transformation hinges on the ability to bridge legacy and modern systems – combining data on a single, modern digital platform.

In the case of the U.S. Navy, a lack of connected systems and databases prevented the expansion of a portal for sailors to manage their careers throughout their military service. Through the deployment of a DXP, the Navy was able to move everything to a single solution that met their performance requirements and delivered an improved user experience. Their DXP solution also allows future expansion of the portal so that it can continue to be a vital career planning tool for sailors.
Driving Personalization
Citizens naturally want streamlined digital experiences that address their specific needs, and a growing number of citizens are choosing self-service over direct human contact. With the right DXP, agencies can apply persona modeling, journey mapping, responsive layout, and data-driven design to increase personalization and relevancy. By learning and adapting to user behaviors and feedback, the personalization can increase over time, enabling experiences that are immediately personal, easy-to-use, and meaningful. And this type of contextual experience should be delivered across all live and self-service engagement channels, including mobile devices.
The personalization capabilities of a DXP have been uniquely leveraged by the Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program, sponsored by NASA. An example of how this program used their DXP can be found with the solar eclipse of 2017. The team at GLOBE chose the identity management features of the platform to keep track of approximately 50,000 users taking eclipse-specific measurements. In the end, meaningful data obtained from the global citizen scientists was crowdsourced to better understand the earth’s system and global environment.
Streamlining Content Management
Insufficient and outdated data continues to limit government agencies’ ability to meet expectations – creating hassles for both citizens and government employees. Ineffective communication, difficulty finding information, and manual processing of paperwork all contribute to inefficiencies. A DXP can solve these common content challenges by managing the lifecycle of content from creation to publishing, storage, maintenance, and deletion.

Effective communication means getting the right content to the right people at the right time. Whether working from home or in the office, operating in normal or crisis mode, ready access to current content is only getting more important. How organizations communicate to citizens and staff, onsite or off-site, will be front and center as they continue to achieve their missions. The best DXP brings together disparate systems and modernizes intranets to deliver the integrated and personalized, anytime, anywhere, any device communications that people need.

There is much work to be done in order to deliver optimal digital experiences for citizens. Recognizing this need is the first step on a long journey of digital transformation. For more resources, visit our government page.

Increase Trust and Satisfaction with Citizens

Learn more about how a leading digital experience platform, Liferay DXP, can help you build engaging and intuitive digital experiences.

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Working Together to Fight Against COVID-19

2025-05-29T21:16:08Z

In the midst of the uncertainties caused by COVID-19, we have still seen so much good. We are constantly amazed by what our innovative teams and customers have been able to accomplish in these high-pressure and fast-changing times. We built this organization to serve people with our proficiency in building user-driven digital experiences and now, we are seeing our customers do more than we could’ve ever imagined with it.

Every day every news outlet is filled with despair and heartbreak, but here at Liferay, we’ve been lucky enough to see hope through the vision and dedication of our clients.

Equipping Healthcare Personnel on the Frontlines

A leading healthcare organization created a COVID-19 specific intranet to serve as a single source of truth and a communication hub for the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel that are risking their lives to treat and care for those who have been affected by the virus.

To equip their staff in over 184 hospitals and 2,000 sites of care, this customer built a new intranet in just two weeks, providing PPE instructional documents and videos to mental health related guidelines, assistance, help lines, and more for their front line workers. The flexibility and many out-of-the-box features of the Liferay platform allowed this healthcare organization to jumpstart the delivery of a much needed digital solution in this battle against COVID-19.

Working to Collect Plasma for a Vaccine

A multinational pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturer has partnered with the U.S. government to collect convalescent plasma from volunteer donors who have recovered from COVID-19 to produce a hyperimmune globulin that could potentially be a viable treatment.

But there’s much researchers must take into account: not only is very little information available around the virus itself, but getting donors who have recovered from COVID-19 is also tricky, especially with social distancing measures in place.

To expedite the collection of plasma, the organization has been able to quickly create a plasma donation portal and tailor according to changing COVID-19 requirements and conditions. The site allows donors to check details of past visits, update personal information, and manage donation visits with scheduling that adheres to social distancing guidelines. Our Global Services consultants have been very active in this project in guiding with implementation, infrastructure scalability, and go-live to accelerate time-to-market.

Expediting Loan Approvals

A U.S. bank providing loans and financial services to cooperatives, agribusinesses, rural public utilities, and other farm credit associations set up a new service to help their customers sign up for process loans under the Paycheck Protection Program, a key part of the U.S. government’s economic relief response to the pandemic for small businesses.

To help streamline the process for customers to sign up for these loans, this bank set up a Small Business Administration-specific loan portal, in just five days. They were able to go to market so quickly by relying on Liferay’s integration capabilities and APIs and accelerating the loan process by leveraging Liferay’s existing authentication capabilities and form functionality to verify eligibility online. This service is quickly bringing the relief small businesses need in order to navigate through these challenging times.

Getting Through This Together

It’s been incredible to watch how these companies are working to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 worldwide.

Here For You

For customers that have any urgent issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, we want to ensure your support needs are being met with the utmost urgency. Liferay is making available temporary use activation keys for Liferay DXP Subscriptions, Liferay Commerce Subscriptions and Liferay Enterprise Search Subscriptions at no additional charge.

If you are interested in receiving such temporary use keys, please visit our Help Center for more information.

Three Intranet Examples That Optimize How You Do Business

2025-05-29T21:02:57Z

Intranets are the unsung heroes of successful enterprises. An effectively designed intranet can not only improve corporate communications and enable employee collaboration but also optimize business operations. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at three global organizations that were able to digitally transform by bringing processes and business continuity strategies into the future with a modern intranet solution built with Liferay.

Aptiv - An Intranet That Reduces Production Downtime

Aptiv is a global parts and technology leader in autonomous driving and connected cars; they make a positive global impact by changing mobility. At the time of writing, they have 160,000 people across 126 manufacturing facilities and 15 major technical centers worldwide in 44 countries.

With over 74 servers across the world, Aptiv employees struggled to find the data they needed. In order to access data, employees needed to physically be in the manufacturing plant where the server was located. Their intranet, built on Liferay, alleviated this challenge by pulling and consolidating all the data from these plants into one view. Employees now have the intelligence in front of them at a moment's notice, even receiving personalized alerts and notifications. This means that employees can spend that valuable time analyzing and making decisions on how to improve operations, rather than gathering data. The end result? Reduction in downtime plant downtime and an improvement in manufacturing efficiency multiplied globally for significant cost savings.

Airbus - An Intranet That Reduces IT Service Costs

Airbus designs and manufactures commercial aircraft, helicopters, military transports, satellites, and launch vehicles while working towards a future where flight is autonomous, electric, and zero emissions.

As a part of their intranet project, Airbus wanted to create a better experience for their employees by improving their IT incident management processes. Employees had to navigate through a confusing array of 15 different ticketing systems, often overwhelming the IT Service Desk with requests and questions. Using Liferay, Airbus was able to put the user at the center of the process and create a consolidated view so users could go to one place. Using Liferay’s intranet capabilities for knowledge management, they were able to go even further by providing the key knowledge that users needed through self-service in order to speed up the time to resolution. Users were happier to have fewer sites to go to and be able to find answers quickly by themselves.

As a result, the company was able to drive a 30% decrease in incidents logged. This made their 100,000 employees more productive because they could often find their own answers and it also reduced costs for the service department.

Coach - An Intranet That Modernized Manual Processes

Luxury goods retailer Coach started with a relatively traditional intranet built on Liferay (albeit a very good looking one) and later realized that they could do more with the platform in order to optimize a costly manual visual merchandising process. Every detail regarding how one of their retail stores was to be set up was designed at their NYC corporate headquarters, documented on paper, and then mailed out to their 1,000 stores worldwide. Not only was this costly, as the fashion-forward retailer needed to update their looks often, it was also impossible to ensure consistency as it allowed no way for stores to report back their challenges or success.

With Liferay, Coach created another intranet site for the visual merchandising team to communicate with their retail stores and post up display designs, all at huge cost savings, estimated at saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in printing and postage. Additionally, the intranet was designed to be mobile-first so that retail employees could easily access it on a phone or tablet when working on the floor. Then through that mobile device, the store employees could send pictures back to corporate to demonstrate that they were able to meet the requirements and also have two way conversations about how well things worked out. All in all, they found a much cheaper, faster, and more collaborative way of doing business. And on a platform they already owned.

Transforming How You Do Business with Liferay

Liferay is the only DXP on the market to have a significant emphasis on employee experience and demonstrably proves that with a #1 placement for B2E use cases in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms research. Those use cases include intranets, employee portals, employee experience, and corporate communications. Some vendors have good content and experience management capabilities. Some are good at knowledge and collaboration. Only Liferay is good at all of that while also giving you the tools to digitize inefficient manual or paper based processes that can really transform how your company operates. And as recent global crises have pointed out rather starkly, if you’re not digital, you’re shutting down.

This is one way in which intranets built on Liferay are different. Not only do they enable you to care for your employees through communications, collaboration, knowledge, and culture, but they also let you work better together through improving business processes and driving your company towards a digital future.

Begin Building an Effective Intranet

Ready to take a look around your future intranet platform? Request a demo with a Liferay expert.

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Why Great B2B Customer Experiences are More Important Than Ever

2025-05-29T21:13:14Z

With 67% of people reporting that their standards for customer experience (CX) have never been higher, it’s no wonder that companies of all types are choosing to invest in CX. Modern, personalized customer experiences that rely on cutting-edge technology have played a major role in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market for many years. But now, business-to-business (B2B) clients are wanting similar elevated customer experiences. Many companies are now adopting user interfaces, such as portals, that reflect the customized and fast experiences typically seen in the B2C and B2B2C markets.

With B2B digital experiences continuing to play an increasingly crucial role in a company’s long-term success, it’s important that businesses work to improve and refine their online presence. But the question remains, what makes a great B2B customer experience? Let’s explore how organizations can meet B2B customer expectations and build long-lasting partnerships.

The Influence of B2C on the B2B Customer Experience

Before diving into what makes a great B2B experience, it’s helpful to know why the pressure is on for companies to improve their processes. According to Lumoa, 80% of B2B customers expect a buying experience similar to the quality received by B2C customers. However, B2B customer experiences rank far lower than their B2C counterparts. B2C companies are continually providing the latest in digital experiences in an effort to compete with one another in ways that may not be seen as often in the B2B realm.

According to Gartner, many B2B buyers feel that completing a purchase is complicated and time consuming, so it’s even more critical for sellers to provide their B2B audiences with well-designed user interfaces. With the right tools, businesses can use platforms to predict user needs based on past purchases, interests, services, and products, making the customer journey easy to navigate. Providing a digital experience that meets or exceeds customer expectations can help a company stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Great Customer Experience is Crucial for Building B2B Relationships

Great customer experience strategies reduce friction, providing users with a journey that meets their every need as quickly and easily as possible. While B2B audiences may not be as likely as their B2C counterparts to abandon a shopping experience or choose a competitor due to poor experiences, the impact of good interactions on long-term relationships is steadily increasing.

According to research regarding B2C and B2B experiences by The Tempkin Group, 86% of those who receive a great customer experience are likely to return for another purchase. However, the study also found that only 13% of people who had a subpar customer experience would possibly return. In addition to those findings, it was discovered that engaged and satisfied customers are likely to buy 50% more frequently and spend 200% more annually.

Improved Business Performance

The importance of creating great B2B experiences is not just in keeping up with competitors and audiences—but it also has a positive impact on overall company performance. According to data from McKinsey, B2B companies that transformed their customer experience processes saw a 10 to 15% revenue growth, higher client satisfaction scores, improved employee satisfaction and a 10 to 20% reduction in operational costs.

The combination of these benefits means a higher ROI for operations, which, in turn, supports the company as a whole.

Increased Employee Satisfaction and Retention

Customer satisfaction is also directly influenced by employee satisfaction. With more opportunities for employees to find flexible work options that complement their needs, companies can improve customer experience while simultaneously creating better work environments for their staff. Employees who have the tools they need to work efficiently and feel confident about the service they’re providing will naturally offer better customer service. Employers can receive feedback from team members to help create a better company culture and ensure that companies have what they need to retain happy, helpful employees.

What’s Holding Back the B2B Customer Experience?

B2B customer experience has historically underperformed in comparison to its B2C counterparts. While the lack of focus and attention to user satisfaction has played a role, it’s not the only reason that many B2B businesses struggle to meet modern customer expectations.

As discussed in a survey by McKinsey and Company, only 25% of B2B respondents use customer data weekly to better understand customer needs, while 9% don’t use their customer data at all. This can mean that the decisions being made by these businesses could be greatly improved with access to complete, accurate data.. A company could miss out on specific aspects of the customer experience without proper use of customer insights and data from all touchpoints, including customer service and social media. Those key insights can highly influence the overall quality of business interactions, as well as data that can provide a more accurate view of each audience member.

Beyond gathering data to enhance experiences, businesses may not have the capabilities needed to completely control and execute their customer experience strategy. Research by Accenture found that only 21% of B2B companies have total control over their sales partners, who are largely responsible for delivering CX to their audience. If a business is unable to determine how, when, and to whom these experiences are provided, even a well-constructed B2B user interface can result in an unsuccessful experience.

Back-end integration that allows greater and more accurate access to customer data, modern interfaces that offer personalization based on individual needs, and improved delivery systems governing how these interfaces are provided to audience members can dramatically enhance a company’s modern B2B customer experience.

What Elements of B2B Customer Experience Should Leaders Focus On

B2B users are looking for partnerships that meet their needs with efficiency, communication, and innovation. B2B leaders have many avenues to focus on when looking to improve customer experience. Here are three starting points for leaders to work towards:

Seamless buying processes. Like all customers, B2B buyers value their time, which is why customer satisfaction is often associated with effortless processes. It’s important, especially in the B2B marketplace, to make touchpoints as simple as possible. When buyers have difficulty finding a product, completing a transaction, or getting help with a problem, they experience unnecessary frustration. B2B leaders can increase seamlessness by empowering customers to resolve their questions independently, providing simple re-ordering options, suggesting products and services based on historical orders and activity, and integrating all data and systems on one platform.
Shortened response and wait times. In an increasingly digital world, customers are accustomed to receiving answers and resolutions instantly. Companies that are able to deliver what customers need faster, be that answers, products, or services, are on the road to creating truly memorable experiences. By creating a knowledge library, providing an FAQ question through self-service tools, and automating repetitive tasks, your organization will be able to provide customers with what they need quickly without requiring more from your team.
Anticipating issues and customer needs. Leaders can use data and feedback to spot any inefficiencies in processes that lead to buyer inquiries. Another way B2B companies can be proactive is by anticipating customers re-ordering needs and sending an automated product reminder.

Creating Better Digital Experiences with Liferay

Great B2B experiences don’t happen on their own—B2B companies have to take the necessary steps to meet and exceed customer expectations. Liferay offers digital solutions built specifically to address the growing complexities of modern B2B businesses. With great customer journeys being more important now than ever for all business types, it’s the optimal time to implement digital tools to enhance the customer experience.

Ready to build a more satisfied and loyal customer base?

Watch this webinar to learn more about the changing B2B landscape and the long-term benefits of improving B2B customer experiences.

5 E-Commerce Strategies B2B Leaders Use to Overcome Market Challenges

2025-06-27T18:06:43Z

Many challenges are making it hard for companies that rely on B2B selling models to drive growth. However, with the following five e-commerce strategies, B2B commerce leaders can leverage technology to overcome these common B2B challenges.

Facing Major B2B Challenges

Commoditization of products. Complex manual processes for simple tasks. Growing customer expectations. These are a few of the common issues B2B organizations are dealing with, which make staying profitable even more challenging.

Additionally, the combination of the internet with globalization further exacerbates this challenge for B2B sellers as buyers can easily purchase products that are almost exactly the same, making differentiation even harder and putting vendors in a position where the only thing they have left to compete on is price.

But competing on price will not be a profitable long-term strategy. Instead, B2B sellers need to focus on how to distinguish their business from competitors, reduce time and money spent in manual processes, and meet customers’ rising expectations.

Tackling with B2B Commerce Strategies

The good news is that these challenges end up creating opportunities, through e-commerce strategies, to create new experiences for customers. Here are the five main strategic initiatives that B2B commerce leaders can leverage to overcome business challenges:

Transforming Manual Processes
Manual processes are often too expensive, so digitalization and automation are strategies to reduce costs and take better profit margins. This is generally translated into a self-service site where customers can make a purchase through the store instead of calling a sales rep. Even though this is a great strategy and a necessary one, it is the first step almost all B2B commerce leaders will take. Soon, all competitors will have done it, and they’ll be back to competing on price, so it is important to go further and look at enhancing the customer experience.
Improving Convenience for Customers After digitalizing processes, a B2B leader should look to improve convenience for customers, distinguishing themselves on the basis of customer experience. The goal is to become so valuable to customers that they’ll pay a premium for products or services, instead of demanding a lower price.
Customers have already shown that they’ll pay for convenience. The more one company can decrease the time customers spend on a simple activity, like reordering, the more those customers are able to spend time on things that actually matter to them. And that’s something that’s hard for the competition to copy. Delivering a customer experience that will take a while for the competition to catch up with will be a much more sustainable competitive advantage.
Selling Directly to Consumers
One way to bypass the middlemen in the selling process and improve profit margins is to directly sell to end consumers. This strategy is becoming particularly popular with manufacturers who have traditionally sold through a distribution network, who then sells to resellers, who then sell to retailers that then actually sell to an end customer. Selling directly to consumers reserves more of the profit margin for manufacturers and allows them to have better control of their customers’ buying journey so they can ensure customers have a better experience.
This is a good strategy for manufacturers who have strong brand recognition among end consumers. For example, a Nike shoe can be sold directly to consumers by its manufacturer because Nike is a well-recognized brand, whereas an unbranded manufacturer who makes zippers on clothes consumer buy would find it very difficult to sell their product directly to end customers.
Selling through Marketplaces For companies that determine that selling directly to consumers would not be the best strategy and that there’s not an opportunity to compete on experience, selling through a marketplace can be an alternative to reduce costs. Major marketplaces like Amazon or Ebay, for example, are already motivated to acquire customers on their own, which means that sellers can reach those audiences at lower cost by selling their products through the marketplace. On top of this, sellers do not have to worry about managing customer service, as these marketplaces will handle the entire customer experience, including returns, calls, etc. For sellers that have very slim margins, this opportunity to save on marketing and service costs may be a compelling offer. Increasingly, customers have also shown that they prefer buying everything from one place over visiting multiple sites. So instead of trying to build a direct-to-consumer site that compete with marketplaces like Amazon, it may be a better customer experience strategy to allow customers to purchase everything they need through one site rather than convincing them to come to a direct site for just one product line.
Transitioning to Recurring Revenue Finally, B2B commerce leaders are putting together strategies to establish subscription models rather than depend only on one-off transactions. This strategy goes hand-in-hand with the previous ones listed and can vary in many ways but from a high-level standpoint, it helps companies guarantee future revenue.
Since customers will pay for convenience, getting them on a subscription model means that there’s less worry about winning them over every single time. This is especially useful for B2B manufacturers that can offer an automatic order service that tracks stock levels and automatically sends a reorder request, saving time for the customer.

By leveraging e-commerce technologies, B2B leaders can start to tackle common business challenges. However, most homegrown systems will not be capable of supporting these new strategic initiatives and instead, these leaders will need to consider other e-commerce technologies that will be able to help tackle these business challenges.

Ready to Start Your E-Commerce Strategy?

Before you begin implementing any of these e-commerce solutions, first gain insights into seven best practices and advice on choosing the correct technology to support each of the following strategies.

Start E-Commcerce Success Here

The 2020 Gartner Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms: A Liferay Perspective

2025-06-26T11:22:51Z

It’s with pleasure that we note Liferay received the highest scores among evaluated vendors for both B2B and B2E use cases in the 2020 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms*.

What is the Gartner Critical Capabilities Report?

Often overlooked in favor of their more recognizable cousins, the Gartner Magic Quadrants, Gartner Critical Capabilities reports serve an important role for technology buyers. According to Gartner, “a Critical Capabilities document is a comparative analysis that scores competing products or services against a set of critical differentiators identified by Gartner. It shows you which products or services are a best fit in various use cases to provide you actionable advice on which products/services you should add to your vendor shortlists for further evaluation.” In other words, a Magic Quadrant provides readers with an overall view of how vendors stack up in terms of their “completeness of vision” and “ability to execute” in a product category as a whole. Critical Capabilities, by contrast, zoom in on vendors’ capabilities with regards to specific use cases.

For Liferay and our customers one Critical Capabilities document stands out from all the others: the Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms. This report analyzes the digital experience space across three primary use cases: business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-employee (B2E). We’re very proud that Liferay was awarded the highest scores among evaluated vendors in the latter two use cases. The news comes on top of Liferay having been positioned as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms for the tenth time**.

Scored Highest in B2B and B2E Use Cases

While Liferay has been committed to helping customers deliver meaningful, engaging experiences to their partners and employees since our founding in 2004, our industry has changed dramatically. Among the most notable recent moves are the withdrawal of software behemoths IBM and Microsoft. As CMSWire Staff Reporter Dom Nicastro writes regarding the Magic Quadrant for DXPs, “IBM's removal was all but expected. It sold off much of its digital experience software in two waves: to HCL in 2018 and to Centerbridge last year.” HCL’s plans for the former WebSphere portfolio remain to be seen.

With Microsoft’s focus increasingly dominated by the company’s fight with Amazon and Google for market share in the cloud hosting market, it too has begun neglecting the portal and intranet space. Nothing epitomizes this more than the upcoming end-of-life (EOL) for SharePoint 2010 in October of this year. According to reporter David Roe, “SharePoint 2010 was one of the most successful editions that Microsoft ever released.” It’s EOL “means that there will be no more upgrades, no more security patches and 2010 will become less and less reliable posing a risk to any enterprise that continues to use it.” While enterprises are free to migrate to a new version of SharePoint or to SharePoint Online, this can be painful for organizations that have made significant investments in customizing their SharePoint deployments.

By contrast, Liferay remains fully committed to serving B2B and B2E use cases and has continuously rolled out new features and functionality. To illustrate, Liferay offers:

Complete control over branding with fully customizable themes, pages, layouts, and applications. Liferay DXP allows developers to create site themes that impact the look and feel of all pages and applications. Content pages in Liferay DXP allow marketers to use prebuilt fragments to customize their pages without coding and mirror a desired corporate look and feel.
Extensive social and collaboration tools including blogs, wikis, message boards and forums, contacts, and calendars. All modules are seamlessly integrated, featuring tagging, ratings, common metadata, mentions, RSS capabilities, and social bookmarking.
A robust and fine-grained permissioning model that makes it easy for administrators to delegate access to individual users or groups of users and to restrict access to sensitive data, regardless of access method.
Support for federated SSO using SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect and certification with popular SSO systems such as OpenAM, Siteminder, CAS, Shibboleth, Kerberos, and others. With Liferay DXP's extensible authentication pipeline, virtually any SSO configuration and vendor can be supported.

Furthermore, every feature we create revolves around providing greater integration and interoperability with other systems. Liferay DXP allows Liferay web services to be exposed in a number of formats including SOAP, JSON, XML, REST, and GraphQL. This long-standing focus on integration and interoperability, combined with our powerful features, are why we believe Gartner has scored us as the highest ranked offering for B2B and B2E use cases in the 2020 Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms.

B2B and B2E Use Case in Action

Learn how S&P 400 insurance company Genworth Financial used Liferay to deliver a new intranet with self-service functionality and a modern look and feel.

Learn how multinational technology company Hewlett Packard Enterprise used Liferay to get ahead of competitors with a single entry point for 170,000 global partners.

Explore Further

To learn more about how Gartner views the DXP market, please request your complimentary copy of the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms.

Get the Report

* Gartner “Critical Capabilities for Digital Experience Platforms” by Irina Guseva, Gene Phifer, Mike Lowndes, 3 February 2020.

The Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms was formally called Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals (2010-2016).

**Gartner “Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms” by Irina Guseva, Gene Phifer, Mike Lowndes, 29 January 2020.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Liferay.

What Manufacturers Need to Change to Support a Servitization Strategy

2025-05-29T21:12:30Z

The buzz around the emerging trend of servitization has left many manufactuers wondering, “what is servitization and why is it important?” The definition of servitization is the shifting of priorities from simply providing a product to selling a whole solution to a customer’s problem.

Why is a Servitization Strategy Important?

We talked to a manufacturing expert and the Senior General Manager at Bosch, Raghuram Joshi, about his thoughts on the rise of servitization and the changing nature of the industry. “In the past,” he says, “revenue generation or turnover in the manufacturing industry was linear in nature—i.e. the more I produce, the more I am able to sell. However, the emergence of digital has enabled new non-linear business and revenue models, which is why manufacturers are reevaluating the way in which they serve their customers. Examples like subscription-based models, “pay as you go” or “pay as you use” are becoming increasingly practical and relevant. End users are demanding products as a service rather than buying them as capital expenditure (CAPEX).”

Not only does servitization satisfy the demands of customers but it can be extremely beneficial for the longevity of a manufacturer’s business. Shifting to this new business model allows manufacturers to build relationships with their end customers and thus secure recurring revenue streams with more opportunities for cross-selling.

Meeting the Needs of Moving to a Servitization Strategy

However, in order to realize these benefits, manufacturers must quickly become more customer experience (CX) focused, a transition that can prove to be a challenge since historically there has been less emphasis on CX in the B2B space, especially in such a product-centric industry. To build these relationships, manufacturers must not only change their business models but also consider what new tools and processes must be in place to support this shift.

Flexibility to Evolve
In making the shift to servitization, manufacturers will be adopting a new business model that will result in a necessary shift of organizational structures, processes, and technologies. As teams are added, new goals are established, and workflows get adjusted, it is critical that businesses are able to adapt quickly to changing demands. Stay ahead of future changes by implementing a digital architecture that can evolve alongside business needs—whether that is setting up an e-commerce site or building out new digital workflows, look for tools that will empower you to easily create and scale the digital solutions needed to serve end customers.
Powerful Integration
As manufacturers add new technologies and tools to support a servitization strategy, they will also need to figure out how best to unite all their systems and applications to work well together. Integration with existing core technologies and newer tools can be difficult; in fact, it continues to be a significant technological challenge that hinders digital transformation. With successful integration, manufacturers will be better equipped to collect data. This capability grows in importance because connected data is the first step to better customer experiences.
However, with the average manufacturing site running on over one hundred software applications, it’s a tremendous challenge to make data both accessible and actionable when multiple disconnected business systems are present. Once siloed systems are brought together, data can be aggregated and shared through a connected ecosystem. For example, well-leveraged customer insights can help manufacturers know when a customer’s product needs a replacement, if a specific product is running low, or when a routine order hasn’t been placed. The potential for amazing customer experiences is greater when driven by a deeper knowledge of customer behavior and preferences. Integration not only applies to data, but also across the entire business ecosystem.
Joshi believes that having employees and suppliers that are connected to the supply chain, manufacturing site, and ultimately customers is what is needed to enable servitization. “Everyone wants to get into servitization, but the change is not happening at the pace people would expect,” he says, due to the fact that the entire stack is not enabled to provide products as a service. At the end of the day, servitization is not an isolated strategy and will not succeed as one.
Equipping Sales and Service Representatives with Actionable Customer Insight
Further expanding on connected business ecosystems, sales teams can play a key role in servitization strategies, if properly equipped with data and insights to provide proactive offerings and field services. Enable these teams to shift from a product-centric selling mindset to a customer-centric one by providing a dashboard or mobile application to leverage customer insights. Automate insights with machine learning to trigger alerts when there might be an issue with an account. This ensures that reps know exactly when to check on an account and take action to save it. By providing the customer data that would be most valuable to Sales, these representatives can be empowered to act as consultants instead of just order takers.

Ultimately manufacturers must assess if they have the flexibility to adapt to an unknown future. Servitization is a seismic shift, but one that manufacturers have to determine for themselves if they want to pursue this new business model. However, with the right foundation and digital tools, businesses can enable servitization with confidence.

Servitization Starts Here

Support servitization business models by leveraging a robust technological foundation like a digital experience platform. Learn more about DXPs and what they are capable of.

What is a DXP?

Turn Your B2B Portal into a Competitive Advantage

2025-05-29T21:06:22Z

While B2B customer experiences differ from those of B2C, customers have begun to expect the same personalized and intuitive experiences they’ve grown accustomed to from B2B companies. Meeting these needs will require changes in strategy and technology, specifically B2B portals.

A traditional B2B portal is seen as a necessary cost center, a way just to cut down on costs. However, a paradigm shift needs to happen in order to transform these B2B portals into revenue-generating competitive advantages. Many companies instead are finding benefits from treating their portal as a product, gaining revenue growth and meeting these new customer expectations. This same shift is possible for your business as well.

Building Your Competitive Advantage

The key to establishing your portal as a competitive advantage lies in improving customer experience. A Walker Info study predicts that by the end of 2020, customer experience will have overtaken price and product as the key brand differentiator. Already, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

How can a B2B portal enhance the overall customer experience to the point that it becomes a unique selling point for your business? Here are three starting points in order to accomplish that goal:

Establish a Self-Service Foundation
B2B buyers want efficiency, transparency and effective service on their own terms. These self-service features are no longer brand differentiators but a necessity for every business. Without these basic features, no matter how many unique capabilities you include, customers will leave looking for a self-service provider elsewhere. However, these features will serve as the foundation for you to build differentiation upon.

How do you create an exceptional self-service foundation? Focus on removing barriers to purchasing. If anything on your site requires customers to take one more step or use one more click to make their purchases or check on their orders, see what you can do to simplify it. A strong self-service experience simplifies not only the buying process but also ordering and shipping, pricing, reordering, restocking and so on. Buyers expect to have the freedom to do all of these things on their own time, without speaking to a representative.
Empower Your Customers to Make the Right Purchases
Once you have a self service foundation in place, you can begin to build differentiation through buyer empowerment. Your buyers want to easily access your site, quickly find what they need to look for and feel confident and assured that they’re making the right decisions. This streamlined purchasing process proves even more important specifically for B2B buyers because their jobs depend on purchasing the correct products and finding the best solutions for their business.

Ensure that your customers are making the right purchases with a B2B portal that includes powerful search functionality, personalized product recommendations, product reviews and other product-focused content such as rich product information, videos, guides or manuals. Buyer empowerment is providing tools and content that give buyers control of their purchasing. Doing so successfully involves self-service features and showing customers the right content at the right time. In order to do this, your marketing site and B2B portal must be unified.

When content and commerce are joined together, you can bring rich content features such as video, interactive catalogs and recommended content into your portal — so your buyers will have all the product information they need on the same site where they’ll make their final purchase, facilitating a better buying experience altogether.
Find Unexpected Ways to Serve Your Customers
The first two steps mentioned are primarily to ensure that your B2B portal is modernized and equipped with the correct foundation in order to truly make your B2B commerce experience a competitive advantage. In order to find new ways that have a meaningful impact on your buyers’ business, you first need to know them well. Do you know their mission? Their goals? The challenges in the way of those goals? Seek to gain a deeper understanding of your buyer. This can be accomplished by fostering deeper customer relationships, communicating directly with buyers to better grasp their needs.

Additionally, by aggregating customer data, you can begin to draw insights about your buyers. Analyze their search history, previously downloaded assets, recurring purchases to begin to build a complete picture of your buyer.
With this information, you want to see what your portal, as a product, can offer to customers that would be so helpful, they’d want to become a customer simply for access to the customer portal. For example, US Foods was able to offer a unique solution to a common problem that plagued their customers with a Menu Profitability feature. For more details, watch this on-demand webinar.

Not Just a Cost Center

There’s potential for your portal solution to become something more than just a cost center. Capitalize on it with a change of perspective. Once you view your B2B portal as a product that can offer unique benefits to your buyer, you’ll be on the path towards distinguishing your business as a trusted expert and a valued partner for success.

How to Build the Best B2B Portal

Need some guidance on how to build a robust customer portal that is user-friendly, cost-efficient and also functions as a competitive advantage for your business? Download this free B2B success kit complete with an RFP template, best practices and a guide to help you get started.

Get Your RFP Kit

Why Businesses Need an API-Driven Strategy

2025-05-29T21:12:41Z

Delivering great digital experiences only grows more difficult year after year. Today, a single web or mobile transaction crosses an average of 35 different technology systems or components, compared to 22 only five years ago.

As businesses integrate IoT, wearables and other smart technology into their multichannel ecosystem, success lies in adopting API-driven strategies. APIs have grown to be the digital glue that not only empowers developers to create new software applications but also enables businesses to develop new revenue streams, streamline their go to market strategy and deliver better experiences to their customers.

What Does it Mean to be API-driven?

An API, or Application Programming Interface, is a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Without APIs, the digital experiences we’ve grown accustomed to, such as booking a hotel room or downloading software, would not be possible. APIs work in the background to help connect us to the information and technology we need.

However, companies that don’t prioritize leveraging APIs in their digital strategies are missing out on the benefits that consuming APIs can bring, as they make it easier to integrate and connect people, places, systems, data and algorithms to create new experiences, products, services and business models. Not all organizations need to be in the business of creating APIs since APIs are meant to be consumed; their creators intent for others to use and benefit from their APIs.

To capitalize on these benefits, businesses should be considering how they can embrace APIs into their digital strategies. But as a business user or C-level executive, APIs may not seem relevant to your realm of work. However, with the rate at which technology is rapidly advancing and the benefits APIs can bring, the next step in digital businesses lies in adopting an API-driven strategy.

What API-Driven Means for Businesses

Having an API-driven business model means investing into and using APIs to streamline, guide and improve business operations and processes. Incorporating APIs into corporate decision making ensures that they become the backbone of an enterprise’s digital strategy.

“We already live in an API economy where CIOs must look beyond APIs as technology and instead build their company’s business models, digital strategies and ecosystems on them,” said Paolo Malinverno, Research Vice President at Gartner.

In embracing APIs, companies understand that consuming APIs is a key part in their digital strategy to achieve business agility, streamline existing processes and accelerate time to market.

Business Benefits of an API-Driven Strategy

Companies that implement and consume APIs can expect to experience the following benefits:

Enablement of New Technologies
Modern application architecture of cloud services, IoT devices and new technologies rely on APIs. According to an article by Gartner, “APIs are now central to application architecture because they enable loosely coupled integration, as well as being the data conduits behind mobile apps and many IoT devices.” This also can empower internal innovation by providing the agility and flexibility needed to do so.
Reduced Costs and Time to Market
One of the main benefits of an API-driven strategy is a reduction in development effort and faster time to market. Developers understand that much of the functionality they need to build into an application already exists elsewhere. They have learned not to expend precious time and resources on reinventing the wheel but instead to rely on cost-effective APIs from third-party platforms or by using APIs they’ve already created. Embracing and leveraging APIs frees developers to focus on delivering the unique functionality of their applications more quickly, which helps businesses save money and resources. In a world where technology is continuously disrupting workforces, customer expectations and even entire industries, the ability to deliver quickly and cost-effectively is vital.
Superior Digital Experiences
Since your developers will be empowered to build solutions across any channel through APIs, this creates better and more engaging experiences for any audience, whether that be for customers, partners or your employees. APIs can help enable the delivery of services such as personalization, data collection and integration. Additionally, as APIs continue to grow in number and in popularity, the capabilities available will only improve and expand.

These business benefits make it evident that APIs are becoming a major component companies should implement to achieve digital success.

Begin Your API-Driven Strategy

If you’re ready to reap these benefits from consuming APIs, here are some things to keep in mind:

Look for an API-First Vendor
The first step should be to look for a vendor that is API-first. This means that the vendor develops API specifically for its users in mind. Basically, these vendors prioritize the creation of developer-friendly, secure and standardized APIs. We recommend looking for a vendor that follows the OpenAPI Specification, the largest framework today for designing, building, documenting and consuming APIs. The OpenAPI specification is language and platform agnostic and used by companies such as Netflix and PayPal. Businesses can rest assured that APIs from an API-first vendor will allow them to reap the benefits we’ve mentioned above.
Best Practices in Leveraging APIs
How you consume and apply an API will depend on your business and its use case but regardless of what API you use:

Read the API documentation to familiarize yourself with the API
Keep a record for yourself of what APIs you are using as well.
Make sure you have an open and API-forward architecture that can be well suited to address changing future needs.

How Businesses are Using APIs Today

As APIs continue to grow more critical to digital success, their evolution can present exciting opportunities for businesses; one such exciting development is headless APIs.

The term headless refers of the front-end of a site being completely decoupled from the platform behind it. The benefit of headless is being able to retrieve content from a backend platform and render it in a customer front-end that has been built using a preferred technology. APIs play a role in helping manage the vast quantity of content and data.

Take Liferay’s Headless CMS as an example. Liferay’s out-of-the-box API layer supports the OpenAPI specification, the most popular open source framework for RESTful APIs. Front-end developers can leverage the tools and frameworks they’re already familiar with to build sites. They also now have unmatched flexibility to integrate Liferay across all systems, which includes pulling data into Liferay or bringing Liferay into an existing ecosystem. Empower your developers to create differentiated customer experiences for every channel with content management APIs, content delivery APIs, content participation APIs and other REST APIs.

The growing importance of APIs in our daily lives is becoming more evident. Consider how embracing APIs can provide new possibilities and business opportunities for your company.

How to Win in an API Economy

Although delivering a great digital experience is not as easy as it once was, by embracing APIs businesses can reap huge rewards and generate profits in places previously unconsidered. Download this whitepaper to learn API-first strategies and be educated on emerging trends.

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How to Increase Partner Portal User Adoption

2025-05-29T20:32:57Z

Even though partner portals are meant to create opportunities to streamline sales processes, empower partners and establish competitive advantages, 80% of partner portals still end up unpopular and unused by partners. Why even bother then to update or build a tool that a majority of people don’t even use? However, if built with the right tools and strategy, a partner portal can be highly successful in unlocking the potential in your partner ecosystem and establishing a mutually profitable relationship.

Satisfied Partners Means Success

We’ve worked with many organizations striving to create a better experience for their partners. One such company is Hewlett Packard Enterprise; they knew that their outdated, complicated and disjointed partner portal was a roadblock to successful partnerships. In order to remedy this problem and deliver exceptional experiences to 250,000 partners worldwide, HPE built a new partner portal that focused on an outside-in approach and aimed to satisfy their partners.

Within a year, a new streamlined and comprehensive portal was launched and partner satisfaction skyrocketed to an all-time high. Using Liferay technology, HPE was able to:

Increase portal adoption and utilization by 50%.
Enable partners to achieve more effective selling.
Handle complex permissioning for a multi-tiered partner program.

Anne Anderson, Vice President of Experience and Change Management, said about the partner portal, "Nobody’s been able to throw anything at us that we couldn’t handle. Our portal supports growing, changing business needs, but it does it in a way that we don’t need to re-engineer it every time. It’s pretty awesome."

Leveraging a Partner-Centric Portal Solution

How have successful companies such as HPE been able to build solutions that satisfy their partners? By:

Including All Partner Tools in One Place
An enterprise partner portal is designed to support existing partners. The goal with any effective partner portal should be to help meet your partner's needs by boosting productivity. Creating an easy-to-use interface with tools in one location that partners use frequently, such as calendars and G-suite accessibility will only increase their efficiency and ability to sell your products. Modern partner portals can also be used on smartphones and tablets, ensuring connectivity for wherever the partner may be. In addition, adding hierarchy and role-based access control will cut down confusion and direct partners to what they need to get done.
Facilitating Open Communication and Knowledge Sharing
Having a space for partners to communicate freely with the partnering business will increase loyalty and engagement. When information flows freely, partners are able to place trust in the organization. Partners will be able to have easy access to materials necessary to be more productive such as training courses, customizable marketing content and sales tools. An up-to-date partner portal will be able to host all the connections needed so many people can access the portal at once. The ease of use will increase engagement and thus loyalty. Partners will want to use the portal and will be dedicated to the goal of mutual success.
Automating Business Operations
Streamlining repetitive processes like ordering makes doing business easier, faster and more accurate. Busy sellers may not have the time to pick up the phone to speak to a vendor, but having the ease of simply going to the portal to perform the same action is valuable. These sellers can also have access to online support, approval workflows and self-service functionalities, further streamlining the buying cycle. By saving time and resources, organizations can now turn their attention to other business priorities.
Giving Partners What They Want

Send out a survey to gather feedback on what should be included in the portal. HPE did this as well in order to guide the functionality and goals for their partner portal. Extending a survey also demonstrates your dedication and commitment to your partners, setting a good foundation for these partnerships. After gathering feedback, establish goals for the portal and what features can be utilized to meet those benchmarks. For example, if you would like to increase communication between partners, consider implementing social collaboration tools such as blogs or tagging.

By executing an effective partner portal strategy, you are empowering your partners to bring in more sales; 66% of senior executives view increased revenue as a primary advantage of effective partnerships. A custom-tailored accessible partner portal with these tools and support will allow partners to sell better; a true win-win scenario for both parties. However, these benefits don’t magically appear once the portal is live. In order to reap the rewards of a partner portal, users need to actually adopt and use the tool frequently. But in order to increase user adoption, you have to start by building a tool that’s easy to use and returns immediate benefits for the users.

Create Lasting Partnerships

Partners can become a key competitive advantage if you take the time to build relationships with a modern portal solution that empowers them to win at their business, so that you succeed at yours.

Learn How to Build a Partner Portal on Liferay DXP

How to Choose the Right Intranet Software

2025-05-29T20:32:16Z

There are dozens of intranet software options available for companies, and choosing the right one can be a challenge, especially for those who are launching an intranet for the first time. Any selection process should start with a comprehensive understanding of what your employees need. Are they looking for a better way to collaborate online? Are they just tired of logging into three different sites to manage their work schedules? Taking the time to assess these pain points will help you create a list of priorities to guide your decision.

However, once you gather your requirements, you’re still left with a crowded market of intranet solutions. Most software will fall into one of three categories, and narrowing your options down to one of these will streamline the decision-making process.

1. The Suite of Tools

If you don’t have an intranet yet, your team is likely already working with their own preferred set of online tools and apps. This could include storing meeting notes on Evernote, scheduling with Doodle polls, sending big files with WeTransfer or using other productivity apps.

For companies that don’t need a fleshed-out intranet solution, encouraging employees to use a standardized suite of tools is a great alternative to an intranet. This approach only requires you to choose the tools you want employees to use and ensure everyone has the access they need.

Many online work tools are able to integrate with one another these days, and assembling a suite of tools that fit your team’s needs is easier to achieve than managing an intranet — provided your team doesn’t use more than a dozen tools or doesn't have conflicting requirements. But what if things are a little more complicated than that?

2. The Off-the-Shelf Solution

Off-the-shelf intranet software is best for companies that have general needs. That is, their requirements are more complicated than a suite of integrated tools can handle, but not so complicated that they need custom development. In this scenario, an intranet solution that comes with standard features out-of-the-box is a great fit.

Some of the typical features available in an off-the-shelf intranet solution are:

Personalized homepages and newsfeeds
Video player capabilities
Document libraries
Activity streams
Group pages
Employee profiles and blogs
Mobile-enabled

Off-the-shelf solutions are useful for companies that are short on time, budget or development resources. Launching an intranet is one thing, but maintaining it is another. You can keep an off-the-shelf solution updated with less resources, though you run the risk of being more dependent on the vendor and whatever future decisions they make about different features.

Additionally, an off-the-shelf solution will have already made a lot of decisions for you, by requiring you to take certain aspects as-is, without any opportunity to customize. This can be a really good thing, especially if your company is new to user experience (UX) design. Imagine building your own internal version of Facebook from the ground up. Are you ready to make all of the UX decisions that go into designing a social platform? Using out-of-the-box tools for a social intranet will ensure that you are rolling out a site with a strong user experience foundation, without too much investment. From there, you can always continue to tweak according to your needs.

3. The Custom Platform

The final category of intranet software is the custom platform. This is a web platform solution for large enterprises that have complex needs. Often, these are industry-specific, such as a retail bank that needs to incorporate finance-specific tools that its employees use daily. Custom platforms are always a commitment, but there are many things they do well that off-the-shelf solutions can’t accomplish.

For instance, intranets built on custom platforms are better equipped to handle complex and unique business needs. As a global brand and world leader in pizza delivery, Domino’s struggled to communicate with their franchise and corporate team members. They needed a site that allowed for more customization and created a more user-specific experience. Using a custom solution, Domino’s was able to create different categories with granular permissions — which in turn provides corporate and franchise team members a custom experience with content relevant to the user, their location and store type. These permissions are also critical for allowing Domino’s to share confidential information securely, which is an important feature given their franchise model. In addition to this, the Domino’s team built a one-stop-shop with news updates, customizable dashboards and a subscription-based news tool to make their intranet, dLive, a great place to receive user-specific information. Traffic has increased from 8,000 visits per week to 20,000 per week on the updated site.

Custom platforms also have greater flexibility than other intranet software options. Your intranet should be an extension of your company culture, and a customizable platform allows you to align internal culture initiatives with the first thing your employees see on the homepage.

Domino’s custom platform also enabled them to add a social sharing tool called DPZ Social for corporate and franchise team members to share photos and posts like they would on social media, helping tie their different global offices into the greater Domino’s culture. The possibilities are numerous for companies that have the resources to invest in great experiences for their employees.

Increased flexibility is also critical for organizations that have changing requirements that need to be quickly accommodated. QAD, a provider of manufacturing ERP software, has to include new business requirements with every project they launch within their intranet. Because the IT team has invested in its customized intranet, it is able to quickly accommodate these new requirements every time they come up, and provide a unique work tool for the employees it supports.

Finally, if your company is planning to incorporate new technologies like AI or IoT into your intranet, a custom platform will allow you to plan for how you’ll bring those into your infrastructure. Integration with an off-the-shelf solution will depend on when the vendor decides it is worth the cost to enable these technologies. Building with customizable intranet software will put that much more power in your company’s hands.

Start With What You Need

Whether you’re building an intranet for the first time or updating a long-standing site, it’s best to start with what you know you need. Often, the true challenges for intranets are in convincing your employees to actually use them. By focusing on the applications and tools you know they use on a daily basis, you can choose intranet software that will address their core pain points, ensuring better employee engagement across the board.

This article was originally published in 2017 but has been updated in 2019 for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

How Mature is Your Intranet Solution?

Regardless of what tools you use to build your intranet, there are varying stages of maturity distinguished by the range on functionality and its focus on employee experience and engagement. Assess where your intranet stands.

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How to Personalize Experiences at Scale with Liferay DXP

2025-05-29T20:33:29Z

Personalization is nothing new but rather becoming the norm for customer experience. Of the millennials and GenZers polled in a recent survey, 75% expect connected processes, seamless handoffs between departments and channels, contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions. Even 63% of Baby Boomers and 69% of GenXers want the same thing.

Customers are demanding next-level personalization; basic personalization features, such as calling out a customer’s first name, fail to engage with customers in any relevant way. Only 8% of these survey respondents answered that they would be encouraged to engage with a retail brand if they sent an email that included their first name or sent a birthday email. Not only are customers expecting more personalized interactions, they want them at every touchpoint of their journeys. Organizations now have to deliver mass personalization or what we call personalization at scale.

Why is Personalization at Scale Necessary?

Let’s unpack this term into two parts: “personalization” and “at scale”. Personalization refers to the tailoring of messages or offers to individuals based on their actual behavior. Businesses are expected to not only create content but also deliver this content to individuals that they would want to see, based on their actions and preferences. The second part of the phrase, “at scale”, means delivering these personalized experiences to multiple audiences, across devices, while still being relevant to individual customers.

Organizations should not only be able to execute and connect fine-grained personalized experiences across multiple touchpoints such as websites, mobile devices, email, IoT and physical stores, to name a few, but also deliver tailored experiences to more people.

The average customer will encounter 15 to 20 brand touchpoints before that brand or product becomes relevant in his or her mind. This number is higher than it has been in recent years; in 2013, customers would only interact with 4 to 6 touchpoints before submitting an inquiry and we can only expect this number to rise in coming years due to IoT and other new emerging channels. Ensuring customers have a seamless, cohesive and personalized experience throughout all of these touchpoints is critical to not only obtaining new customers but also building a long-term relationship with them. Additional benefits of scaling personalization include:

Boosting revenue by up to 15%.
Reducing customer acquisition costs by as much as 50%.
Increasing efficiency of marketing spend by 10 to 30%.
Enhancing customer purchase intent by 78%.

How Does Liferay DXP 7.2 Support This?

Although personalization at scale is very beneficial, successful execution can be very difficult. Why? Simply because, personalization itself can already be a challenge. Needing to expand that across multiple channels, multiple audiences at the same time is even more daunting and requires more resources. Understanding these struggles, we built Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) 7.2 in order to help digital-first teams be able to successfully personalize experiences at scale. Here’s how:

Create Experiences: First and foremost, in order to deliver personalized experiences, businesses must be able to create those experiences. On Liferay DXP, business users have access to tools that empower them to easily create content pages and other digital experiences without the help of a developer. Users can drag and drop content, widgets and fragments to build engaging pages. Improvements made on Liferay DXP 7.2 to the content authoring experience, interface and web experience creation have made the process even more friendly for business users to create visually pleasing pages with a fraction of the effort. In addition, users can now preview content within an associated display page before publishing. Map content to individual sections on a page to see how everything would look live.
Personalize those Experiences: Business users can easily define audience segments with robust rules for fine-grained personalization and engage these segments with a range of personalized experiences across pages, navigation and assets. A few of these segmentation rules include personalizing according to device, cookie, URL and content visited, among others. Segmentation capabilities have now been moved into the core DXP platform for this version so all content and applications can leverage segmentation to provide personalized experiences. On DXP 7.2, users have even more powerful tools available to personalize and target content on web pages and fragments. Automate content personalization based on user behavior with interest-based content recommendations. Easily create content sets for reuse across multiple pages and add targeting to personalize these sets of content. Easily execute personalized variations to display different content depending on segmentation. One of the biggest difficulties involving personalization at scale is the inability to not only gather the right data surrounding your customers but also make sense of it. Sometimes there’s too much, sometimes it’s not specific enough to help your marketing campaigns. To overcome this, organizations need to create a single customer view. Liferay DXP integrates seamlessly with Liferay Analytics Cloud to help provide deeper insights on your customers, pages and content. In addition, use segmentation categories and data across both platforms for more specific targeting and personalization.
Manage Digital Assets Effectively: Because you will be delivering personalized experiences to a large number of individuals, there will most likely be a large number of digital assets to manage as well. Reduce time spent performing manual tasks with new bulk management features available on Liferay DXP 7.2. Additionally, the newest version of Liferay leverages third-party machines learning services to provide personalized experiences and improve the findability of assets by automatically adding tags to images and documents upon upload.
Think Headlessly: One of the biggest new additions to the latest version of DXP is headless functionalities, namely headless APIs and headless CMS. Because content and presentation is now decoupled on Liferay DXP 7.2, businesses have the freedom to use the best of both a traditional CMS and headless architecture in one platform. With a hybrid CMS, content management is detached from the front-end with an API so users can publish content across multiple channels freely without needing new front-end templates every time. So developers can leverage the freedom of a headless system while business users still have the convenience of traditional content management tools. Headless capabilities are especially necessary to be able to effectively create experiences on multiple channels, without front-end developers being brought in for every new channel or interface added. Businesses need to be able to create consistent experiences across multiple channels, even future ones, in order to remain successful in the digital age.

By leveraging these features available on Liferay DXP 7.2, your business will be able to win and retain customers by delivering personalized experiences at scale. Start giving your customers the relevant experiences they desire for.

Making it Personal

In the era of digital experiences, personalization is becoming increasingly more critical to the success of a business. Ensure your organization is ready to deliver engaging experiences that distinguish your business from the competition. Use Liferay DXP as the foundation for these experiences.

What else is new in Liferay DXP 7.2?

Read about more new features that are now available on Liferay DXP 7.2 that can not only help your business deliver personalized experiences but can also streamline business operations and manage content headlessly.

Learn More

How E-Commerce in Manufacturing is a Game Changer

2025-05-29T20:31:03Z

E-commerce in manufacturing reflects a paradigm shift from pure transactions to experience-driven commerce. Purchasing parts or products online is nothing new, but many of the legacy systems used to bring products online are unwieldy. However, manufacturers that leverage modern B2B e-commerce solutions can turn this often complicated process into engaging experiences that satisfy their modern customers.

How is E-Commerce in Manufacturing a Game Changer?

As traditionally product-focused organizations move to become more customer-centric, manufacturers are looking for digital solutions that facilitate the change. E-commerce comes with many benefits: improving accuracy of orders, 24/7 access to order history and account management, more efficient digital processes, among many others.

What distinguishes e-commerce over other digital solutions is its potential to transform the nature of the manufacturing industry. E-commerce in manufacturing is not simply another digital tool for businesses to add; rather is a platform that enables manufacturers to move away from their traditional business models and embrace a digitally connected ecosystem of customers, internal teams, data and systems that they manage through a single platform. These benefits are game changing to manufacturers as this solution allows them to:

1) Bring Content and Commerce Together

E-commerce enables manufacturers to combine their marketing sites with their purchasing sites so that customers, employees and other users don’t need to switch between multiple systems; research, purchasing and management can all happen in one place. Modern e-commerce platforms achieve this by uniting content and commerce, which brings benefits such as:

The ability to configure personalized catalogs and pricing per account or job role all within the software, rather than having to track agreements manually.
Increasing discoverability through search engines, a major way that B2B buyers are conducting their research online before ever talking to a sales representative.
Sales and customer service teams being able to service accounts on one platform, seeing what the customers see so that they can create better experiences for the customer together.
A smoother experience for customers that is no longer managed through siloed tools but rather through one consolidated e-commerce platform.

2) Gather Data for a Continuous Loop of Improvement, Innovation and Efficiency

Manufacturers are very familiar with collecting data from their supply chain and factories in order to streamline their production processes through automation. However, the same data-driven strategy often hasn’t been applied to their marketing strategies.

Data from customers can provide valuable insights that manufacturers can feed back into their business. E-commerce platforms can gather customer data in the form of purchasing trends, returns and qualitative feedback such as product quality ratings and reviews. This data is vital to understanding the health of customer accounts in Manufacturing and can often reveal new opportunities to guide product development or new service programs, especially when combined with the data already being gathered from the production process.

By collecting data at every point of the manufacturing process, from assembly to consumption, manufacturers can set up a continuous cycle of data and innovation that will grow their business and develop sustainable competitive advantages.

3) Empower Sales Representatives

Though the benefits of e-commerce, especially self-service e-commerce, are promising, there’s one major downside for many manufacturers: conflict with the established sales team. Most sales teams worry that a new digital channel will take away from their livelihood or replace their role altogether. The right e-commerce approach can transform this fear into new opportunity for sales reps, supporting them to act as more than just order takers. Instead of using time to log orders, the same customer data that’s being used to improve product development can be given to sales teams so they can focus on higher-value, more strategic selling.

Sales representatives don’t even need to be in the same location as customers in order to do business now; e-commerce enables manufacturers to scale and capture business in new markets regardless of where their sales teams are located.

Becoming Customer-Focused Organizations

Moving from being a product-centered business to a customer-centric one is feasible and beneficial using an e-commerce platform; however, simply adding an e-commerce solution to an existing technology stack is not the end-all solution. If implemented successfully alongside a detailed strategy, an e-commerce platform is not just another way to sell but a transformative solution that solves traditional B2B challenges and elevates manufacturers to becoming customer-driven businesses that will ultimately drive long-term success.

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Trying to implement an e-commerce solution for your organization? Learn about 7 best practices needed for B2B e-commerce success.

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Personalized Product Recommendations in Liferay Commerce

2025-05-29T20:50:05Z

For anyone launching an e-commerce site today, personalized product recommendations are an obvious feature to include. However, these automated experiences are not as simple as e-commerce leaders make them appear.

Once you bring in real customer data, you have dozens of ways to recommend products to your users. For B2B merchants, there are three types of recommendations that are quick wins for improving the customer experience — and all three are provided out of the box in Liferay Commerce.

Types of Product Recommendations in Liferay Commerce

Liferay Commerce provides machine learning models for implementing personalized product recommendations at three different levels.

Content-Based Product Recommendations

Help customers find the right product by recommending related products based on product content such as specifications and categorizations. As you sync your product catalog from your ERP or PIM, Liferay Commerce refreshes its recommendation engine to ensure your customers can discover the right related products.

Also-Bought Product Recommendations

Encourage cross-selling by recommending products that other customers bought, based on the product that a customer is currently viewing. Also-boughts are a popular way to help customers make the right choice when buying a product, as they can easily see what other customers liked and dig further without searching the catalog via keywords or filters.

User-Based Product Recommendations

Offer more personalized recommendations by showing customers what other customers who are similar to them also bought. This adds known customer profile data to your Also-Bought recommendations for an even more personalized experience, equipping your customers with the popular buying choices from other customers from similar companies.

Where to Start

Based on your strategy, it might be beneficial to start with one type of recommendation that will have more direct impact on your goals. Here are some valuable strategies that B2B merchants can implement to address common pain points.

Increase Visibility of Low-Selling Products

Most catalogs have products that end up in a Miscellaneous category or otherwise low-visibility area of the site. By implementing content-based product recommendations, you can put these products in front of customers more often, increasing the number of eyes on them and hopefully resulting in a sales lift.

Reduce Returns

Many product returns are avoidable, especially if your product lines involve compatibility requirements (e.g., spare auto parts, A/V equipment, software, etc). Pair content-based recommendations with manually-added product relationships to ensure that customers are finding the correct product, ultimately reducing returns.

Speed Up Purchasing Decisions

B2B purchasing cycles can be particularly long as purchasing often involves a higher investment and more complex products. Make the decision easier (and thus faster) by leveraging both also-boughts and user-based recommendations. In addition to ensuring that customers are finding the most relevant product, you can add an additional layer of credibility with the knowledge that other companies have made the same purchase.

Up-Selling for New Accounts

If you know one of your customer segments is likely to purchase your more expensive products, then you can implement user-based product recommendations to ensure that your newest customers within that segment see those products immediately. When you onboard a new customer, implement user-based recommendations instead of regular also-boughts so that they see the big ticket products first. Certain audiences and buyer profiles are more likely to go for premium options if they know their peers are doing the same and you can capitalize on this with the right recommendation during the purchasing process.

There’s More to Learn

These are only a few of the types of product recommendations you can create with your customer data. Once you bring in specific customer data such as location, company size, device, buyer role and so on, you can create incredibly personalized recommendations to address many needs within your strategy. The key is to think beyond marketing personalization — banners, coupons and ads — to personalization that delivers higher-value offerings to your customers, aligning with the way they want to buy products.

New in Liferay Commerce 2.0

Learn more about what’s new in Liferay Commerce 2.0 with this deep-dive webinar on the latest features to transform how you sell to B2B customers.

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The Security Pillars Cloud Providers Must Support

2025-05-29T21:01:45Z

Research from analyst firm Wikibon demonstrates that security has remained remarkably stable as the leading impediment to public cloud adoption. This is something I deal with constantly in my current role as CEO of my company’s new cloud division, where I spend much of my time working on the audits necessary to qualify for security certifications, speaking to analysts, etc. What I’ve found is that, while each organization has its own nuances, it’s clear where the market is headed. For simplicity, I’ve divided their requirements into four (somewhat arbitrary) categories: Data Handling, Mechanisms, Peace of Mind and Reporting.

Data Handling

While some organizations continue to store their most highly sensitive data on premise, this does not mean data stored in the cloud is not sensitive, nor does it give cloud providers an excuse to shirk responsibility for security. Indeed, many organizations rightfully demand that data they store in the cloud must be encrypted at rest (especially when hosted in a public cloud environment) with cryptographic key storage in a separate server or on premise. The cloud solution provider must also have strong policies regarding data management, retention, migration, deletion and communication standards. Proper processes regarding employee training, hiring and off-boarding, while not always top of mind for cloud providers thinking of security, are also critically important to ensure good governance.

Mechanisms

Role-based access is the cornerstone of any security system and the cloud is no exception. Administrators need a system that allows them to assign permissions to staff based on their role with clearly demarcated rules regarding who has access to which information, who can make edits, etc. This often includes integration with Microsoft Active Directory and LDAP in order to support the authentication and authorization of all users and devices within a network. Most enterprises will also demand support for SSO tools like OpenID, Open Authorization (OAuth), SAML, Shibboleth and SSO servers.

Peace of Mind

Perhaps the most critical component of delivering enterprise peace of mind is in ensuring near-continuous uptime for mission-critical applications. Today, most enterprise SLAs specify 99.5% or higher uptime guaranteed by multiple layers of redundancy in data centers spread throughout the world. This also includes provisions for backup and recovery in case unforeseen disaster strikes, or situations where demand drastically increases due to factors such as seasonal marketing campaigns or the deployment of a new application. The system should be able to adapt itself to account for traffic jumps by scaling up and preventing the collapse of digital channels.

Reporting

Enterprises will insist not just on access controls but also on accurate logs with detailed information on who accessed which systems and when, plus automated alerts in case abnormal behavior is detected or systems are compromised. In practice, this means cloud providers should be prepared to provide information regarding user session length (particularly by admin or privileged logins) and CPU and memory usage over time, among other metrics.

Concluding Thoughts

Cloud computing has become a major driver of growth for businesses, particularly in accelerating the development lifecycle and time to market for enterprise applications. While this is obviously a positive development, it also means more sensitive data is moving off premise and enterprises need to carefully evaluate the risks that entails, lest they end up among the legion of companies compromised in recent security breaches. In particular, businesses need to understand what security certifications their cloud providers have, what processes they have in place to ensure organizational data remains secure, their policies regarding the on-boarding and off-boarding of their own personnel and the granularity of the metrics they provide customers.

Don’t let any of this scare you! The cloud is a wondrous place full of business value but as with any other purchase, you owe it your organization and your customers to go in with clear-eyed understanding of the risk environment.

Learn More About the Benefits of Cloud Deployments

Most enterprises understand the cloud offers significant benefits in the form of more efficient resource management and faster time-to-market. Yet there are even more benefits waiting for digital enterprises just below the surface. Read our white paper to learn more!

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Introducing Liferay DXP 7.2: Content, Personalization and Headless

2025-05-29T20:35:41Z

The digital landscape is changing, and businesses with platforms that enable them to work smarter will adapt best. Today we’re excited to introduce Liferay DXP 7.2, digital experience software built to meet customers’ growing demands for personalized and meaningful experiences across a multitude of touchpoints. With rich content creation and personalization tools and improved headless architecture, the latest version of our digital experience platform is designed to meet the needs of today’s digital-first business teams.

A business’ ability to reach its audiences across touchpoints is imperative to success. Headless delivery has become key to meeting customer expectations of quick, relevant and personalized digital experiences. Liferay DXP 7.2 delivers with the capabilities of a headless CMS, giving you the ability to engage with customers on their preferred channel or device.

Easy-to-use and reusable content management and personalization tools paired with the flexibility of a decoupled CMS architecture equip enterprises to do more.

Get the full list of new features in Liferay DXP 7.2 here and join our webinar later this month to hear directly from Edwin Chung, our VP of Product Management, and Dimple Koticha, one of our talented sales engineers.

Content, Made Easier

Liferay DXP 7.2 makes your content work harder for your business with tools that make publishing a simple experience. Liferay DXP 7.2 enables the creation of engaging experiences tailored to your customers’ needs through improved authoring capabilities and reusable fragment creation.

Content authoring is streamlined, as structured content no longer requires a display template.
Drag-and-drop page layouts empower marketers and other business users to create pages with easily configurable content, fragments and widgets.
Front-end developers can code fragments in their own code editors and upload — without needing to redeploy through a CLI tool.

Personalization at Scale

For businesses looking to engage many individual users, basic personalization capabilities are no longer enough. By investing in tools to present personalized experiences at scale across multiple audiences and channels, companies can grow revenue and customer retention by as much as 10 to 30 percent while also increasing customer satisfaction. Liferay DXP 7.2 ships with an advanced rule builder to create complex rules, allowing for deeper customizations in personalization, and the ability to segment across all content and applications in the core platform. At the same time, Liferay DXP 7.2 introduces behavior-based segmentations and interest-based content recommendations for automatic personalization of content through Liferay Analytics Cloud integration. Personalizing individual aspects of a page so as to deliver unique experiences to different segments is also now possible through the page editor.

Headless Freedom

As digital touchpoints increase exponentially, businesses must be able to deliver experiences quickly to meet customers wherever they connect. As a decoupled CMS or platform, Liferay DXP gives developers the freedom to create any presentation layer without compromising on the benefits of a traditional CMS, helping businesses advance their customer experience initiatives at a faster pace. In Liferay DXP 7.2, businesses looking to rapidly create multichannel experiences will benefit from new REST APIs for content delivery, content management and content participation. Our teams are already working to add more headless APIs to support a broad range of use cases in future versions of DXP, allowing for even more flexibility to use DXP completely headlessly.

What’s on your business’ digital to-do list? Liferay DXP 7.2 can help.

Want to Learn More about 7.2?

Get a first-hand look at the new and improved Liferay DXP 7.2 features by joining our webinar!

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Why the Insurance Industry Needs Omnichannel

2025-05-29T21:14:01Z

Think omnichannel is just a tech industry buzzword? Think again. Insurers are increasingly turning to personalized and omnichannel experiences—providing customers with a seamless experience across any channel they use to communicate: from in-office visits and phone calls to website visits, applications on mobile devices and more.

The benefit of this approach is two-fold: it both attracts and retains digital-savvy consumers.

What is Omnichannel?

Oftentimes the terms cross-channel, multi-channel and omnichannel are used interchangeably, but each has unique attributes and creates a different consumer experience.

Cross-channel means that a consumer can use two channels to achieve a goal.
Multi-channel refers to having multiple channels for interaction, but they are not integrated.
Omnichannel offers the consumer an integrated and seamless experience across all channels.

Why Does it Matter for Insurers?

Some sectors, such as retail, have long been reaping the benefits of an omnichannel presence. Their foray into this realm of sales and brand presence has heightened the consumer’s awareness. There are two main factors motivating this omnichannel trend: the necessity to improve efficiency and distribution, as well as consumer’s digital expectations.

1. Improving Efficiency and Distribution

Due to high overhead costs such as offices and staff, insurers need to maximize their digital channels and, at the same time, use customer data to increase conversions and grow their business. Companies whose omnichannel approach focuses on the customer experience see higher and faster growth levels than those that do not. To provide consumers with a solid omnichannel experience requires a commitment to the regular training employees, properly managing data arriving from various channels and maintaining effective communication.

Economic factors also play into the growth challenges insurers face, meaning that insurers are looking for new ways to generate income. Maximizing the profitability of channels through smarter marketing and sales policies should lead to a higher conversion rate. Automation and digitization will be increasingly important to achieve improved sales efficiency ratings. Technologies related to data analysis, as well as the influence of social networks and mobile technologies, will drive the future of transactions.

2. Meeting Consumer’s Digital Expectations

Demographic changes are a major motivating factor in this shift. Millennials represent the future of insurance and have grown up in a world that allows them to buy products and services instantly through any channel or device. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 51% of U.S. adults have used their mobile device to make an online purchase, and 45% “have used their phones while inside a store to look up online reviews or to try and find a better price online for something they are thinking of purchasing.” This is the new normal for carrying out transactions with any type of company.

If insurers are not able to offer their clients an ideal digital experience when it comes to accessing and managing their policies, many will go to companies that pay more attention to customer experience. A recent report highlights that millennials contact their insurers up to 2.5 times more than other customers through social networks and two times more through mobile. However, these interactions do not necessarily translate into positive experiences. In fact, the satisfaction rating that the millennial generation notes of its experience with insurers is typically lower than that of other clients, which suggests that this generation has higher expectations about the quality of service expected through digital channels.

The behaviors of customers are changing. The use of multiple channels to make a single purchase is quickly becoming the norm and it’s important that insurance companies innovate to meet this new culture. Although digital disruption is already being experienced, the traditional insurance sector must prioritize meeting the expectations of new, digital-savvy customers. An omnichannel model will allow the insurer to maintain its competitiveness, retain its customers and facilitate growth.

Start now, as the demand for omnichannel experiences will be even greater as the millennial generation continues to age into insurance needs.

Learn more about why insurers are turning to omnichannel technology

Learn about how it can: increase customer loyalty and retention, create a deeper understanding of customers, facilitate growth and more.

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Liferay DXP Cloud: Breaking the Barriers of Time and Project Constraints

2025-05-29T20:41:01Z

Moving to the cloud is top of mind for many enterprises, as is the security, installation process, and other key issues that come along with the decision. The long-term benefits of operating on the cloud are easily recognizable, but companies also need to consider other methods to reduce costs and expedite business needs—such as a fully functional development operations strategy, advanced metrics for their environments and a development cycle that allows for faster innovation.

In order to make cloud deployments easier, we launched Liferay DXP Cloud, the best way for enterprises to deploy, manage and scale Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Meet Liferay DXP Cloud

Liferay DXP Cloud is an enterprise solution that simplifies the deployment, management and scaling of Liferay DXP with Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities. Operating on Liferay DXP Cloud greatly lessens the need for IT to maintain and manage their own infrastructures—allowing them to focus on delivering new business services.

Specifically built for our leading digital experience platform, Liferay DXP Cloud comes with out-of-the-box features to help optimize the performance of Liferay DXP and the evolution of your DevOps strategy:

Improved Agility: Dynamically scale up bandwidth to maintain steady performance even through traffic peaks. IT teams can accommodate unexpected traffic flows on Liferay DXP Cloud through its Autoscaling feature in order to avoid service disruptions and manage unpredictable fluctuations.
Automatic Backup and Recovery: Liferay DXP Cloud provides hourly automatic and secure backups to ensure organizational data and documents are protected and able to be restored in case of data corruption or failure. Encryption at rest ensures that sensitive data saved on disks is not readable by any user or application without a valid key. Each backup is saved for 30 days and available for you to restore.
High Performance and Availability: With DXP Cloud, optimize performance to ensure high availability for your applications. Use the out-of-the-box health checks on the platform and configure self-healing for your services in case issues arise. Plus, deliver high availability, zero downtime deployments to guarantee that mission-critical sites stay online.
Detailed Project Monitoring: DXP Cloud delivers comprehensive performance metrics so IT teams can track the health and computing requirements of their sites over time. Administrators can quickly understand CPU, memory usage, data transfer rates, and more, at one glance. For even more in-depth numbers, DXP Cloud's out-of-the-box integration with Dynatrace offers advanced metrics so your team can stay on top of your project at all times. Users can also opt to receive real-time alerts about project performance, resources or resolution of issues.
Integrated Governance: Administrators are empowered to deliver maximum productivity and security by managing permissions that match governance policies for your team members within each project environment. There’s no need to develop or deploy separate permissions.
Reliable Security: According to a TechTarget survey, 40% of respondents avoided public cloud deployment because of security concerns. Combat those fears with DXP Cloud’s private network that includes a database offering encryption at rest and encryption in transit. Additionally, you can encrypt traffic and secure the way data is sent between your services and browsers thanks to automatically renewed SSL certificates.

Read the full list of Liferay DXP Cloud capabilities here.

Continuous Innovation

Innovation is made easier on an agile platform teeming with features and tools that allow you to customize and drastically improve the end user experience.

“We developed Liferay DXP Cloud because we realized there was a need among enterprise customers to make cloud deployments easier, speed up the development process and deliver business solutions faster,” said Eduardo Lundgren, Engineering Director at Liferay. “Liferay DXP Cloud is a complete platform to enable innovation, simplify infrastructure and ensure faster time-to-market.”

Keep your business focused on what really matters by easing the digital transition with Liferay DXP Cloud.

Launch with DXP Cloud

Securely and reliably create and manage engaging digital experiences for your users without having to worry about infrastructure or complexity.

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The Benefits of Liferay for Digital Workplace Development

2025-05-29T21:00:50Z

Given today’s tight labor market, businesses of all kinds are looking to find ways to make their workforces more efficient and increase employee satisfaction. One of the best ways to accomplish both goals is through the deployment of intranets that serve as internal knowledge repositories for staff and a place where they can find the resources they need to accomplish their tasks.

A thirteen-year veteran of using Liferay, XTIVIA CTO Vivek Agarwal has a wealth of experience in using the technology to develop corporate intranets and other digital workplace solutions. Drawing on his experiences, Vivek speaks to Liferay’s advantages in the following areas:

Content Management
Personalization
Integrations & Security
Mobile Development
Customization

Check out the full post on XTIVIA’s blog to learn more and get a first-hand account of how everything comes together from an accomplished practitioner.

Build Your Digital Workplace with Liferay DXP

Liferay DXP offers one of the most robust, flexible paths to create a digital workplace in the enterprise. Read about the benefits of using Liferay DXP for your intranet in our whitepaper.

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Pros and Cons of B2B E-Commerce

2025-05-29T20:54:10Z

Though the growing importance of e-commerce for B2B is well known, many manufacturers and distributors are still weighing the pros and cons of moving their B2B channel to a digital solution in 2019. The appeal of a digital commerce solution ranges from offering a much better customer experience to cutting overhead on traditional sales processes. But as those tasked with modernizing the B2B channel know, there are several cons, included security issues, inadequate tools to manage B2B complexity and concerns that user adoption of the new channel won’t justify the investment.

Regardless of where your company stands today, the decision may be made for you in the end. Analysts have predicted that B2B e-commerce market growth will continue, exceeding one trillion dollars in sales by 2023. Failing to adapt to changing customer expectations will give you little ground to stand on compared to competitors that make the move to digital.

Below are common hurdles and actionable steps you can take to overcome them, as well as some of the major benefits you can expect if you succeed.

Con of B2B E-Commerce #1: Poor User Adoption

One of the biggest concerns most companies wrestle with is user adoption. What if you invest months of development, dollars and staff time into building an e-commerce website that your customers never use? Some long-time accounts may be so used to shooting off an email to their account manager whenever they have an order that they won’t see the benefit of using the website.

However, consider the pro: if you are able to move the majority of your customers to an e-commerce site, you can empower them to manage orders on their own, freeing up your sales team to focus on closing new deals or expanding existing business.

If user adoption is your main concern, here’s an important question to ask: Why wouldn’t your customers use your e-commerce site? Today, 74 percent of buyers research their purchases online and 93 percent want to make those purchases online.

If your site has poor adoption, it likely means that it isn’t making customers’ lives easier. A solid B2B e-commerce site should make it easier to research products, schedule recurring orders, monitor order status and keep up-to-date on important product news. If you stay focused on making your customers’ jobs easier and more efficient, then user adoption will follow.

Con of B2B E-Commerce #2: Inadequate Support for Complex Buying Processes

Many of today’s most popular e-commerce platforms started as B2C solutions and expanded into the B2B space. Because of this, some companies are concerned that these vendors don’t fully understand or account for the unique needs of the B2B experience. Given today’s analyst coverage and the evolution of digital commerce platforms, this shouldn’t be a major blocker for your move to digital.

The rapid growth of B2B digital commerce means that vendors are heavily invested in creating success for their B2B customers, and analysts like Gartner and Forrester (among others) regularly cover the highest priority capabilities and trends that these vendors must account for. With a careful vendor review, you should be able to identify a platform that provides out-of-the-box functionality for features such as contract pricing, multiple buyer roles within accounts, purchasing workflows and enterprise scalability to support the growth of the channel.

In addition, leading digital commerce platforms will provide more than core commerce capabilities. With the complexity of products and the need to provide better content resources to buyers, partners and sales teams, many companies are looking for software that can integrate content and commerce in one seamless solution.

The pro here is obvious: by bringing these capabilities together and automating solutions, you can generate new revenues with lower operations costs and higher net margins, all while providing an exceptional online ordering experience to your customers.

Con of B2B E-Commerce #3: Lack of a Human Touch

Because the B2B seller-buyer relationship tends to involve longer periods of time and investment, B2B buyers expect personalized service from their vendors. Self service digital solutions have been increasingly popular with buyers, but companies may fear that a one-size-fits-all approach will lower the quality of their customer service and distance them from their buyers. Luckily, moving to a digital first solution doesn’t have to mean giving up a human touch. A robust B2B digital commerce platform should provide a shared view for both the customer and the account manager. If there is any issue with an order, account managers can log in as the customer, see exactly what they’re seeing and provide support as needed. And, in case it’s not clear, the major pro here is that you get the best of both worlds. Customers are empowered to find answers and manage purchasing on their own time, but their account managers are only a click away when they need them.

Recommendations for Moving Forward

Hopefully, hearing the pros of e-commerce and practical ways to overcome the cons has spurred you to take the next step. If you’re implementing an e-commerce solution for the first time or replacing a homegrown system, here are some recommendations to consider.

Perform your own research. Within B2B e-commerce, there is a wide breadth of digital maturity and what works for one industry leader might not be the right solution for your company today. Experts such as Brian Beck, Justin King and Andy Hoar regularly provide insights on B2B e-commerce best practices. There are also events like B2B Online and B2B Next that are designed to equip manufacturers and distributors with the latest information on succeeding at B2B e-commerce.
Challenge vendors. For every digital commerce vendor you talk to, question and confirm their B2B capabilities, including both out-of-the-box capabilities and scalability for future growth. Some vendors may seem adequate while your digital channel is growing, but if you don’t choose a vendor that can support your business long-term, you’ll need to find a new solution sooner than you might like.
Focus on customer experience. Success at B2B e-commerce isn’t just about technology; it’s about providing complete service experiences to your customers. Don’t leave traditional sales processes completely behind. Your overall goal should be to make these processes easier and the complexity of B2B means that sometimes you need both the digital solution and a human touch to accomplish that.

The Foundation for Great Commerce Experiences

With a customer-centric strategy, corporate buy-in and the right digital commerce platform, manufacturers are poised for incredible growth over the next few years. Get ahead of your competition today by moving away from traditional processes and delighting customers with smooth, easy online experiences.

7 Best Practices for B2B E-Commerce Success

As B2B buyers grow more accustomed to making purchases online, they increasingly expect the same experience that they get from online retailers. However, B2B is not the same as B2C, and B2B sellers need to craft their digital commerce strategy with a careful eye to the needs of their buyers. Learn seven best practices that accelerate the success of the B2B e-commerce channel in this free e-book.

Read the E-Book

Introducing Liferay Commerce 1.1

2025-05-29T20:35:38Z

After months of research, design and development, Liferay Commerce 1.1 is released and available worldwide. We’ve added a brand new B2B accelerator and several features to address some of the pressing commerce needs companies are facing today.

In particular, Liferay Commerce 1.1 doubles down on two major pain points: improving the B2B user experience and bringing content & commerce together in one platform.

Improving User Experience for B2B Commerce

Across the board, companies are facing increasing pressure to deliver B2C-like experiences for their B2B customers. Due to their interactions with internet retailers, customers expect easy online purchasing to replace the phone calls and faxes that they usually have to go through when placing new orders.

However, the needs of a B2C customer and a B2B customer can be quite different. For instance, a B2B purchaser with a 15-year relationship with a spare parts manufacturer is going to be less interested in exploring a product catalog and more interested in real time updates of their order history and spend with the company. The experience should still be easy, enjoyable and beautifully designed but the fundamental tasks that a buyer cares about shift.

When a B2C retailer says they want to offer “engaging experiences” to their customers, they’re usually talking in terms of time-on-page, number of pages visited, social engagement and in-the-moment purchases. When a B2B seller looks at improving experiences, they should be thinking about how to make interactions intuitive and efficient so that their customers can come in, quickly get a task done and immediately get back to running their own business.

B2B customer dashboard in Liferay Commerce

What makes for an intuitive, efficient experience? At Liferay, we’re trying to answer this question through our B2B accelerators for Commerce. Most of the accelerators offered by commerce solutions are basically specialized site themes and templates that allow your e-commerce site to launch faster.

But on its own, a better theme can’t solve many of the common problems that B2B companies face regarding the user experience their B2B buyers need. Unlike B2C, the characteristics of a best-in-class B2B digital experience are still being defined. There is ample room for B2B companies to jump ahead of their competition by delivering a superior experience.

To help our customers achieve this, Liferay enlisted the B2B expertise of our internal UX design team and is building enhanced UX interactions into every accelerator we create.

A shining example of this is Minium, available now with the Liferay Commerce 1.1 release. Every pixel was designed for driving efficiency for buyers, with significant enhancements around the site-wide search experience, the ability to quickly add products to an order and the UI for managing multiple draft orders at once before sending into a buyer workflow.

Try it out for yourself — Liferay Commerce Demo >

Content and Commerce Across Every Channel

Regardless of whether you’re looking at B2B or B2C, one of the most-cited pain points in commerce is trying to reuse content you’ve created in a web CMS within your commerce platform. It comes back to the issue of integration — who wants to spend time trying to wrangle these two (or more) solutions when there’s such an obvious benefit to having them on a unified platform?

Having the flexibility to effortlessly mix content and commerce transforms all your channels, from marketing landing pages to enriched product pages and integrated knowledge bases. The value of product-related content multiplies in a B2B setting, where products are more complex and buyers benefit from the expertise that sellers are able to provide in the form of user guides, videos and more.

Because Liferay Commerce is built from the ground up to work with Liferay DXP, all of this integration is already handled for our customers, including integration with the features in our latest DXP 7.1 release. Instead of integrating third-party systems, companies can leverage the full benefits of a digital experience platform to provide product education within their digital commerce site, creating a single, comprehensive experience that is easier to manage and ultimately delivers more value to the customer.

There’s More to Discover in Liferay Commerce 1.1

Liferay Commerce 1.1 also introduces support for subscription products, recurring payments and more UX enhancements within the accelerator than we’re able to cover here. Make sure to watch the webinar for a comprehensive look at how the new features tie into the rest of our platform.

It’s clear that the future of best-in-class commerce experiences will blur the lines between commerce and digital experiences for each step of the customer journey. At Liferay, we’re looking forward to delivering even more value with tailored, integrated experiences for every audience in the B2B world.

Stay tuned, because this is far from the last thing we have planned for Liferay Commerce in 2019.

Unify Your Commerce on a Single, Comprehensive Platform

See how Liferay Commerce improves experiences across the entire customer lifecycle with this deep-dive webinar into the latest features.

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Why Your Business Needs to Move to the Cloud

2025-05-29T21:14:09Z

Adopting a cloud strategy in the next year should be a top priority for enterprises wanting to stay competitive. Gartner predicts that by 2020, cloud will increasingly be the default option for software deployment. In fact, having a “no cloud” policy could become as rare as an “no internet” policy. Moving onto the cloud not only offers competitive advantages but also crucial digital business benefits.

Advantages of Public Cloud Deployment

Among the different types of deployment options (on-premise, managed hosting, private cloud, etc.), public cloud deployment can be highly valuable to enterprises for the following reasons:

Cost Savings: Deploying through a public cloud solution reduces infrastructure costs as well as IT spending and maintenance. When factoring in hardware expenses, such as electricity bills and upgrades, a cloud solution delivers business value faster and with less associated costs. According to a recent TechTarget survey, more than 31% said that the main reason for using a public cloud was for a reduction in infrastructure costs.
Greater Flexibility: Cloud solutions are better suited to handle the demands of your business. When growth or seasonality shift the needs of your business, the cloud's flexibility allows you to respond accordingly — resulting in a more timely response and a better customer experience.
Faster Time to Market: Implementation is made easier with public cloud infrastructure. Right from the start, developers have everything necessary — from infrastructure to environments — decreasing time to market and allowing your business to hit the ground running.
Ease of Use: Overall, cloud solutions simplify infrastructure management. IT teams no longer need to maintain physical servers and instead can use convenient interfaces on cloud solutions for easier configuration and monitoring.

Comparing On-Premise and Cloud Deployment

But even with these benefits of the cloud, determining whether migrating to the cloud is a tangible action your business should take requires hard data and numbers to inform your decision.

To figure what which deployment method to pursue, compare the total cost of ownership (TCO) of a cloud versus an on-premise application system. Here are a few costs to consider in order to successfully implement and manage an on-premise system.

Upfront Costs: The investment that an organization can expect to pay before going live with a new application system includes design, build and deploy phases. Examples of upfront costs would include hardware, network equipment and storage costs.
Recurring Costs: The upfront costs only make up a part of the total costs and operating expense to support the enterprise application. Ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs need to be considered as recurring costs for on-premise infrastructure. It’s important to remember that hardware and software depreciate over time; so it only has about three to five years of useful life before requiring an upgrade.
Intangibles: In addition, there are other intangible costs that need to be accounted for such as security costs, costs to scale up and opportunity cost.

In comparison, here are costs that need to be considered for Cloud deployment:

Upfront Costs: Although needing a lower upfront investment, cloud applications require regular subscription fee payments.
Recurring Costs: In order to effectively use the cloud application, organizations need to invest in highly trained IT teams. The cost of training is ongoing as cloud applications continue to improve and adapt to changing business needs. Consulting costs may also be included if needed.
Intangibles: Cloud intangibles include downtime, which can impact labor productivity, revenue and reputation. Additionally, the time and effort required for remediation and service-level agreements (SLA) also impact the total cost. In order to tackle these intangibles, cloud providers need to enforce policies such as uptime commitments and high availability.

For a full list of key factors needed to calculate TCO for on-premise and cloud solutions, click here.

Moving onto the Cloud

Weighing the costs against the benefits, it’s clear to see that migrating to the cloud is a better choice than on-premise solutions. The flexibility, reliability and cost-savings make the cloud a strategic long-term solution for your business. Forrester says, “the cloud is not only a viable option for an even larger class of enterprise applications and workloads, it is often the preferred method for gaining competitive advantage in the age of the customer.”

Accelerate innovation and free up your resources by shifting focus to infrastructure management to your core competencies using cloud services.

See how Liferay Experience Cloud can work for you

Deciding to migrate to the cloud is the first step; now it’s time to decide what solution to use. Meet the newest way for enterprises to deploy and manage Liferay DXP reliably, securely and quickly.

Discover even more benefits in Liferay Experience Cloud

The Power of Portals and Open Source Development

2025-05-29T21:01:30Z

Often mischaracterized as archaic relics from the 1990s, portals today serve as the foundation for personalized content experiences and underpin the communication and collaboration efforts of large organizations around the world.

To find out more about how portals are used in the field and the changing role of open source software in the enterprise, I sat down with Dave Pierovich, Senior Portal Solutions Architect at Liferay partner Perficient.

How have portals gained more relevance in the past five years?

Executives increasingly see the importance of creating personalized experiences for their customers and portals offer one of the best ways to do that. That’s true not only of the Fortune 500 but midsize and smaller organizations as well. The corporate world is also beginning to understand that doing 100% custom builds is simply not efficient.

Ultimately, when customers ask for a “portal” what they’re asking for is a platform made up of many pre-integrated frameworks that provides a lot of functionality out-of-the-box (OOB), so you don’t have to “reinvent the wheel.” It’s much more cost-effective to purchase portal platforms like Liferay where most of the common requirements are available OOB. Custom means you have to create and maintain much more code, hire more developers, etc. With Liferay you get a lot of functionality already built for you and can focus your development effort on the functionality your company needs to differentiate itself in the market.

What are some common misconceptions you’ve encountered regarding portal technology?

What can sometimes happen is that engineering leadership at an organization says “we know Java” and think that equals “we know portal.” But there’s a huge difference between developing standard J2EE and developing for a portal. J2EE provides a framework but there’s not much there. The challenge is that development teams that aren’t familiar with portal platforms like Liferay assume that they are as limited as J2EE. As a result, unfamiliar development teams have a tendency to under-utilize and over-customize their portals, ending up with a clunky, poorly performing result that’s hard to maintain and even harder to upgrade to the next version of the platform.

Unfortunately, this sometimes results in the portal itself being blamed when the core issue is not the technology but how it’s developed and used. For example, I’ve seen organizations build custom integrations with LDAP when Liferay already provides one. There’s sometimes the idea that you should just build whatever you need. Since J2EE may not offer something, people who don’t know Liferay might not know something already exists. That’s a big mistake and one of the reasons I strongly encourage those new to Liferay to get training. Many issues arise as a result of developers trying to use Liferay before familiarizing themselves with the software.

When thinking about a new portal deployment, how do you scope the resources you’ll need for that particular implementation?

It really depends on the specifics of each implementation and what the client needs. Client requirements are quite varied. Enterprises today have come to understand the need to create personalized experiences for their customers and there’s just so much you can do with a portal. However, I typically spend two to three weeks on discovery work before development work on a project begins. I use that time to understand the client’s needs - what’s a “nice to have” versus a “need to have” - and what systems I’ll need to integrate with. From there I can create a project plan that allows me to allocate work to individual team members based on their experience, location (an offshore team can present a different set of challenges than one based locally), etc.

Can you tell me about a deployment you worked on recently that you’re particularly proud of?

I recently had the opportunity to work on a project for a major financial institution that involved developing a prototype of the system used by their internal advisors. The client was looking for a single-page application that gave them the ability to do a lot of different things. Despite being based on Angular, the previous version of the application was very clunky and slow.

With only a small team we rapidly demonstrated high-end UI capabilities built on top of Liferay. Not only was the system faster but it also recognized each user’s permissions and tailored their experience accordingly. This is something Liferay does OOB but Angular has no concept for. We were even able to integrate with React and Angular to provide a more powerful solution.

I’m incredibly proud of what my team was able to accomplish in a very short period of time. The system we built was very well received and really demonstrated what Liferay DXP can do. Liferay DXP can easily stand up to any other solution and fare well as it brings a lot of OOB functionality to the table that few others do.

How does an organization benefit from using open source technology?

There used to be a fear that open source was somehow “risky” or “not secure” because everyone could see your code. Red Hat proved that wrong with Linux in the 1990’s. In fact, open source is actually more secure thanks to Linus’s Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” With a proprietary product, a bad actor can find a vulnerability and exploit it for years before it’s discovered, reported to the vendor and patched. That’s not likely to be true of an open source offering.

In addition, open source solutions are very cost-effective thanks to their ability to leverage a wider developer community. When it comes to portals, leveraging an open source offering allows organizations to save money on software licenses and the initial purchase price, resources that can instead be used to build a custom implementation unique to an organization’s needs.

In Conclusion

Portals are powerful tools but they require investment in understanding their functionality, core strengths and weaknesses. As businesses move towards delivering more personalized experiences to prospects and customers, portals play a key role in addressing customer needs and surfacing the right content at the right time. However, like all other tools, they are best used in the hands of experienced professionals who understand their in’s and out’s.

To learn more about Perficient, be sure to check out their website and the work they’ve done to help organizations improve their digital initiatives and make better use of data.

Leveraging Liferay DXP for Personalization in Intranets

2025-05-29T20:39:58Z

Creating a personalized experience for your employees is more than a nice-to-have in today’s digitally empowered workplace. According to Gartner research, “Leaders driving intranet initiatives must be keenly aware of the No. 1 reason for intranet failure: employee neglect… Employees don’t use intranets willingly or effectively because they often aren’t designed to satisfy their needs.” Leaders can increase intranet user adoption by tailoring a solution that actually solves employee problems.

For instance, personalization in your intranet or employee portal provides concrete benefits for communication, ensuring that important information cuts through the company noise and reaches employees. With the right personalization, employees are able to do their jobs better, which improves morale and confidence, and companies see overall increases in productivity as less time is spent sifting through irrelevant information.

Types of Personalization for Intranets

When implementing an intranet solution, organizations are faced with deciding between a platform solution or an intranet point solution. The latter tends to be rigid and marketed as a “one size fits all,” suggesting that they will instantly work for any kind of business. While these point solutions do decrease time to market, a platform solution provides far greater flexibility and scalability for large or complex organizations. More specifically, a digital experience platform (DXP) provides the architecture for enterprises to produce personalized, omnichannel experiences for every audience, from employees to partners to customers.

Liferay DXP offers a mix of personalization tools that can be combined to achieve the right experience for any team.

Six Tools for Personalization

1) Role-Based Content Delivery for Large Teams

Liferay DXP allows for multiple user types to access a single URL and see a unique page view, announcement, blog post or any type of content based on their role or organization. These permissions can be executed on an incredibly granular level from unique dashboards to specific widgets. This allows for faster development of personalized experiences, especially for large enterprises with many teams and departments.

An example of two different announcements tailored towards two different users.

2) Audience Targeting for Customized Campaigns

This dynamic application allows users to create custom campaigns based on dynamic user segments like profile attributes or pages viewed. For example, audience targeting can be used to send out varying content based on different franchises’ locations. When those employees log into their intranet, they know about promotions, new products and other information relevant to their location and are not confused by different content that applies to another location.

Audience targeting is simple in Liferay DXP. Take advantage of user segments to deliver personalized content and notifications.

As a result of custom audience targeting, only new hires will see the relevant notifcation to them on the right side.

3) Access and Permissions to Streamline UI

A common pain point with intranets is the inability to easily find information. Storing information is necessary but this hinders employees from finding the content that they actually need. Site administrators can grant access to employees depending on the type of content they need to see. By simplifying content repositories and streamlining the intranet UI, employees will have a much more clear view of the content that is relevant to their job.

Leverage the incredibly granular permissions included in Liferay DXP. For example, control what users can write, view or edit blogs.

4) Team Sites for Increased Collaboration

Liferay DXP’s built-in site hierarchy increases team collaboration as department, teams and even individuals can have sites of their own, with public and private pages. To control access, admins can be assigned to each child site so that teams have one place to go for their current projects and updates without creating more noise for the rest of the company.

Liferay DXP allows users to edit site hierachies, add child sites and manage members in these sites.

5) Personal Individual Dashboards

Each user has a custom dashboard based on the applications used daily. Using a drag-and-drop designer, employees can optimize their dashboards to really suit their needs.

Users can personalize their own dashboards based on the applications and content they want to see.

6) Topic Subscriptions

Employees can control what notifications they get based on topics they are subscribed to. These can be email or push notifications through the intranet. Direct notifications can save time, making sure that employees receive important information to do their jobs well. Allowing employees to opt in or out of notifications also empowers them to adjust their intranet experience according to what works best for them.

Users can choose what notifications they recieve and how they recieve them.

How Tailored Does Your Personalization Need to be?

Personalization can be resource-intensive, so it should always be weighed against the potential to increase productivity and efficiency in your intranet. Personalization can vary according to company objectives and desires. To begin, intranet managers should identify the desired outcomes achieved. Do you want employees to be more productive? More collaborative? Employers should then gather information from intranet users on what features they would like. It only makes sense to personalize certain experiences that employees actually want. Identify where your current intranet fails to meet those user needs. These guidelines offer a good starting point to building a personalized digital workplace.

Whether customizing daily tasks to increase engagement or personalizing around team goals to increase collaboration, providing these tailored experiences will encourage intranet adoption, enabling employees to do their job better.

Turning Your Intranet Into a Competitive Advantage

Although personalized intranets starts with your employees, the benefits trickle down into your customers. These personalization tools can improve many aspects of your business, from customer service to product quality leading to competitive advantages across the entire customer journey.

Build Your Modern Intranet

How Genworth Bridges the Gap Between Business and IT

2025-06-27T18:07:48Z

One of my favorite things about Liferay’s annual symposium in North America is the chance to meet new people and hear how they’re solving common challenges that we all face at their companies. This year, I had a chance to talk with Andrea Chase from Genworth about her role in designing the company’s intranet. Genworth Financial, Inc. is a Fortune 500 insurance holding company that helps families achieve the dream of homeownership and address the financial challenges of aging through its leadership positions in mortgage insurance and long term care insurance.

At Genworth, Chase’s main priority is to bridge communication gaps between IT and Business and help each side learn how they can work together to build a better experience for their employees. We hear all the time that the most challenging part of digital transformation is not the technology, but the cultural changes that must happen in order to put customer experience at the center of business strategy. This is true whether you’re building digital experiences for customers, partners or employees — technology alone is not going to solve all problems. You need to cultivate a desire to understand your users’ needs before you begin to build a solution.

Communication Is the Foundation of Cultural Change

When I asked Chase how she would describe her role in designing Genworth’s intranet, she laughed and rattled off a handful of adjectives. “Diplomat, Orchestrator, Conductor, Peacemaker… When I started my role, there was a lot of tension from previous attempts to improve the intranet. My job was and is to get people to listen to each other. Through that, I drive the value of what IT can provide.”

For the most part, Genworth’s IT team owns the intranet strategy and is in charge of identifying requirements and implementing new features for their co-workers. When Chase started her role, she saw that, although IT was working hard to implement good solutions, their business users felt that the improvements didn’t address their real needs. Something was being lost in translation between researching requirements and delivering new features.

According to Chase, “IT and Business weren’t talking to each other. I asked IT whether they had sat down with the business users and really tried to understand the problems they were grappling with each day. Who are you building this for? Did you ask them how they want to use it? They weren’t doing that.”

Uncover What People Actually Want Before You Begin to Build

It sounds pretty obvious: before you start planning features for your project, you should be sure you understand what people want. In reality, unclear or misaligned requirements are a common struggle for many companies. In fact, up to 15% of IT projects are abandoned and at least 50% of a programmer’s time during the project is spent redoing work due to having the wrong requirements. If proper measurements, goals and test processes are implemented upfront, the majority of this wasted time can be prevented.

This is why user experience (UX) research and design has become so important to development today, whether you’re designing for an internal or an external audience. Good UX is about more than usability or visual design; it’s the job of the UX researcher to find the core problem that users are facing and figure out the best way to solve that for them. Like Chase, UX designers bridge the gap between users and IT to ensure that what’s being developed will provide true ongoing value.

Create a Culture of Listening to Find Real Value

If you’re new to UX research, your first instinct might be to sit down with your end user and ask them what they want. The problem with this is that people don’t always know what they want. In Chase’s case, employees knew what their challenges were, but didn’t know how to ask IT for the solution they wanted.

“Requests would go to IT, and IT would send back that they need more information about the business requirement. But the business users didn’t know what further information they needed. People don’t know what they don’t know, so obviously this process wasn’t working and more education was needed on both sides,” said Chase. “Without that, you have no validation that what IT is building will match what the business needs. They would build a feature and if they heard nothing back, they assumed that no news was good news, which often wasn’t the case.”

If Tension From Past Projects Is Weighing Your Team Down, Start Over With a Blank Page

At Genworth, it was clear that Chase would need to try some new communication strategies to ensure that all parties felt confident in the plans for their intranet.

“When I started, Business was afraid to talk to IT,” Chase told me. “IT was frustrated that they were spending all this time on new features that the Business side didn’t want to use. To change this, to get people to really listen to each other, I decided to do a reset. Instead of letting tensions simmer and implementing short-term fixes to problems, we would start with a blank page.”

Chase brought all of her stakeholders into a room and gave them space to air the current issues with the intranet. “I told them to get it all out there so that we could get to the point of talking about what’s not working now instead of what didn’t work in the past. Without that, we couldn’t move forward. We needed to address the elephant in the room in order to forge credibility and trust on both sides that this process would be different.”

Stakeholders Need to Contribute From the Beginning if You Want to Take Down Obstacles Together

One of the key things Chase did before the meeting was set the expectation that everyone would need to contribute. “For me, contributing means talking,” she said. In the past, there were some stakeholders who would stay quiet during a meeting, then later have side conversations with other stakeholders to share that they disagreed with what had been said.

To really move forward together, it was important to have everyone share their perspective in the meeting so that everyone else took it into account. “For me, an intranet is an experience, so I wanted to know from our users what experience works for them,” said Chase. “It’s not like every employee is the same. Things are different for new hires, for transfers, for different departments, for managers. We needed to hear every perspective in order to build the intranet we wanted.”

Today, Genworth is much further along in their process of getting IT and Business to work better together. It’s been a year since the reset, and the team has tackled challenges like improving how they onboard new hires. In the past, new hires would miss deadlines to turn in required forms because they couldn’t figure out where to find them on the intranet or weren’t aware they were needed. Now they’re able to save time and reduce frustration during this process.

If You See These Communication Challenges in Your Organization, Here’s How to Get Started

To finish our conversation, I asked Chase what advice she would give to an IT or Business leader who wants to fix these kinds of communication issues in their own organizations.

“The first thing you should do is set up some small conversations,” Chase said. “Go to each stakeholder and tell them that you want to hear about what was frustrating in the past. Then just listen. If they tell you about a problem and you immediately switch into fixing mode, they’re going to stop talking and feel like you didn’t hear them. Just listen and ask questions.

“Then, after the meeting, follow up with an email that summarizes what you heard and lists some next action items. This will reaffirm that, one, you heard what they said and two, that you’re ready to work with them to improve things.”

When it comes to digital customer experiences, culture outweighs strategy. At Liferay, we increasingly hear from IT leaders that they see their co-workers as their customers and are applying the same techniques that marketing and sales use to create better digital experiences. As digital transformation continues to drive companies forward, those that take the time to create listening cultures across the entire organization will reap the benefits of superior experiences at every touchpoint.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Genworth Financial, Inc.

Communication Matters

Employees spend up to 20% of their time searching for internal information each week. Recapture this time with a modern, user-friendly intranet that brings tools and systems under one umbrella customized for your brand, with a host of out-of-the-box tools designed to create open, efficient communication in large, complex companies.

See what a Liferay intranet can do

How to Choose a B2B E-Commerce Solution for Your Business

2025-06-27T18:08:00Z

According to Forrester Research, 57% of B2B executives said that their top technology need for investment was an e-commerce platform, making it the highest reported need in the survey. Even though most executives understand the urgency to move their businesses online, many companies that do have B2B sites simply treat these websites as online catalogs and take orders by phone or e-mail, not taking full advantage of the benefits of powerful e-commerce software. This outdated method of selling will only cripple businesses unless digital transformation is embraced.

Eliminating B2B Complexities

B2B e-commerce breaks many of the barriers associated with traditional B2B commerce. With no set store hours or geographical boundaries, businesses have virtually unlimited opportunities for growth. An effective B2B e-commerce solution will alleviate many of the complexities associated with B2B with these features:

1. Straightforward Purchasing

In general, B2B buyers prefer a B2B e-commerce platform with B2C conveniences. In fact, 93% of B2B buyers prefer to purchase online directly from their vendors and reorder easily. They want to have self-service access to their accounts and orders and pay through online options. Allowing buyers to benefit from these conveniences and making the ordering process more focused and efficient will enhance customer experiences.

Look for software that supports buyers by managing their own accounts and workflows, adding additional sales representatives directly and choosing from multiple payment and shipping options. The common complexities of B2B commerce such as managing bulk orders, accommodating different online payments methods and organizing shipping schedules can be resolved through a powerful e-commerce platform.

2. Optimized Product Management

Find software that includes efficient searching and advanced inventory management tools like real time tracking and supply chain management.

Businesses will often have lengthy and complicated catalogs that make it difficult for buyers to decipher and order. An advanced search engine tool will help customers locate the product they are looking for with ease. Furthermore, companies can improve operations by providing customers with real-time accurate inventory information across the supply chain to optimize delivery times since many B2B orders involve bulk orders. Organizations need to know how much inventory is in stock at each of their locations. Technology can aid in managing inventory on hand and backorders. Handling these complicated actions on the backend means that on the front end, all the customer sees is a personalized buying experience that they will want to keep coming back to.

3. Flexible and Personalized Configurations

From pricing to shipping, a modern B2B platform will offer flexibility and efficiency according to your business goals.

The additional complexities of B2B requires a solution that is highly configurable to accommodate for the many pricing options, authorization rules, complicated workflows, combination of payment terms and service bundles. Personalize the users’ online experience by assigning custom catalogs and pricing for specific customers and target products and promotions to specific segments. In many instances, different customers will have different pricing so that unique pricing structure needs to be reflected as well for the specific user.

4. In Depth Analytics and Reporting

Utilize a powerful solution that offers data reporting tools that show insight into customer interests, page performance and asset engagement levels to understand how to cater your website towards audience behavior.

A unique benefit of doing business online is having a wealth of data and analytics otherwise not possible through traditional commerce. Digital platforms track performance metrics, provide real-time analysis of traffic patterns and reveal what customers are doing on the site. This data can be transformed into a deeper understanding of customers that leads to more informed decision making that in turn helps the organization create even better customer experiences.

The Future of B2B E-Commerce

Today B2B digital commerce is on track to hit $1 trillion by 2019. Businesses should not shy away from this technology but instead capitalize on the growth of B2B e-commerce. Recognizing how an e-commerce solution can answer your B2B challenges will be the first step into tailoring an experience that will exceed your customers’ expectations and nurture them into loyal buyers.

A Digital Experience That Earns Customer Loyalty

Liferay Commerce is designed specifically to ease the complexities of B2B e-commerce so you can spend more time evolving and growing your business

Learn more about the features included in Liferay Commerce

Open Source and the Value of a Strong Community

2025-06-27T18:08:49Z

Liferay has been passionate about open source since the first version of our product, and every year we find that collaborating with our community ultimately creates products that are better for everyone. On our community blog, you can consistently find Liferay staff and community members sharing their knowledge and working together to improve developer and user experiences.

One of the top Liferay contributors, Andrew Jardine, recently agreed to let me interview him about open source today and the value of being a contributor. With almost 10 years of Liferay experience, Jardine has successfully delivered more than a dozen projects for organizations, large and small, in North America. Jardine's contributions to Liferay span multiple versions of the product, from 5.x through to 7.x. Read on to hear his thoughts on what makes a good open source community, how he uses open source to ensure his clients are successful, and why developers need to embrace the current shifts in development paradigms.

Tell me about yourself and what kinds of development projects you work on.

Unlike most people, I (Jardine) knew from a very young age that I wanted to be a programmer. I started playing with computers LONG before they were "cool," which means that I can be labeled a true "nerd." Professionally, I've got about 20 years of technology under my belt, but if you consider the years before my formal schooling and profession started, that number would be closer to 30 years.

I love not just discovering new tech but also thinking up creative ways that it can be used — ways that perhaps, a lot of the time, were not necessarily how the technology was intended to be used. That's one of the main drivers for me to be involved in open source — the idea of creating something awesome and simply sharing it with others to see what they can do with it.

Liferay, for me, is a poster child for this. It has some strong product features to let you get off the ground relatively quickly, but at the same time it has so many entry points for customization and extension that the ways you can twist or mold the product are virtually endless. To me it is akin to the swiss army knife of software.

Is there a particular type of project or company you really like to work with?

Not really, to be honest. At this point, I've worked with just about every industry vertical. I've worked with huge organizations that have thousands of people, and I have worked with small two-man startups.

Projects are pretty much the same. Some have been massive undertakings that will affect the whole scale of how the organization collaborates, others have been micro tools aimed at solving one particular problem alone. I enjoy all of it.

The only thing I look for from the outset of any engagement is an open minded culture that is willing (at the risk of quoting an overused pun) to think outside the box. For example, an intranet site can be nothing more than a collection of pages with seemingly endless amounts of information on them, or it could be an engaging social-based user experience that provides not just data on a page but also a way to connect with experts. Ultimately I want to build whatever helps make my clients successful, but I always push to build a little bit more, go the extra mile so that you can really capture the attention of your audience. I'll say this though, anyone who solicits my help for a Liferay project gets a definite yes if I have time in my schedule.

How do you choose which technologies to invest in?

That's a tough one. I do my best to follow the market trends, but that can be difficult at times. It seems like every other day there is some "new" hot thing that everyone is talking about, which means that keeping up and/or filtering the flash in the pan from the ones with staying power can be hard.

The short answer for this would be that I choose to invest my time and money in anything that I feel will help me enable my clients to be successful. A lot of the time that means that I am only focusing on what is "hot" in the market based on the needs of my current clients, but I also try to understand the way the industry is moving in general and do my best to at least keep a survey of what’s out there so that I know where to focus my attention when the time comes.

Liferay has been a staple product in my toolbox for many years now, though. I rely on and believe in it so strongly that I often find myself demonstrating it to any client that isn't already aware of it. It just offers so much as a development platform that I feel it provides real value for my client’s buck.

For open source, I sometimes see people who are concerned that a project won’t be supported long-term or won’t have much investment from developers. Is that something you take into account?

It's not really something I take into account when it comes to open source. I think the projects with the best results are the ones that choose the right tool for the job. Technology moves so quickly these days that spinning your wheels on such issues, I feel, is a waste of resources. Of course you want to do your due diligence and make sure that the choices you make are sound, but if you are choosing to use open source software, you are accepting that there is a bit of personal ownership involved.

In fact, what I love most about open source is the fact that you DON'T have to worry about long-term support or developer interest. Having the source code available means that even if the project does die (from a community perspective), you could continue to maintain it on your own — or better yet, you could use it to spin off a new project. For me, the purpose of open source is not "long-term support" but rather the idea that I am sharing something I have built and you can choose to use it the way I have built it or you can take my idea and branch off with it in a new direction.

How much open source technology do you use?

The amount I use is directly linked to the amount my clients use. For my own company, I think it’s probably a good mix of 75% open source and 25% licensed (either perpetual or as a SaaS). 90% of the work I do does involve Liferay since that is a core focus of my business.

I think that people often dismiss open source as "hobby" projects, but in fact I think that some of the best software on the market is either open source, or offers an open source companion project. Most of the time when my clients shy away from the free version of a piece of software, it’s not about the quality, but about the support. Most organizations want some level of support (from a vendor) to mitigate some of their operational risk.

This is where I think that Liferay is a great option for my clients. For those that are willing to take on the risk, they are fine to use the community version. If they are risk-averse, then they have the option of a DXP subscription. The two streams of the product are so close feature-wise that it's not as if you need to buy the enterprise subscription to get access to all the features. Both the community and enterprise versions of the software are built by the same folks. That is a great selling point when trying to weigh the benefits of choosing Liferay over a competing product.

What are some of the changes in technology that developers should be focused on right now?

That's a big question. I think everyone has their own opinion on this one, to be honest. Lately though, I have found myself thinking about this. There was a time when business users had virtually no technical knowledge. I think those days are largely gone. Technology has been thrust into all of our everyday lives. Tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, smart cars but most importantly SELF SERVICE is a theme that is becoming ever present: empowering users to be self sufficient.

I think software is headed in this direction as well. If you consider the latest trends surrounding these immensely popular Javascript frameworks that are used to build rich client side based applications, I think you find a lens into the future. One of the best features of these Javascript frameworks is that they allow the developers to link to repositories that are chalk-full of modules or components that they can simply grab and use. In some cases, the only code the developer has to write is the code that stitches these modules together.

By updating Liferay to support OSGi, you are opening up the platform to this new model. I think programming in the future will be more and more microservice- or microcomponent-based development. Eventually, you will likely find that the outset of almost any project will be time spent scouring a registry selecting the services you want to use before you start stitching.

The prospect this provides for me is that we might see a day when our business user is able to build their own applications by snapping services and components together in much the same way we allow them to create and manage content today.

Are there other shifts or skill sets that you think will be critical for developers in the next five years?

I think the biggest challenge coming for developers is twofold. First, embracing this kind of change is difficult, especially for guys like me that have been around through the years. It's a pretty major shift from what we are used to as developers, but I think putting the control into the hands of the users is a good thing as it frees up your time to be creative and focus on something new.

The second challenge will be changing the way you architect or even think about development. We're used to tackling problems in the concept of an ecosystem, but for this type of model it really boils down to tackling the problem in a bubble. You have to assume a more contract-based approach to programming. Fortunately, for a number of years now, software has been headed in this direction. This contract-based approached has shown its face more than once already. First in the push for SOA, then in the movement towards public APIs and more recently in the fury of developing microservices. So we're already thinking contractually, but I feel like this is smaller still.

What does an open source project need to do to win over developers like you?

For me, it's all about the community. Some people like to fixate on documentation or developer guides. Don't get me wrong, those are very important, especially in the early days when you are new to the product and are trying to figure it out. Over the long term though, as people start to be a little more creative with their use of the tools, you start to wade into areas that are basically impossible to "document." At that point, for me, the responsiveness and the participation of the community becomes key.

You need to have the means to connect with the other people who are using this tool or product so that you can engage in a conversation with them. The conversation might end up being a round table type discussion where you are spitballing ideas, or it might be in a support type capacity where one member is helping another troubleshoot or understand a corner use case.

At the end of the day, I think that community connections are a foundational pillar for any successful open source project. From my experience, this is one of the places that Liferay excels. As one of Liferay's most active community members, I do have a bias I suppose, but I have been helped more times than I can count simply by posting a message in the forums or in the Liferay Community Slack channel. Sometimes it is a Liferay staff member that answers my question, but much of the time it is another community member like myself. If everyone gives just a little, then collectively we all gain a lot.

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As customer expectations and business needs multiply, companies risk increasing IT complexity when they address these challenges one-by-one with their technology choices. See how Liferay Digital Experience Platform can help you bring software solutions into a unified system, saving time and resources by eliminating silos, connecting databases and shortening business processes.

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Six Elements of Great Customer Web Portal Software

2025-06-27T18:09:14Z

What is a Modern Customer Web Portal?

Customers today want to log in and enjoy a simple and good quality experience. This means it would make a lot of business sense for companies to implement a modern customer web portal, and here’s why.

In our hyper-connected digital world, a good customer web portal with a great user experience is pretty much mandatory for businesses that wish to stay ahead of the competition, engage customers in a positive manner, and grow their customer base.

A customer web portal is a website that allows customers to log in to a business (or government agency in the public sector) and enjoy a personalized experience as they request services, order products, find and read information, and peruse their own unique customer history. These portals are secure digital locations that give customers an easy and direct single point of access from which to explore to their hearts’ content.

Customer web portals have come a long way over the last 10 years or so. Today’s modern customer portals and service portals now offer advanced personalisation and customisation options, allowing businesses to provide highly curated information and unique features to their customers.

In this article, we’ll help you understand what functions and features are necessary to make a great customer web portal that improves the digital experience of your customers.

Why Do Customers Enjoy Using Good Quality Web Portals?

Customers have made their preferences for using web portals clear. Recent figures from Statista found that 88% of customers globally now expect brands to offer an online service and support web portal. If made available, 91% of customers would use an online knowledge base if it was tailored to their own requirements and Gartner predicts that by 2030, customers will generate a billion service tickets while trying to find answers for themselves online.

So, why do today’s modern customers enjoy using web portals so much? What exactly do they get out of the experience and what do they expect? In a nutshell, simplicity and good information. Customers want self-service portals to be responsive to their needs and enquiries, helping to solve their issues in a timely manner. Customer web portals need to be engaging, informative, and even entertaining as customers gain access to buying products and services in both B2C and B2B environments. In addition, it’s crucial for portals to be intuitive, delivering easy-to-use experiences across all touch points.

How You Can Turn Customer Service into a Profit Center

By reducing costs and generating new revenue streams with self-service, customer experience leaders can leverage customer experience to be a primary contributor to profitability. Download the e-book to find out more about the benefits of self-service to help improve your business performance.

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In other words, they want convenience - which leads to increased satisfaction - and they want it delivered digitally at the time of their own choosing.

Some of these customer desires transcend multiple channels, touch points, and interactions but a great customer web portal is definitely one way to create seamless and personalized experiences to ensure your organization meets many of these modern customer expectations.

Use Cases and Examples: Why Users Would Use a Customer Web Portal

A customer web portal can meet the unique needs of your customers by delivering content, services, and tools that are specific to each customer.

Exact use cases tend to vary depending on the industry in question. Examples of common customer portals across various sectors include:

Financial services: providing personalized online banking services for a retail or business banking customer.
Utilities companies: providing online tools to monitor and control a customer’s water or electricity usage for a business, tenant, or homeowner.
Software vendors: providing new customers with specialized onboarding help and tools when the customer buys software for the first time.

As you can see, the examples are numerous with each set of products and services across different industries presenting opportunities for delivering great customer experiences through a modern web portal.

Critical Elements to Consider When Deploying Customer Web Portals

Organizations often face the choice between building or buying when it comes to deploying a modern customer web portal. There are pros and cons for each approach, but the fact is that creating a customer portal from scratch can require extensive resources where time and costs will add up.

However, investing in great customer web portal software that’s been proven to deliver the following capabilities can help you build an effective platform to serve your customers better. These are the 6 critical elements to look for:

1. High Availability and Scalability as Your Business Expands

No matter what kind of business goals you have, any good portal software needs to have high availability and scalability built in to meet your needs as your organization changes over time. This capability ensures that your software is built at the architectural level to mitigate against unexpected events and unplanned changes in your business landscape. Not only should your software be safe from a business risk perspective, it should also be able to handle a growing amount of interactions, expanding exponentially if necessary as your business, products, and services change and grow.

2. Robust Self-Service Capabilities

According to a recent study, 59% of consumers and 71% of business buyers say that self-service availability impacts their loyalty to a brand. In today’s digital environment, online self-service functions commonly exist such as access to a strong knowledge base, the ability to lodge and resolve service requests, and being able to easily find and initiate instant chat services. These offerings are no longer supplemental tools, they are online necessities that customers use every day. These features are now expected by most consumers, so it’s important that customer web portal software includes these self-service capabilities in order to create an instantaneous and positive digital experience.

3. Highly Flexible to Change With Your Business

Portal software can vary quite a lot in flexibility and adaptability, and great portal software will be the kind that can adapt to your business needs. For example, an organization with a dedicated team of programmers would benefit from a customer web portal built on open source software which caters for extra flexibility, customisation, and integration. Equally, if the organization doesn’t have programmers on the team, it’s just as important to find software that provides plenty of best practice out-of-the-box features and tools, so that non-technical team members can easily learn how to use the platform so the organization can gain all of the benefits.

4. Security to Protect Your Customer’s Information

In our hyper-connected digital landscape, customer data as well as commercial company information is regularly stored online, often moving between locations. Customer portals will often need to contain sensitive information such as patient or client addresses, customer credit card information, order invoices, and other identifying data. A secure customer portal, with robust modern features such as encryption and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), will allow users to feel safe when inputting private information or accessing sensitive documents within your web portal. In short, best practice online security is expected with the ability to safeguard any and all sensitive data, so be sure to deliver a secure experience for your customers if you want to protect your brand integrity and customer experience.

5. In-Depth Analytics Tools for Improving Customer Experiences

No digital experience should remain stagnant; the beauty of online platforms is they can always be fine tuned, updated, and enhanced. Organizations need to ensure the digital experiences they present through customer web portals come with a high quality analytics function, harnessing data for analysis, scrutiny, and improvement. For example, you always want to know whether a particular page or service is performing well. Analytics can help you ask and answer questions like ‘does the customer know exactly where to find the information they are seeking?’ or ‘is there anything on a particular page that is negatively impacting user behavior?’. The right customer web portal software includes valuable and comprehensive analytical tools and reports that deliver this key requirement, examining the effectiveness of your portal and providing information that will be helpful in continually enhancing the overall customer experience.

6. Customer-Centered Functionalities

Ultimately a customer portal should enhance the experience customers have with your organization. When you are looking for software to start building a customer portal, consider offerings that include the functionalities that would best benefit the experience for your end users. No two customer portals will have all of the exact same features and functions because each business will have its own unique goals, products, and services. Whether the software you select has in-built advanced search functions, multi language support, or varying security hierarchies, make sure you choose the software with the capabilities that can best serve your specific customers.

Business Benefits of Self-Service Portals and How to Get Started

Beyond delivering a better customer online experience with your company, a web portal provides a range of business benefits. These include reduced costs from storing information digitally (reducing the need to print and post materials) and lower support costs as customers more readily help themselves without having to talk to service staff as often. Another major business benefit is staff utilization. When a good quality self-service platform is available with the customer web portal, sales and service representatives have more time to focus on tasks of greater value.

Ultimately - while there are several key components that comprise great customer web portals, the most important elements are those that will build a satisfying customer experience for your users. Not just immediately but over the duration of a long-term mutually rewarding relationship. Furthermore, a portal that can be custom-tailored to your customers’ exact needs will be integral to your organization’s ongoing success.

Ready to request a demo of Liferay’s customer web portal? If you’re in the research phase or planning your own portal, now could be the ideal time to explore Liferay’s digital experience platform (DXP) - you can request a live demo anytime and we’ll be happy to show you all the features and functionality built in to help you achieve your customer experience and process efficiency goals.

Three Communication Challenges Your Intranet Can Solve

2025-05-29T21:02:52Z

There’s hardly a company out there that doesn’t struggle with effective communication within the workplace. In fact, 86% of executives cite ineffective communication as the cause of workplace failures. If you run a small company, it’s easier to get everyone in one room for a company-wide update or discussion. For enterprises, the challenge of communicating across cultures, geographies and time zones costs a significant amount of time and resources.

Intranets are a powerful way for companies to address these challenges cost-effectively. For instance, Liferay DXP comes with knowledge bases, forums and a blogging platform out of the box, meaning that setting them up is simply a matter of adding your users and enabling each feature. Even better, the nature of these collaborative channels gives leadership a way to foster transparency and open communication in their organizations.

You’ll find similar communication features across intranet platforms because these channels have been around for years, with plenty of time to mature and evolve according to real user needs. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when setting up forums, blogs or a knowledge base on your intranet, but choosing a modern, enterprise-grade platform ensures that you’re getting a polished user experience that employees feel comfortable using, as well as general refinement that you might not be able to achieve if you build one from scratch.

To get started, here are three common challenges that companies face, and how an intranet can be improved to address them.

Challenge #1: I need to fix top-down communication.

Your company struggles with keeping the right teams informed about important company announcements, such as new products, resources, policies, etc. You post info on your company portal, but no one seems to read it. If this is one of your top challenges, here are a few things to implement that will make a fast impact.

Set up analytics to track user engagement. Analytics in intranets are often overlooked due to cost factors. However, if you can set up basic page metrics like views and Click Through Rates, you can address any gaps that are preventing your announcements from getting through.

Provide a way for people to ask questions. Some of the best information sharing comes from comments, especially as members of different teams jump in and address different questions. In addition to enabling comments, providing direct messaging or chat within your intranet makes it easier for people to find and talk with coworkers they haven’t met in person.

Target content based on role. By automating curation, you can ensure that only relevant announcements are reaching each employee, eliminating the rest of the company chatter that they don’t need to worry about. Liferay DXP has an application called Asset Publisher that can target all content within Liferay, from knowledge base articles to blog posts. Another option is to organize announcements by topics and allow employees to select which ones they want to be notified about.

Challenge #2: I want to encourage interdepartmental communication.

Your teams don’t seem to talk to each other, and it makes it hard to coordinate initiatives. You end up with inconsistencies in marketing, product vision or customer support because of siloed decision making. Improving interdepartmental communication usually involves an organizational culture shift, but there are several ways that you can facilitate the process through your intranet.

Encourage team blogs. Sometimes communication gaps between departments come down to not knowing the right person to contact. When one team member posts regular updates, other employees know who to approach when a question comes up.

Set up a company forum. Message boards and forums are typically a more casual channel, so employees feel less pressure to put together something polished like they might for a company-wide communication. This leads to teams getting information out faster to those who need it.

Dedicate resources to improving the UX. Make it as straightforward as possible to share information on your intranet. User adoption is often an obstacle for intranets, but by improving the UX for common tasks, you can increase the likelihood that people will use it.

Challenge #3: I want to hear more feedback from employees.

Management wants to hear more real time feedback from employees about how the company can improve. Some feedback comes through, but it’s from a small selection of people or it isn’t specific enough. Making room for feedback can be tricky, but creating the right channels can go a long way toward empowering employees in their roles.

Run an employee feedback survey. There are many tools you can use to quickly build forms and send them out to employees. You could run this as a single campaign with a deadline, or you can create feedback templates that are available whenever an employee has something to submit.

Create space for feedback within the normal workflow. One challenge with forms or surveys is that they tend to focus on what management wants to know, rather than what employees want to share. By integrating the feedback process with different tasks, you’re able to capture real time feedback as employees think about it. For instance, Liferay DXP has a suggestion box for knowledge base articles, and surfaces those suggestions for content authors. This also makes it easier to communicate to employees that their feedback is being heard and acted on.

Intranets Work Best When Tailored for Your Company

No digital tool solves all communication problems. Management still needs to work at opening up communication through company culture and personal interactions. There are many familiar channels for these — meetings, quarterly reviews, end of the year surveys, casual lunch conversations — that can be strengthened by an intranet. If you can implement the right balance of tools for your company’s unique needs, you can solve these communication problems faster, improving employee satisfaction and productivity.

Communication Matters

See what a Liferay intranet can do

Winning CX With a 4-D Customer Experience Strategy

2025-05-29T21:15:49Z

One thing is very clear from the conversations at LSNA 2018: customer experience is still at the top of everyone’s mind. A number of our partners and customers shared stories about how they are making strategic and organizational changes that will allow them to drive new levels of engagement with their customers.

Jon Eberly, CEO of Liferay partner Clock Four, calls this 4-D customer experience. At LSNA 2018, he shared in detail how his company helps organizations combine strategy and technology to create more successful customer experiences.

Customer Experience vs. User Experience

Before we get into the different dimensions of customer experience, it’s important to remember that User Experience and Customer Experience are two different things. UX is the implementation of CX strategy; it brings together user research, beautiful design and usability testing to deliver great experiences. However, companies still need a layer of strategy above UX that determines what qualifies as a “great” experience, which usually involves a balance of customer satisfaction and business ROI.

Eberly explained it this way:

The UX designer asks, “Have you created a highly usable, efficient and effective experience?” But the CX designer asks, “Have you created the RIGHT experience?” If the highly usable, efficient experience isn’t aligned with business priorities, you’ve created a great experience that’s still the wrong one.

Digital Leaders Win With Four Dimensional CX Strategy

With that in mind, here are the dimensions of customer experience that Eberly identified.

2-D Marketing

Height and Width, i.e., the screen.

2-D marketing leverages highly usable elements, clear calls to action, a well-organized layout and intuitive navigation. Users can easily find what they need, and the design of the page guides them to the desired business outcomes with CTAs.

3-D Marketing

Depth, i.e., personalization.

3-D marketing is defined by personalized content, entitled navigation and entitled functionality. Users don’t have to search for what they want; instead, the design and functionality of the site adjusts dynamically to what they need.

4-D Marketing

Time, i.e., the funnel.

4-D marketing represents the most mature stage of marketing for companies, with technology implemented to deliver exceptional experiences over lengths of time. It can includes elements such as gamification, sales stage triggers and behavioral reinforcement to ensure the customer journey progresses.

By dividing marketing maturity into this model, it’s easier to figure out which dimension your company is working in now. You may not have these exact marketing tools on your website, but most companies can answer pretty quickly whether their marketing is accounting for personalization or time.

Take Your Strategy to the Next Level

To evolve customer experience strategy, Eberly recommended that companies focus on three areas for the CX stack.

First, look at customer alignment. Are the benefits of your products aligned with the needs of your ideal customer? If not, you’ll need to either adjust your audience, your messaging or your product. Without that clear connection between product benefits and customer needs, any marketing tactics you try will have limited value.

Next, look at customer experience, particularly at how customers move from touchpoint to touchpoint. Is the customer journey seamless, omnichannel and personalized? Are you able to maintain consistency with things like saving information entered on mobile so that it’s available to customers on desktop later?

Finally, assess customer utility. Are your platforms and interfaces integrated, usable, scalable and engaging? In other words, are you executing well on the promises your marketing messaging makes, or is technology getting in the way of your strategy?

Great Experiences Are for More Than Customers

In closing, Eberly shared briefly about a B2B customer relationship portal that his company worked on for Elan, which manages about 200,000 local and regional financial institutions on behalf of credit card issuing relationships. When research their users, they found that users that take online training book 40% more accounts on average. They adjusted the UX of the site to prioritize training in page placement, with compelling messaging and incentives to encourage users to take the training.

All the hype around improving customer experience isn’t for nothing. When companies get it right, the pay-off is phenomenal. By broadening their marketing strategy to include all four dimensions of customer experience, companies can get to these results faster, with experiences that users truly value.

Equip Your Team for Great Experiences

Successful customer experiences take time, effort and strategy, but it may be difficult for a company to know where to start. To learn more, read about three strategies for consistent experiences and see what improvements are right for you.

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Redesigning the Liferay Mobile Events App

2025-05-29T20:56:07Z

At Liferay, we have regular events across the world, including France, Germany, Brazil and, of course, North America. Each event needs a dedicated marketing site and mobile experience, with diverse requirements from our teams. To reduce the time it takes to create these sites, our marketing development team decided to completely redesign the process for creating these sites, as well as how the mobile app is delivered.

Ryan Schuhler, a software engineer at Liferay, shared about this redesign process at LSNA 2018. As one of the main engineers responsible for providing solutions for marketers at Liferay, Schuhler worked on designing a new process for delivering events site and mobile that would decrease development time through the creation of reusable web components.

Setting a Path Forward for Scalable Designs

The team’s first goal for the redesign was to give users what they needed. In this case, that meant ensuring that event attendees would be able to easily find session and speaker information, as well as other useful features like push notifications.

The second goal was to improve administration so that marketers could create and update events sites without going through the development team. This was critical. Liferay has a relatively small development team for its global marketers, and anything that saves them time results is a huge advantage for the company.

Streamlining the Conversation

To address this, the development team started by bringing the conversation around requirements, design mock-ups and refinements into one workflow. This freed them to develop the desktop and mobile experience at the same time without worrying that requirements would change later in the process. If you’ve been to a Liferay event, you know that the mobile app is the primary way we provide agenda information, event updates and partner offers, so having time to implement a great user experience was incredibly important.

The team started by auditing all of the recent events in order to understand the common requirements that marketers had for the websites and mobile app.

“When we started, our marketers were worried that this would limit their creativity,” said Schuhler. “In reality, by starting with their requirements, we were able to give them everything they needed to deliver the experiences they want.”

After identifying the key requirements, the team designed configurable components that could be reused across events and regions.

“We have three types of events,” explained Schuhler. “We knew they needed different styling, but the same components could be used because the functionality was the same. This allowed us to give a unique look and feel for each event type while still maintaining brand consistency in the buttons, layout and so on.”

Refining Administration

To improve the administration experience for marketers and give them more independence, the team created a new portlet for editing event content. For example, editing speaker and session info is easier with a content editing interface dedicated to organizing that content.

Everything is centralized, which means that marketers can now update content in one place and know that it will be updated on both the website and the mobile application. The development team achieved this with Xamarin, which allows you to generate a web and mobile experience with a single code base. The team also used Liferay Screens, a library of mobile app components, to speed up development, as well as an integration with Firebase for notifications and session ratings.

Time Saved

With the previous process of designing events sites, it took an average of 80 days to finish a ticket. This year, it took an average of 9 days to complete tickets for LSNA. This includes the full process, from defining requirements with the stakeholder to delivering the final design. This dramatically freed up the development team’s time to work on other critical projects.

The team also reduced resources needed to complete new sites. Today, it only takes about one-third of the dev resources to create event sites when compared to last year. Much of this saved time came from eliminating the process of gathering requirements for each event. Since the components are already designed based on marketers’ needs, developers no longer have to have multiple conversations with stakeholders to understand what they want.

These results speak for themselves. “We learned a lot, but we also know that there’s room to keep growing,” said Schuhler. By focusing on improving the collaboration between marketing and development, Liferay is able to deliver better experiences for its event attendees worldwide.

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The What and Why of Customer Data Platforms

2025-05-29T21:02:37Z

As part of the vision for Liferay Analytics Cloud, product manager Jon Lee did a deep dive into customer data platforms and why companies need them as part of their digital strategies.

With the increasing importance of customer experience, companies need to find better, more comprehensive ways to understand their customers with data. Among the top challenges of customer experience management is achieving a single view of the customer. According to a survey done during LSNA 2018, we found that only 8% of attendees felt they had a strong solution for achieving a single view of the customer. When asked what the challenges were, one of the top ones was solutions for bringing together data from disparate systems.

Why a Customer Data Platform?

Improving the customer journey is the first step in delivering exceptional customer experiences. “We believe that a CDP is a key part of making this happen,” said Lee.

Customers today use more than one touchpoint to address their needs. As they move between digital touchpoints, such as email and mobile apps, and physical touchpoints, such as talking with an agent or calling customer support, companies need solutions for capturing that data, organizing it, and discovering trends that can help them improve customer experience at scale.

With features focused on efficient integration and ensuring data quality, customer data platforms are positioned to be a key part of understanding the customer journey.

What Can You Do With a Customer Data Platform?

A customer data platform integrates, cleans and combines data from multiple sources to create a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems. Lee went over several benefits with a CDP:

Sales and Marketing can more easily map customer journeys by breaking users into meaningful segments and tracking how they engage across touchpoints.
Data analysts can stitch together different sources of data and ensure that they have clean, high quality data to work with.
Data privacy regulations such as GDPR are easier to respond to because you have a clear picture of the customer information your systems are gathering.

To achieve this, future releases of Liferay Analytics Cloud will include more out-of-the-box connectors to facilitate integrations with common systems used by enterprises. Ultimately, the vision for Liferay Analytics Cloud is to enable companies to connect data across all systems and sites, including legacy systems with custom data.

See What Liferay Analytics Cloud Can Do

Liferay Analytics Cloud helps companies uncover deeper insights into who their customers are and how they’re engaging with Liferay sites. It also helps measure the performance of assets so that companies can ensure they’re creating the right content for their users.

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Transforming Autonomous Vehicle Production with Big Data

2025-05-29T21:05:47Z

Aptiv, formerly called Delphi, sees themselves as a company that addresses urban mobility challenges. When you look at population increases that are coming in the next decade, it becomes clear that innovation is needed in mobility.

“Today, our portfolio consists mostly of what we call Smart Vehicle Architecture and Smart Mobility Solutions,” said Steve Hutchins, Chief Engineer of Manufacturing Information Systems at Aptiv. This includes things like automated driving, but goes beyond those features to comprehensive mobility experiences.

This innovation requires Aptiv to push the envelope in its manufacturing. A key challenge was getting actionable data into the right hands across a diverse global enterprise. With over two million transactions spread over 74 servers across the globe, a lot of time is spent finding information and tracking down who owns it.

To address these challenges, Aptiv decided to build a global manufacturing intelligence portal, and it conducted a thorough discovery process for the project. It knew that it wanted to streamline and co-locate all of its data with a best-in-class portal platform, and that it would need a development partner that could act as a thought leader to guide them. Aptiv decided on partnering with Youngsoft to deliver a new solution on Liferay.

A One Stop Shop for Global Intelligence

Traditionally, Aptiv employees needed to be within a plant in order to access information. A major goal of the new solution was to break down these silos and create a true omnichannel experience that allowed employees to access information anywhere, without fiddling with VPNs and without risking data security.

The manufacturing intelligence portal achieved this with a number of features. For instance, to solve the limited visibility that managers had for daily regional and global trends for daily targets, they automated the consolidation of systems and exposed revenue goals to the right people.

They were also able to deliver real time production data on screens that are placed throughout their plants, so that employees always have accurate information in front of them as they work. This completely digitized the manual process of logging this information and consolidating it for global plants. Data from every global transaction is streamed into a data lake, which is displayed in a dashboard that is available on any device, anywhere.

Another key feature that Aptiv was able to develop was targeted alarming for manufacturing plants. “Historically, when alarms go off in plants, everyone hears them,” said Hutchins. “With the portal, we’ve identified the right equipment and users, and built targeted alarming that gets alerts to the right person.” These alerts can be anything from email to push notifications to alarm lights within plants.

As we heard in another session, the trends in manufacturing can be seen as a risk or a possibility for organizations. Aptiv’s solution shows that IT leaders can bring emerging technologies together and deliver powerful solutions that solve business problems, in ways we never used to think were possible.

See What Liferay Analytics Cloud Can Do

Liferay Analytics Cloud aggregates data and visualizes analytics regarding people and interactions on any website, allowing companies to measure content performance and provide essential personalized experiences.

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How Dropbox Ensures Success for Its Partner Portal

2025-05-29T20:31:00Z

At Liferay, we hear over and over from our customers that partners are a critical component of their success. To that end, being able to deliver an exceptional partner experience is just as important as the customer experience. By becoming easy to work with, companies can nurture loyalty with their partners and create more successful relationships.

Alaaeldin El-Nattar, COO of Rivet Logic, shared how Dropbox is managing its growing partner ecosystem while equipping partners with the tools they need to succeed.

Dropbox started in 2007 as a simple way for people to easily share their files wherever they are. Today, they have over 500 million users and over 300,000 teams using Dropbox Business. This large, global footprint means that they need to manage a rapidly growing global partner network. In order to have a robust partner experience, they needed a way to streamline their management.

Ensuring the Success of a Global Partner Network

One of the key challenges Dropbox faced was that they had no centralized solution for their 7,000 partners. They were also still relying on tedious manual web forms for deal registration and for creating support tickets, which lead to high turnaround times. Finally, their sales enablement was limited, with no access to sales and marketing resources or training materials to help their partners succeed.

Dropbox decided on the following requirements for their partner portal:

The solution needed to be flexible and customizable so that they could evolve as expectations changed.
The new portal also needed to streamline and automate processes, especially when it comes to onboarding new partners.
Self service options were a must, so that partners had the tools they needed, right when they needed them without having to wait on Dropbox to help them.

Dropbox started looking for a SaaS product, but found that the lack of platform flexibility would limit their ability to cater to their partners unique requirements. The team considered an in-house application instead, but feared that it would be difficult to maintain, enhance or add new features.

When Rivet Logic suggested Liferay DXP, Dropbox realized that this was the best of both options: a customizable platform that came with foundational components so that they weren’t starting from scratch.

“When people say ‘buy versus build,’ no one talks about the in-between,” said El-Nattar. “That’s what Liferay enables us to do.”

Designing the Right User Experience

Delivering an incredible user interface and user experience was a high priority for Dropbox. Although they have their own internal UX team, they leaned on Rivet Logic’s Liferay expertise to understand the best way to develop their ideas within Liferay’s platform, ensuring that the implementation maximized the out-of-the-box features.

There were many features that made the new portal successful for Dropbox, such as:

Centralized access to resources and tools
Localized experience based on regions
Role-based content targeting
Seamless integration with back-end systems
Self service capabilities for common tasks such as registering new deals and request support. The portal combines intuitive user interfaces with integrated workflows, so that partners can easily accomplish a task without having to be trained on the process.

The new partner portal was also built with scalable designs that aligned with Liferay’s road map to ensure longevity of the solution. In addition to the consolidated, streamlined partner experience, the new portal has allowed Dropbox to realize cost savings and reduced time-to-market, and has laid the groundwork for smooth upgrades in the future.

“Upgrades are important because, in Liferay, you can build your solution in different ways,” said El-Nattar. “When we implement solutions, we ensure that anything being developed will have a clear path to upgrade based on what’s coming.” Rivet Logic’s years of experience have given them a familiarity with Liferay that allows them to advise their clients on the best way to find success with Liferay DXP.

Learn What’s New in Liferay DXP 7.1

The latest release of Liferay DXP includes a host of new features and improved functionality, such as flexible, efficient page design, data protection tools, streamlined usability for business users and more.

Learn More

Optimizing Business Processes With Form-Based Applications

2025-05-29T20:46:26Z

Sometimes when we take pictures, we surface small pieces of what we’re experiencing. But the world we see is much bigger than the pictures we take. There’s a huge opportunity within business operations to drive convenience with optimized processes that the customer may never see, but that greatly improves their experience.

During LSNA 2018, Charlles Pinon shared about what’s new and what’s coming in Liferay Forms, and how companies can leverage these improvements to change how they engage with their customers.

What’s New in Liferay Forms?

Forms are everywhere. Whether you’re running a feedback survey or guiding a customer through the process of purchasing a product, forms are a key part of how companies communicate with customers.

Good forms have relevant questions that personalize the experience to customer interests. By improving personalization, companies can reduce abandonment in forms. With the release of 7.1, Liferay DXP brings together advanced forms functionality with a low-code approach that allows business users to create new forms faster than ever, with built-in personalization tools.

“We have support for everything from multi-language support to customizable conditional rules,” explained Charlles Pinon, the product manager for Forms and Workflow at Liferay.

What Does It Mean for Your Company?

The latest improvements mean that companies can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to build and manage new forms for advanced business use cases, such as insurance applications. For instance, the ability to define conditional rules allows for greater personalization out of the box, with the ability to ask additional questions based on the information the systems receives from users.

One of the newest features integrates functionality in Screens, one of Liferay’s mobile tools, to enable a continuous experience across devices. If someone begins filling out a form on their computer, they can finish up later on their mobile phone without having to re-enter any information. This means that companies can deliver an omnichannel experience from day one and capitalize on this critical channel for interacting with customers.

What’s Coming Next?

“We’re looking for ways to evolve form-based applications,” said Pinon. To achieve this, he plans to improve Forms APIs for easier integration with other systems. He also plans to implement major improvements to the visual workflow designer so that workflows are better integrated into the forms that users build.

Pinon also shared plans to make fields reusable in different forms and quickly integrate forms as CTAs on marketing landing pages. Some of these changes are planned for Liferay DXP 7.2, the coming release for Liferay’s main platform.

Even more exciting, Liferay Analytics Cloud will be employed to understand user interactions on forms for greater visibility into what is causing form abandonment. These changes will open up ways for companies to interact with their customers and respond quickly to change.

Learn What’s New in Liferay DXP 7.1

Learn More

The Future of Liferay & Java and How It Affects Liferay

2025-08-14T13:09:52Z

Note: This article was last updated on August 14, 2025, to ensure all information is up-to-date.

Key Takeaways

Java is the foundation of Liferay DXP, and the platform’s Java roadmap closely follows Java’s evolution to maintain compatibility, security, and performance.
Current focus: Java 17 and Java 21 are the main LTS versions supported, with Java 21 becoming the primary runtime in 2026.
Major update: Liferay DXP will adopt Jakarta EE 10 in Q3 2025, requiring updates to any custom code deployed inside DXP.
Release cadence: Java feature releases arrive twice a year; LTS versions get multi-year support. Liferay’s LTS releases include 3 years of Premium Support + 2 years of Limited Support.
Java 8 is effectively end-of-life for public updates; upgrading to Java 17 or Java 21 is strongly recommended.
Development best practice: Always build and test against the latest supported Java versions, review compatibility matrices, and use Liferay tools like Blade CLI, Liferay IDE, and Gradle plugins.

Keeping Pace with Java’s Evolution

If you’ve been around the Java world for a while, you’ve lived through a decade of big changes – from the introduction of the six-month release cadence to the evolution of the LTS model, from the sunset of Java 8 public updates to today’s push toward Java 21 and beyond. Through it all, Java has remained the backbone of Liferay DXP, and that’s not changing anytime soon. Liferay Portal, originally developed over a decade ago, continues to be actively developed to keep pace with industry changes. As industry-wide shifts in Java standards and technologies occur, Liferay Portal adapts to ensure compatibility across different Java versions, application servers, and API standards like Jakarta EE, facilitating ongoing compatibility and innovation. Liferay’s roadmap includes a focus on Java 21 as the main runtime version starting in 2026.

Liferay’s Java roadmap continues to track closely with the language’s evolution, ensuring that developers can build secure, high-performing solutions without worrying about falling behind on compatibility. Liferay’s Java roadmap is designed to align with the next generation of Java, supporting future advancements and migration strategies.

Java’s Ongoing Role in Liferay

Java isn’t just a technical requirement for Liferay DXP – it’s the foundation. Compatibility between the Java JDK and Liferay DXP is critical to performance, security, and stability.

Today, Liferay DXP runs on Java LTS release versions, with Java 17 and Java 21 as the main focus for new projects. In 2025, Liferay will compile DXP on Java 17 to ensure broad compatibility, while maintaining runtime support for both Java 17 and Java 21. This means there may be a temporary mismatch between the compile version (17) and the recommended runtime (21). Java 21 offers improved performance, enhanced security, and cost-saving features—making it the preferred choice for deployments even during this transition period.

Liferay’s developer workspace – Gradle, Blade CLI, and IDE plugins – already supports building custom modules with Java 17 and Java 21, giving teams the flexibility to target their preferred LTS version. This tooling will continue to evolve alongside our Java migration, ensuring developers can adopt new features without breaking compatibility.

Once the Jakarta EE 10 migration and application server upgrades are completed in Q3 2025, Liferay will turn its attention to the final goal: becoming a full Java 21 enterprise platform. At that point, Java 17 will be deprecated, with a planned shift to Java 21 for both compile and runtime in 2026.

If you’re deploying custom code inside Liferay DXP, staying aligned with the latest LTS releases is essential. Application servers like Apache Tomcat and WildFly, which host Liferay instances, also require updated Java support. Even client extension customizations running outside the Liferay JVM can be affected by Java changes, though these are managed separately from in-VM deployments, allowing for smoother upgrades and migrations.

The migration to Jakarta EE 10 will require updates to any custom code deployed inside DXP, so now is the time to review and prepare your codebase.

Liferay DXP Today

Liferay DXP is an enterprise-grade digital experience system built to create, manage, and optimize digital experiences across web, mobile, and beyond – all from one secure, unified environment. It offers comprehensive functionality and all the flexibility organizations need to create the exact solutions they want.

Built on Java: Ensures enterprise-grade reliability and compatibility.
Composable architecture: Supports multi-site and multi-audience needs with reusable content, templates, and workflows. Each module serves as a building block, and modules and templates can be easily configured to meet specific business requirements.
Flexible deployment: Liferay’s available subscription options – SaaS, PaaS, and On-Premise/your own cloud – allowing organizations to adapt the system to their diverse business needs.
Enterprise integration framework: Open API and connectors to integrate with core systems like CRM, ERP, and identity management, streamlining connectivity and data flow. Liferay DXP can also integrate with external databases and file storage systems to enhance content management and data accessibility.
Scalable and secure: Meets the demands of mission-critical applications with built-in governance, access control, and high availability.
Comprehensive capabilities: Delivers robust out-of-the-box capabilities like content management, AI, low-code, commerce, digital asset management, personalization, or integration.

Users can interact with the system’s features through intuitive interfaces, manage content, participate in workflows, and customize their experience using available settings. Tools are provided to facilitate content creation, management, and workflow optimization. Analytics tools in Liferay DXP help track user behavior and engagement with content such as articles, blog posts, and files. Administrators can set various configuration options and page settings, ensuring each setting is tailored to the platform’s requirements. Whether starting a new project or enhancing an existing one, Liferay DXP provides the flexibility and ability to meet evolving business demands.

By staying aligned with Java’s release cycle, Liferay DXP makes it easier for organizations to keep their environments modern, secure, and ready for what’s next.

The Release Cadence – Still Going Strong

Back in 2017, Oracle introduced a faster Java release cadence: a feature release every six months (March and September) and designated LTS (Long-Term Support) versions every few years. That shift – once a big adjustment – is now the norm. Liferay’s Long-Term Support (LTS) versions will be designated as having a three-year Premium Support Phase followed by a two-year Limited Support Phase.

Here’s what that means in 2025:

Feature releases: Arrive twice a year, supported for six months. Be sure to track the specific support dates for each release.
LTS versions: Get multi-year support from vendors and are the recommended baseline for production environments. For more details on support periods, consult your vendor’s documentation.
OpenJDK as default: There’s now no functional difference between Oracle JDK and OpenJDK; the latter is the go-to for most developers.

Note: Oracle provides free updates for the first six months of any release, after which you’ll need a paid subscription for Oracle JDK updates. The good news? Other vendors – like Red Hat, IBM, Azul, and community projects – continue to provide extended support for LTS releases.

The bottom line: keep an eye on support timelines and plan migrations early to avoid security or compatibility gaps. Make sure to complete your migration before support end dates to ensure continued functionality and support. When adopting new Java or Liferay releases, always follow proper install procedures – including downloading, configuring, and starting the server or application – to ensure a smooth and reliable setup.

Overview: Cadence Details and Support Phases

Release Type	Frequency	Free Support Period	Paid Support Options	Notes
Feature Release	Every 6 months	6 months (Oracle)	Vendor-specific	Not recommended for production; bridge between LTS releases
LTS Release	Every 2–3 years	Varies by vendor	Multi-year	Recommended for production environments
Liferay LTS	Aligned with Java LTS	3 years Premium Support + 2 years Limited Support	Included in subscription	Matches Java support lifecycle

Where Are We Now with Java 8?

The beginning of the end-of-life process for Java 8 started when Oracle ended its public updates back in 2019. Red Hat then led community maintenance for years after that, with backing from vendors like Amazon, Azul, and IBM. But by 2025, most published public updates have ended.

If you’re still on Java 8, you’re likely relying on paid commercial support – and you’re overdue for an upgrade. Upgrading to the latest version ensures you benefit from improved performance, the newest features, and enhanced security.

Overview: Key Java Versions, Support Timelines, Recommended Actions

Java Version	Release Year	Public Updates Ended	Current Status (2025)	Recommendation
Java 8	2014	2019 (Oracle)	Paid support only (limited vendors)	Upgrade to Java 17 or 21 ASAP
Java 11	2018	Varies by vendor	Still supported by some vendors	Plan migration to newer LTS
Java 17 (LTS)	2021	Ongoing	Current LTS supported by Liferay	Safe for new and existing projects
Java 21 (LTS)	2023	Ongoing	Becoming primary runtime in 2026	Recommended for new projects

Development Tools and Best Practices

Staying current with Liferay’s Java roadmap is essential for any development team looking to build robust, future-proof solutions on the Liferay platform. As new versions of Java JDK are released, ensuring compatibility between your custom code, the Liferay JVM, and the application servers you deploy on becomes a top priority. This alignment not only guarantees seamless integration but also maximizes performance, security, and long-term support for your projects.

When developing for Liferay, always verify that your custom code is built and tested against the latest supported Java versions. This proactive approach helps avoid unexpected issues during upgrades and ensures your solutions take full advantage of new features and security enhancements. It’s also important to regularly review the compatibility matrix for both Liferay DXP and your chosen application servers, as support for specific Java versions can vary between platforms. As of now, Liferay plans to use Java 17 as the compiler while maintaining runtime compatibility with Java 21.
To streamline the development process, Liferay offers a suite of powerful tools designed to boost productivity and simplify complex tasks. The Liferay IDE provides a familiar, Eclipse-based environment tailored for portal development, while Blade CLI offers a command-line interface for creating, managing, and deploying modules with ease. Gradle plugins further enhance your build process, enabling you to automate tasks and maintain consistency across different environments.

By leveraging these tools and following best practices for version management and compatibility, developers can confidently create, modify, and maintain custom code that integrates smoothly with the latest versions of Liferay DXP. It is crucial to test and deploy new app versions to ensure compatibility with the latest Java and Liferay releases, as this supports improved security, performance, and alignment with current standards. This approach not only reduces technical debt but also positions your organization to quickly adopt new technologies and features as they become available, ensuring your Liferay solutions remain flexible, secure, and ready for the future.

Wrapping It Up

Java’s faster release cycle is here to stay, and Liferay is keeping pace. By aligning Liferay DXP as a solution for enterprise needs with the latest LTS versions – and adopting Jakarta EE 10 this year – we’re making sure you can innovate without worrying about whether the foundation will hold.

Liferay continues to support its customers through regular updates, enhancements, and a commitment to seamless migrations. These updates help clients stay secure and competitive in a rapidly changing technology landscape. The team is prepared to respond quickly to changes in the Java ecosystem and evolving customer needs.

If you want to dig deeper, the community-maintained document Java Is Still Free is still the best resource for up-to-date information on Java’s licensing, support, and roadmap.

As always, Liferay will keep updating its JDK compatibility support in step with Java’s evolution, so you can plan your upgrades with confidence – and keep building experiences that are ready for the future.

How JDK11 Affects Liferay Users

2025-08-14T08:59:49Z

With the release of JDK11, Oracle’s new JAVA SE Support Policy brings sweepings changes to the Java Enterprise community.

Others have already created great explanations of the changes to come, so I won’t repeat their work here. I do, however, have some thoughts to share on how these changes will affect Liferay Portal and DXP users.

Starting with JDK11, you will no longer be able to use Oracle JDK for free for commercial purposes.

All commercial projects will require a subscription/service from Oracle to get the Oracle JDK. The majority of Liferay users are commercial users who deploy on Oracle JDK. If you don’t pay for support from Oracle for their JDK or one of their other products, you’ll need to start paying in order to continue using Oracle JDK.

OpenJDK binary is now your free option.

Oracle will continue to provide a free alternative with their Oracle OpenJDK binary. There will also be others such as Azul, RedHat, IBM and AdoptOpenJDK that will provide their own binaries. For now, Liferay has only certified Oracle's OpenJDK binary. We have to yet to determine whether all OpenJDK libraries can fall under the same name or if we need to certify them individually.

A new JDK will be released every six months and some of them will be marked as LTS releases.

Prior to JDK9, all JDKs were essentially Long Term Support (LTS) releases. Users received bug fixes for years, which allowed use to delay moving to a new release. Now, we’ll see a new JDK release every six months, but not all will receive long term support.

As of now, Liferay has decided we will not certify every single major release of the JDK. We will instead choose to follow Oracle's lead and certify only those marked for long term support. If you’ve seen our latest compatibility matrix, you may have noticed that Liferay did not certify JDK9 or JDK10. We instead plan to certify JDK11, JDK17 and JDK23, which have been marked as LTS. This is subject to change.

Oracle will only guarantee two updates per major release.

JDK8 has received 172 updates since its release. In contrast, JDK9, the first release that Oracle implemented this policy, has had four updates, while JDK10 only received two updates. Although JDK11 is designated as an LTS release, there is no guarantee of more than two updates from Oracle.

We will have to wait until JDK12 is released to see what will happen with JDK11. Perhaps I’m optimistic, but I believe that the Java open source community will continue to backport security issues and bugs well after Oracle decides to stop. We’ll have to wait and see.

January 2019 will be the last free public update for JDK8.

If you’re a Liferay user and you have not made a plan for your production servers, please start!

Below are the paths that are currently available, but these are in no way recommendations provided by Liferay. It is up to you to make the best decision for your own company.

Continue to use Oracle JDK8 without any future patches
Continue to use Oracle JDK8 and pay for a subscription
Switch to Oracle JDK11 and pay for a subscription
Switch to Oracle OpenJDK11 binary (knowing that you’ll have to make this decision again in six months)
Switch to a certified version of IBM JDK

I will try to update this list as more options become available, e.g., if we decide to certify AdoptOpenJDK, Azul Zulu, RedHat JDK and so on.

I am eager to see how the rest of the enterprise community reacts to these changes.

If you have more questions, please feel free to post to our community forum or reach out to our sales team at sales@liferay.com.

How Getting Personalization Right Improves Customer Experience

2025-05-29T20:31:11Z

In the 17th and early 18th century, it was difficult for hat makers to accurately measure the circumference of a head. They simply created a standard size and assumed it would fit everyone regardless of head shape or size.

That all changed when Lock & Co. Hatters adopted the Comformatuer, a device placed on the head of a customer to design a hat that fit with a reasonable accuracy. Soon customized hats became a reality and better head measuring tools than the Comformatuer appeared on the market, although Lock & Co. still uses them in 2018 to fit their hard hats. But what mattered most was that customers suddenly had hats that fit their head perfectly.

At Cignex, we know that people love it when someone goes to extreme lengths to recognize them. That is why personalized targeting is a great device in the hands of a marketer when done right. According to BCG, “brands creating personalized experience by integrating advanced digital technologies and proprietary data for customers are seeing revenue increase by 6 to 10%.” The research further states that “over the next five years in three sectors alone - retail, healthcare and financial services - personalization will push a revenue shift of some $800 billion to the 15% of companies that get it right.”

How Has Personalization Changed?

Personalization has come a long way in the last few years. Not long ago, greeting a registered website visitor by his or her name was considered personalization. More recently, businesses have been able to communicate with customers and registered users through multiple touchpoints, and companies are able to add more context, nuance and a specific tone.

Organizations have moved beyond just sourcing traditional data (consumed using various prompts like web forms and sign up buttons) and now leverage behavioral data as well. With the sophistication of ETL platforms and real-time data processing, it is easier for organizations to parse and comprehend unstructured forms of data, crunching them to derive analytics that can influence business decisions.

The advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence today adds another layer where organizations are able to develop a predictive model to forecast and improvise website features and content suited to individual customers. In some sectors, this strategy is called “individualization.” At the end of the day, individualization and personalization are facets of an enhanced customer experience.

Having Clear Goals About Personalization

A company’s personalization goals can be anything, including customer satisfaction, opportunities to upsell or cross-sell, brand recognition, closing new deals and much more. Whatever your business’s goals and strategies may be, making improvements can begin with asking questions like:

What are the potential snags within our existing customer touchpoints?
How do we create helpful personalization without being intrusive in our digital experiences?
What customer preferences are we not capturing in our data analysis?

These questions can help you better understand your strengths and weaknesses to make the most of your personalization efforts.

Iterative Learning

Today, the modus operandi in digital business is to create personalized campaigns followed by carefully collecting and tracking customer reactions. The response to your campaigns dynamically influences the information, context and communication tone that you would adopt toward the customer in your next communication touchpoint. The objective is to derive persuasive thinking toward your brand and its products.

Behavioral scores play an active role in mapping the customer journey within the persuasion cycle. Based on various levels of interaction, these scores trigger predefined communication in the form of personalized ads, landing pages, product offers and more. Setting the right expectations with respect to how you would use behavioral scores is integral to the persuasion cycle.

Ownership and Cross Functional Coordination

Generally, marketing/digital teams tend to have the onus of implementing personalization within organizations, but to have effective personalization across the board, businesses need multiple departments to come together as stakeholders in decision making. Think about it, wouldn’t it be a relief if a field agent who comes to your home to repair your washing machine already knows if it is covered under warranty or spontaneously offers you a discount based on your customer loyalty score? A similar alignment between different teams within the organization is necessary if the common goal is to provide an enhanced customer experience.

Good Data Management Practices and the Necessity of Consent

While many businesses believe they should collect every piece of data possible, what is most important is understanding the right factors and data points that would influence practices that drive digital experience. For this, you need to have good data management practices, effective data collection processes and a scalable technology platform that is secure and robust.

With the recent implementation of GDPR, the topic of user consent and privacy is more important than ever. Organizations need to secure permissions from their customers in terms of how they collect their data and how they intend to use it. What level of profiling is done to deliver a better experience? An exercise in transparency would extend further in sustaining the relationship and increases brand credibility among customers.

When it comes to personalization, it is important to ask these two questions. What is the perceived value you deliver to the customer? And how will that value transform into business for your brand? As long as you are able to answer them with clarity, your personalization will strike the right chord with customers.

Personalization with Liferay DXP

Personalization is just one aspect of what can be done with Liferay. Learn more about what Liferay DXP 7.1 can do for you in our detailed features overview whitepaper.

Read Liferay DXP 7.1 Features Overview

The Benefits of Mapping Experiences to Known Users

2025-05-29T21:00:52Z

More than ever, a company’s success today depends on understanding and engaging with their target audience online on increasingly deep levels. And while digital marketing helps connect businesses with potential customers faster than ever, 79% of consumers are only likely to engage with an offer if it has been personalized to reflect previous interactions they had with the brand, as evidenced by Marketo research. As such, analytics systems that provide information on user interests and page performance are a cornerstone of personalized online marketing across industries.

However, while systems such as Google Analytics can provide helpful insights regarding site performance overall or the success rate of individual pages, its inherent anonymity prevents companies from understanding their audiences on a deeper, person-by-person level. By creating known users in an analytics system, businesses can be equipped to create more effective online experiences that can be shaped to match the specific interests and needs of groups or even individual audience members.

In better understanding how to create known users, as well as their benefits, businesses can improve the ROI and effectiveness of their online marketing strategies.

What Qualifies as a “Known User?”

While having user profiles that show a customer’s history with a company can improve online marketing, identifying a truly “known user” requires more detailed and robust information. This information most often includes shopping history, customer service interactions, social media profiles, geographic location, product reviews and any other recorded interactions directly linked to their generated profiles. Most often, using single sign-on capabilities can help connect these many different aspects to a single user profile.

Perhaps most importantly, businesses need to properly leverage the large quantities of anonymous data that they have compiled online through the use of cookies. Even businesses who employ single sign-on may not be fully connecting user profiles to robust data generated by these same users. This may be due to data siloing in back-end systems, separate websites or profiles used for various business processes or general oversights regarding data storage. By consolidating data and better tracking user interactions, a business can create a more complete profile that helps increase understanding of purchase history, interests, location and more for more accurate personalization.

Together, these elements turn formerly anonymous website visitors into fleshed out individuals, allowing businesses to better understand how they can support and sell to known users.

How Can Personalized Experiences Benefit a Business?

Thanks to top-of-the-line modern online experiences that have been crafted by companies such as Amazon, consumers are more aware than ever of how online personalization can serve their needs. This has led to higher audience expectations and the desire to be met with websites that react to and support them as individuals with unique service demands. No matter the industry, online experiences that are personalized to known users can make a quantifiable impact on a company’s future.

Recent research from Accenture indicates that 75% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase from a business that recognizes them by name and makes recommendations based on past purchases. In the often impersonal world of online business, this difference can quickly build a relationship between a company and an individual. When combined with higher spending rates, businesses can find improved results for their online marketing efforts that benefit the company as a whole.

In addition, increasing personalization across a company’s channels can increase overall consumer spending by as much as 500%, according to The E-Tailing Group. When combined with the previously mentioned effects on the likelihood of making a purchase, personalization can lead to an increased sense of loyalty by customers. In doing so, businesses can counteract the ever-increasing difficulty of creating a loyal customer base in a time where competition is high and switching services between brands is easier than ever.

Finding Insights Through Liferay Analytics Cloud

With Liferay Analytics Cloud, companies can better understand individual users on a more personal level to better know target audiences and how to better reach them. In doing so, businesses can make informed and effective changes to their online presence. Beyond understanding individual users, businesses can also use Liferay Analytics Cloud to determine how their webpages and the individual elements found within them are performing. Together, these insights provide companies with actionable data that can lead to stronger, more profitable business-customer relationships.

Learn More About Liferay Analytics Cloud

Learn more about how Liferay Analytics Cloud can help you better understand your target audience and improve experiences with our product overview.

Read the Liferay Analytics Cloud Overview

What Portal Features are Available in Liferay DXP 7.1?

2025-05-29T21:12:32Z

Across industries, portals play a crucial role in maintaining customer relationships for businesses that must supply sensitive, ongoing services and information. From insurance plans to B2B transactions, these secure forms of online customer care continue to provide individualized services and products to a wide audience.

Liferay continues to help businesses around the world create great digital experiences with the release of Liferay DXP 7.1, which includes a variety of new and improved features designed to aid in creating stronger portals than ever. The following features are just some of the tools that can help companies develop the portal that their customers need today. For a complete list, read the Liferay DXP 7.1 Features Overview.

New Form Editing Control

Forms can be an effective way for businesses to communicate with customers through portals, allowing audiences to provide feedback and voice their needs in fast and efficient ways. With Liferay DXP 7.1, forms are more powerful digital business tools than ever. Forms have extensive new functionality, including the ability to dynamically change based on user responses in order to provide deeper insights regarding various target audience groups. This is possible through the ability to create a set of conditional rules that allows companies to design advanced forms for every situation, which will trigger changes to questions when certain conditions, such as user role, are met by the answers provided. The interface has also been improved for better usability, with intuitive editing support, new tools that allow for customization of data collection and new conditional rules for advanced forms.

Improved Data Protection

Portals allow both customers and employees to access crucial information regarding transactions, contracts and various pieces of sensitive information in order to supply effective, fast services. However, the presence of such data means that the modern portal must provide a high level of security and compliance with modern GDPR guidelines. New data protection tools in Liferay DXP 7.1 help companies address GDPR regulations and maintain greater control over how their platform manages user data, including the ability to erase a user’s personal data to comply with these regulations today. In addition, Liferay DXP undergoes continuous security testing and vulnerability monitoring of third-party libraries. When new potential security vulnerabilities are found, customers are provided with a security update or fix pack.

Strong Site Administration

Updates and new features in Liferay DXP 7.1 provide businesses with stronger site administration capabilities, allowing users to fine-tune online portals and effectively respond to user needs. Users can create and manage portals and their respective members, as well as insert JavaScript and metadata, set friendly URLs, create page sets to organize your pages/navigation and more. Users can also create dynamic sites, allowing all changes to the parent template to be inherited by associated children sites.

High Scalability

The size of a business’ customer or partner base when creating a portal may not stay consistent and, in the case of continued growth, may quickly balloon in size. As such, a modern portal must be ready to scale according to changes in the amount of daily users. Liferay portals have been tested to support tens of thousands of simultaneous virtual users and in collaboration use cases on a single application server. Liferay portals have also been deployed in large installations with millions of active users in the most demanding environments. Liferay DXP is highly scalable and customers can feel secure in deploying Liferay to cloud-based environments.

Simplified UI

In order to provide the greatest amount of value to users, portals need to not only provide needed information, but allow fast and simple experiences through an easy-to-use interface. Liferay DXP simplifies the user experience of internal and external portals — notably those that allow users to log in for personalized services or views and those that require a workflow approval process to update content and integrate or aggregate multiple existing services. Liferay DXP provides a presentation layer for integrating all enterprise systems into a single easy-to-use interface for end users.

Dynamic Search

Dynamic, extensible search is built in with Liferay DXP 7.1 through the default use of Elasticsearch to provide powerful search monitoring, tuning and scaling. Liferay provides users with an efficient way to instantly refine search results in a portal by drilling down with specific constraints that match the user’s search criteria with faceted search. As modern portals can play host to web content, documents, images and many more user-generated pieces of content, they can quickly become a massive data repository. As such, multi-tier search is a vital aspect for users, giving them the ability to search across all portal assets available to them based on their roles and memberships.

Detailed Performance Monitoring

Poor portal performance can quickly cause slow loading times and compromised experiences, negatively impacting user opinions and overall portal usage. To help prevent such occurrences, Liferay DXP 7.1 gives administrators the ability to monitor the platform’s performance and better optimize resources with access to key performance statistics for all applications and pages. Meanwhile, the auditing feature allows administrators to track and manage user activity within the platform to better understand their experiences and where changes to a portal can make a difference.

Identity Management

Through logging into a portal, users on both the customer and employee sides are able to access more personalized experiences that provide them with the tools and information they uniquely need. Liferay offers a customizable single sign-on (SSO) that integrates with CAS, LDAP (Active Directory, etc.), NTLM, CA Siteminder, Oracle Access Manager, Novell Identity Manager, OpenSSO and more. These features help businesses shape individual user experiences through detailed identity management.

Learn About More Portal Features in Liferay DXP 7.1

These features are just a few of the advancements found in Liferay DXP 7.1, with more features enhancing the creation of portals, intranets and more. Find out the details in our whitepaper.

Read the Liferay DXP 7.1 Features Overview

What Does the Fourth Industrial Revolution Mean for Me

2025-05-29T21:11:25Z

Automation, artificial intelligence and the future of work have been topics saturating the news over the past few years. Just last month, Spyce, a fully automated “robotic kitchen” created by four MIT students, opened up down the street from my office in the center of Boston. I walked in, typed my order on a screen, paid and was transfixed by the machines putting on a Fantasia-like show as they prepared my food. I drifted off, contemplating what the next industrial revolution, the fourth industrial revolution will mean for the workplace and my job at Valamis, and realized how easy it is to forget the industrial revolutions that came before.

Revolutions of the Past

Inventions throughout history have changed the way we live and relate to each other, as well as the world around us. The steam engine triggered the original industrial revolution; the second revolution was driven by the invention of electricity and the proliferation of mass production, transportation and the distribution of the telephone. Then came the third industrial revolution, the transformation from analog to digital that brought us the personal computer and the internet. Just as access to information has been forever changed, technology has changed the workforce.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)

Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) proclaimed that “When compared with previous industrial revolutions, the Fourth is evolving at an exponential rather than a linear pace. Moreover, it is disrupting almost every industry in every country.” Reflecting on past industrial revolutions, Schwab’s words ring true: It took decades for the telephone to reach 50% of U.S. households, yet it only took five years for cell phones to accomplish the same feat in the 1990s, according to Harvard Business Review.

Due to the accessibility and collaboration of information facilitated by the internet, technology adoption is faster than ever. Schwab says, “Disruption is ... flowing from agile, innovative competitors who, thanks to access to global digital platforms for research, development, marketing, sales and distribution, can oust well-established incumbents faster than ever by improving the quality, speed or price at which value is delivered.”

Intelligent Automation & Reskilling the Workforce

Intelligent automation requires a massive effort to re-skill the workforce, while some jobs will completely disappear with automation. As a result of these changes, it is estimated by McKinsey & Company that up to 375 million workers will need to switch occupational categories by 2030. McKinsey & Company also predicts that in about 60 percent of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated, implying substantial workplace transformations and changes for all workers.

Alongside the need to upskill the workforce in response to AI and automation, it is important to note the importance of workforce generational shift. “Millennials now make up more than half the workforce, and they bring high expectations for a rewarding, purposeful work experience, constant learning and development opportunities and dynamic career progression.” (Deloitte 2016)

Investing in Corporate Learning

Engaging Millennials, reskilling the workforce and investing in corporate learning are relatively new and major considerations that executives have been tasked with as a result of the third industrial revolution, and will remain important throughout the fourth industrial revolution. Global digital platforms as Schwab described, like learning experience platforms, have resulted from a global need for development.

With a changing workforce and new technology on the horizon, 8 in 10 executives surveyed by Deloitte ranked corporate learning as “important” or “very important.” Deloitte notes that “this focus on learning seems appropriate, as learning opportunities are among the largest drivers of employee engagement and strong workplace culture—they are part of the entire employee value proposition, not merely a way to build skills.”

Executives not only see the importance of learning, but are investing in it heavily. According to a recent study by Ernst & Young, “More than half of executives (55%) are struggling to identify and hire people with the right skills. Many are reskilling their existing workforce to better respond to technology changes as a result.”

Learning Experience Platforms & Artificial Intelligence

In order to reskill the masses, learning and development leaders (L&D) have turned to personalized learning. Curating content to upskill employees, assess skill gaps and even predict future skill gaps, is now possible with learning experience platforms leveraging artificial intelligence, which Valamis built on Liferay.

Learning experience platforms using AI are being adopted by organizations looking to quickly and efficiently upskill employees, and offer development as a benefit to attract and retain talent. Learning experience platforms coupled with AI can help organizations curate relevant and engaging content despite generational differences, delivered around the world at any time.

Technology: The Tool for Adaptation

With the progress and adoption rate increasing steadily, technology, especially AI and automation, will undoubtedly transform work as we know it. Responding to the transformation, as we have done for generations, will be facilitated by technology. Artificial intelligence will play a role in replacing monotonous work and jobs, but it will also play an even more important role in transitioning employees to new roles, quicker than we have ever seen in the past.

We text our family, snapchat our friends, slack our coworkers, google for answers, Uber/Lyft to the airport and today this all seems natural. It almost seems more unnatural to attempt to communicate and access information without technology. Technology has made the world borderless; the global diffusion of ideas has brought about more technology to solve new problems, and it will always continue to do so. The fourth industrial revolution will bring new problems, but also new solutions. Change is inevitable, but some things will be familiar in the fourth industrial revolution.

Back at Spyce, I watched as the robot finished my meal, an employee picked it up and called my name. She handed it to me, and wished me a good day.

Get Equipped for Digital Transformation

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See the Newest Features in Liferay DXP 7.1

2025-05-29T20:57:44Z

Liferay DXP 7.1 is now available and with it comes a wide array of new features and updates designed to put more useful tools in the hands of users than ever before.

Liferay DXP 7.1 is a platform designed to create a wide range of enterprise digital solutions, from innovative customer-facing websites to engaging global partner portals. Liferay DXP 7.1 launches new features for efficient, beautiful page design, as well as an extensive upgrade to the powerful forms feature. The business user experience has also been streamlined throughout the platform to help companies save time while managing their sites. The latest version also launches new tools to support data protection in accordance with the recent GDPR requirements.

Finally, there are several significant technological updates that empower companies to develop new competitive advantages with modern development tools for mobile and web. In order to help businesses better understand what 7.1 offers, this quick guide can help you better understand some of the new features and their benefits, which are detailed in full in our Liferay DXP 7.1 New Features Summary.

Website Management

Web management is designed to be easier than ever through the introduction and updates of various features meant to give more power and personalization options than ever before.

Page Creation - Liferay DXP 7.1 introduces a powerful new way to design websites. From carefully designed page fragments to full control over page menus, Liferay DXP 7.1 frees web developers and designers to execute their visions for web experiences.
Content Pages - Users can now easily create and add unstructured content directly to pages. This is useful for site pages that don’t need to leverage structured web content within Liferay, such as one-off landing pages for marketing campaigns.
Fragments - Fragments are a new way of creating and implementing content page designs in Liferay through the Fragment Editor within the browser. Web developers can now save page sections as fragments and reuse them across a Liferay site.
Updated Page Editor - The new Page Editor allows business users to visually lay out page designs and save them as reusable templates. Within this interface, users can search through collections and easily add, remove and position fragments on the page.

Navigation

The modern customer expects a smoother, faster and more intuitive online experience than ever before and updates to navigation within the Liferay ecosystem are designed to address those demands.

Menus - Menus are now decoupled from page navigation for the freedom to create custom menus for sections of the site or remove menus for marketing landing pages. A new drag-and-drop interface allows easy management of menu hierarchies and saving different menu sets.
Search - Liferay DXP 7.1 improves search administration and uses Elasticsearch 6 as the default search engine, giving users more options for implementing and managing enterprise search. A new control panel makes administration tasks easier and users can configure the search engine, start and monitor any reindexes and much more.

Administration

By providing greater power to the handling of data and the rules that govern a company’s online presence, users of Liferay DXP 7.1 have been given even greater control capabilities. These administrative updates help users maintain and improve their business solutions in ways that better serve both employees and audiences.

Administration Improvements - Liferay DXP 7.1 improves the experience for business users. Streamlined administration tools allow companies to spend less time managing their sites, while still offering the granular control necessary for enterprises.
Data Protection - Companies can now erase a user’s personal data and export data in a machine-readable format. Administrators can review content that potentially contains personal information and edit or delete as needed through a simple interface. Tools include APIs for implementation into third-party apps or overriding default app behavior.
Forms - Forms have extensive new functionality, including a set of conditional rules that allows companies to design advanced forms that can create calculations, offer follow-up questions based on responses and much more. The interface has also been improved for better usability, with intuitive editing support. Liferay developers can use the new Rules API to create rules that will address any needs not covered out of the box.
Modularity Update - New search applications such as Search Results, Search Bar and Category Facets allow greater flexibility in page construction. These come from the previous Search application, but have been divided into more useful components. Message board services have also been modularized and extracted for easy management and updates.

Mobile

A strong mobile experience is a crucial aspect of the modern customer journey. Through new developments in Liferay DXP 7.1, businesses can make effective improvements to their mobile strategy.

Hybrid Mobile App Development Update - Liferay Screens 3.0 enables software developers to use Apache Cordova or Xamarin to build cross-platform applications from one codebase designed for the web on a PC and embed that content into a Screens app for mobile use. Sites and applications designed for PC can be rendered in screenlets with no additional code so native mobile capabilities and navigation can mix with HTML content seamlessly.
Adaptive Media - Adaptive Media dynamically adjusts images to best fit the screen size of the device being used. It also offers deep control over how images are loaded and displayed to address performance issues. Adaptive Media automatically works in the background, but developers can edit image resolutions and define which devices should trigger various resolutions.

See the Complete List of New Features

Liferay DXP 7.1 provides more features and greater capabilities for users than ever before. Learn about the complete list of new features in our helpful whitepaper.

Read the New Features Summary

What is Your Customer Experience Ecosystem

2025-05-29T21:12:28Z

Creating, controlling and providing excellent customer experience is a major factor in most companies’ digital business plans today. By striving to provide a pleasant and easy-to-navigate online customer journey, companies can improve their chances that target audiences will be happy with their purchasing process and become return customers.

However, businesses may be too focused on the very specific ideal path that they have crafted for an audience and unaware of the greater customer experience ecosystem that encompasses them. As discussed by Forrester, this ecosystem includes not only the connected touchpoints that a company has created, but the many different people who work within it, as well as other websites, applications and interactions that a potential customer has experienced in relation to your company’s CX, as well as the back-end systems that businesses use to manage their customer-facing touchpoints.

By better understanding the value of a customer experience ecosystem, companies can be prepared to implement successful CX strategies and avoid major ecosystem disruptions that lose customers. The result is consistent, successful long-term CX plans.

Defining a Customer Experience Ecosystem

Forrester defines a customer experience ecosystem as “the web of relations among all aspects of a company - including its customers, employees, partners and operating environment - that determine the quality of the customer experience.” These various elements impact CX in the following ways:

Customers - As discussed by Customer Think, customers should be ranked as the highest priority regarding needs within the CX environment due to being the source of funding that propels the entire ecosystem through their purchases. The expectations of customers should influence the way an ecosystem operates, rather than a company attempting to force customers to adapt to their ecosystem. For example, a business that completely overhauls their website to suit their own preferences rather than the preferences and expectations of customers. In doing so, customers can become frustrated and leave for competitors who are more willing to listen to and shape their CX around the needs they have expressed.
Employees - While customers are the funding that propels CX, employees are the people that respond to customer demands. When evaluating the ecosystem, consider how well-educated employees are regarding the tools and information at their disposal and how they use these elements to better serve your target audience. By supporting your workforce in serving customer needs and educating them regarding the many aspects of your company’s unique customer experience ecosystem, they can be prepared for a wide array of customer journeys.
Partners - In the CX ecosystem, partners can play a crucial role as they often extend the ecosystem further than the touchpoints created by a business in order to reach more potential customers. While this can broaden your target market, it also means that the audience’s perception of your company is influenced by how it is presented by others. Closer partner relationships, well-crafted marketing efforts and systems that integrate with partner data and experiences can help prevent poor communication and negative impressions from influencing the ecosystem.
Operating Environment - The software environment in which your users, including customers, employees and partners, run their applications will invariably impact the CX ecosystem, as this influences not only how your systems run, but how different tools and data interact with one another. Should incompatible technology be operating within the same ecosystem, it may result in inaccessible data and difficult transitions within the customer journey

Whether these elements are deliberately connected by companies or have simply been brought together due to the preferences of customers, they form an ecosystem that encompasses a business’ online presence.

Creating a Seamless CX Ecosystem

After determining the many elements that make up a customer experience ecosystem, a business will need to understand how this uniquely applies to their own online presence and what can be done to make the most of it. Through accurate analytics, companies can be made better aware of how their audiences are moving through customer journeys and what touchpoints, both those created by the company and those from third parties, are affecting audience decisions.

Whether potential customers are coming from social media platforms, speaking with representatives over the phone, visiting physical locations in person or coming from targeted advertisements, a well-designed customer experience will be ready to address the unique journeys that come from each of these points of origin and more. This can be done through proper integration with social media, targeted advertisement that also changes web page layouts to suit individual needs and effective back-end system integration that applies customer data in meaningful, targeted methods to customer experience.

The easier that potential customers can move between the elements that make up an ecosystem, the more likely they are to not abandon their journey for another business.

Connect with Your Customers

Today’s businesses need to effectively connect with customers and meet their needs efficiently, but where do you start? Read our whitepaper to learn more effective strategies.

Read “Engage Existing Customers: Four Key Strategies”

How to Measure Customer Experiences

2025-05-29T20:33:12Z

A well-constructed and effective customer experience is a crucial part of business strategies today. No matter the industry, customer experiences (CX) that meet target audience needs and help convert them into customers are a crucial part of continued commercial success. But due to its often difficult to define nature, CX can be difficult for companies to gauge in order to determine its value and make changes that improve ROI.

However, measuring CX successfully can be done with the right insights and, when done correctly, can help businesses effectively shape and refine their strategies.

Requirements for Measuring Customer Experience

According to Gartner, there are three conditions that must be met by companies in order to successfully implement customer experience measurements.

Measure CX Across Levels of Management - Companies should work to understand how customer experience impacts various levels of management, ranging from C-suite executives to operational leaders across the organization. These various measurements show how CX affects business outcomes, cross-departmental issues, department tactics and more. Should you only focus on one level, valuable insights may be missed.
Include Metrics from All Departments - As opposed to the vertical nature of the first condition, this second condition is horizontal in nature and is meant to encompass the many different teams that make up a company. A metric such as customer satisfaction can vary between departments and reflect how each impacts the experience. Measuring such a metric across a business will provide comprehensive data and insights regarding where improvements should be made and how they may need to differ depending on the department.
Balance the Rational with the Emotional - Businesses should not only measure the quality of the services provided, but the emotions they provoke within customers. Customers will have an emotional reaction to the treatment they receive from a company and these reactions will influence rational decisions. The more they love an experience, the more loyal they will become, and the more they dislike it, the more likely they are to leave for a competitor.

Having these conditions in place will help your team correctly approach metrics to better prevent accidentally skewing data and for an effective application of CX improvements across the company.

Measuring Customer Experience

Because customer experience involves all aspects of a consumer interacting with a business, there are many elements that may be measured by an organization. However, the following aspects can provide highly useful CX insights, regardless of the industry of a company.

Customer Satisfaction Scores - Companies should extensively poll customer satisfaction across all departments and keep detailed records to better understand weak points and areas for potential improvement, which can boost customer experience as a whole.
Product or Service Quality Metrics - Beyond being satisfied with their experiences, customers should be enabled to rate the products and services they receive. Whether this is through a third-party site or on the company’s own, receiving evaluations of products can show if CX issues are caused by what customers purchase, rather than how a company provides it.
Employee Engagement - A workforce that is committed to your company’s goals and values and is determined to perform their best means a more effective team. By measuring their investment in the company through anonymous surveys and performance evaluations, you can better determine how well a team is performing their duties. The result is an ability to equip and train your team as needed.
First Call Resolution Rates - An effective customer service center will have a higher likelihood of resolving customers’ problems during their first call or online chat. The higher the resolution rate, the more effective your service. Low rates should be a sign that your customer service is in need of improvement for a better customer experience.
Net Promoter Score - Beyond customer satisfaction, a net promoter score determines customer loyalty with one question - “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” Based on a score of 0 to 10, a company can determine which customers will likely buy more and refer, as well as which will likely not return, according to Forbes. These insights help determine the longevity of a customer base and what should be done to improve CX.

Improving Your Customer Experience

Following a successful customer experience evaluation, companies will have the opportunity to make improvements to various aspects of the experience as needed. Once you have collected your CX metrics, consider the following recommendations on how you should take action.

Don’t focus on one major customer experience metric, but take multiple lower-level metrics, such as how various departments field a complaint about a product, into account for a more balanced review of CX.
Consider the effects of a change on all departments. While a specific department may have been in charge of tracking a metric, changes regarding how your company does business and interacts with customers must be considered to prevent negatively affecting some departments while improving others.
Take customer emotions into consideration. While rational, statistically-backed CX changes are crucial, remember how your audience will emotionally react to the changes you make, both positively and negatively.
Determine a hierarchy of metrics to guide CX plans and how you invest both time and money in your improvement efforts. Decide upon what statistics are most important for your company’s performance and what changes should be prioritized when planning both time and financial investment.

By following these guidelines, a company can approach their metrics and CX improvement efforts through a comprehensive strategy.

Transform Your Customer Experience

Whether you are looking to change specific aspects or completely overhaul your customer experience, find the strategic insights you need in our helpful whitepaper.

Read “Four Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience”

Maximizing the Value of Design

2025-06-27T18:09:30Z

When businesses consider how to implement digital transformation, they often focus on the improvement of back-end systems and how to reach customers across multiple channels. However, many successful, cost-effective digital transformation strategies also depend greatly on design.

Reducing misconceptions about design can aid in removing company silos, which is critical in aligning business, design and development teams for operational success.

What is design? According to usability expert Jared Spool, design is the rendering of intent. This can include aesthetic improvements, but doesn’t always and is definitely not limited to aesthetics alone. When utilized effectively, the positive effects of applying design principles to solving business problems can be seen far and wide. However, many companies may be unaware of how to maximize the value their designers can bring to the table.

A Customer-Centric Approach to Implementing Effective Digital Business Strategies

Why is it so important to focus on users when creating a design strategy? At the end of the day, it’s your users who most affect your business’ bottom line — prospects, customers, coworkers and many others. Figuring out who you are solving problems for is half the battle. Once you have that, you have real people who can help you evaluate whether or not your work is actually effective. All too often even designers can end up only paying lip service to customer- or user-centric design, so what are some ways businesses can actually execute this?

1. Get Designers Involved Early

The sooner designers can become embedded in your business strategy, the more effective your communication and planning can become because they will have a clearer understanding of not only the problem you’re trying to solve, but why that problem is a problem for your business, and by extension your customer.

One of my favorite misunderstood Steve Jobs quotes is: “Customers don't know what they want until we've shown them.” This could be interpreted as possibly some typical Jobsian arrogance. However, what it really means is that, generally, people’s ability to break down and get to the root of issues is limited. And to really understand problems, you must not only listen to what people are saying — you have to really examine and study their actual behavior. In doing so, a designer can then better understand the needs and issues affecting an audience and create an experience that both illuminates these issues and solves them for improved customer service through design.

This applies to design within business because all too often projects are brought to designers in a mostly finished state, meaning that a designer’s creativity and input is largely stifled due to the constraints of a project being almost complete. Project managers bring wireframes and ask designers to either “brand” it or “make it fit with the rest of the site.” Sometimes this works because you have an exceptional project manager who has a very deep understanding of the issue and how to solve it. However, those cases are the exception, not the rule. Most often, the improvements that could be made possible through a designer’s input are unable to be implemented, as doing so would likely cause delays and overhauls to affect the project.

Instead, when you’re first starting the project and reviewing problems and goals, include a designer in those meetings so that they can already start to develop a deep understanding of the whole problem so they can provide a more comprehensive solution.

2. Review Effectively

The better a company is at reviewing designs, the better they become at creating a great end product in the most efficient ways possible. Here are four guidelines that are helpful in the review process.

Set Clear Goals - At the top of this list of goals should be measurable ways in which a company can improve the design. For example, does a screen in question help the user accomplish the task efficiently? Goals should not include “Make this screen appealing to my sense of aesthetics.” By tracking the customer journey and how it is affected by design, strategies can become much clearer and more effective in their implementation.
Know Where You Are - Provide stage-appropriate feedback that makes the most of each aspect of the review process. For example, wireframe reviews should receive feedback regarding structure and flow, not color. Doing so prevents confusion and unnecessary complications.
Present the Problem, Not the Solution - Improve the effectiveness of design strategies by improving not only the frequency and timing of their interdepartmental communications, but how these departments discuss the topic of design. Designers provide solutions, so a business should provide designers with problems for them to solve, rather than a strict, predetermined solution for them to implement without their own input.
Provide Scenarios, Not Opinions - Instead of saying what you don't like, provide a useful scenario that a designer can address and solve through their creativity. This can help prevent subjectivity for better results that solve problems in ways others may not consider.

These principles will help your business make the most of the review process and improve your intercompany collaboration regarding design. By putting users at the focal point of the review process, it helps remove (potentially) egotistical subjectivity from the equation because you are now focusing on the needs of others instead of personal opinions.

3. Inform Designers with Data

Everything you are producing should be measured. If you don’t know how your current projects are performing, you cannot improve as needed. Tools such as Google Analytics, Liferay Forms and Hotjar can all provide insights concerning how users interact with your projects and websites online.

Frequently testing allows for continued growth and the ability to properly address problems. Providing in-depth data with tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar can inform and help designers in new ways through concrete information. Data can’t always tell you the whole story, but it can give your designers greater context and help them make more informed decisions.

With these concrete insights, companies can see what areas are performing the best and what complications may be negatively impacting users. When used appropriately, data will help guide future decisions while still embracing the reality that people can be irrational and numbers can’t predict the future.

As mentioned earlier, examining people’s behavior is key to understanding the underlying problems in any site and using data intelligently will help streamline the solution process.

Putting It All Together

Introducing design early on in your business processes can help put customers at the center by providing a figure to focus on, evaluate for and measure. In turn, this more streamlined, efficient process will provide measurable value for your business.

Enhancing Your Customer Experience

Great design can play a major role in enhancing the customer experience, but there are many elements within successful CX. Learn more in our guide to these four strategies.

Read “Four Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience.”

Single Customer View Demystified

2025-05-29T20:58:48Z

Today’s customers expect to be known and cared about by companies. While modern online experiences can customize web page layouts and provide customer service representatives with a customer’s purchase history, the future of highly personalized experiences can be seen in the idea of a single customer view.

There are many perspectives on what makes a true single customer view (SCV), and one of the most common misconceptions is that an SCV is either a piece of software or an off-the-shelf product. Rather, SCV is not only a product but is actually a process that your data must follow to make it ready and suitable for marketing, analytics and insight. Through the extraction, transformation and load process, SCV should take all the data you hold concerning your customers and put it through an automated journey of matching, cleansing and enhancement.

More businesses than ever are interacting with their customers through multiple online channels, which is resulting in enormous amounts of data being created and stored in the digital space. According to an IDC study, consumers created 1.8 zettabytes of information in 2011, which will multiply approximately 50 times by the year 2020. With so much information available, it is up to companies to take the correct steps in collecting, organizing and analyzing it effectively.

Why Single Customer View?

SCV gives companies the chance to understand customers with better data to know who they are, where they are, what they do and, eventually, what they want. An online experience that is able to create a strong single customer view can provide tailored experiences similar to what can be seen in the best in-person experiences, such as a restaurant predicting and preparing the order of a faithful customer long before he or she orders it.

Better data creates better insights concerning a company’s target audience. When applied appropriately, this leads to:

Better Marketing - Derive interest based on pages visited, articles read and keywords searched to cater to audience interest and send more relevant promotions.
Better Sales - Create complete profiles with historical data to help sales people identify needs, budgets and timing for customers to more effectively close deals.
Better Support - After purchase, customers may encounter issues, report bugs or look for FAQs. This data can be gathered to form a proactive approach to solve issues and provide better training and documentation to solve issues before they arise.
Better Retention - Proactively track trends and data concerning what creates unhappy or happy customers to create better experiences and boost upselling and renewing for long-term customer relationships.

In the end, these all add up to a better customer experience.

The Benefits of Single Customer View

While companies should provide many well-designed online touchpoints to their customers in order to provide them with the best online experience possible, such as online chat and e-commerce checkout options, businesses should also see every point as a chance to connect and learn about individual consumers and interact with them in meaningful ways.

A successful single customer view is created by collecting all information related to your customers and providing a 360 ̊view for each person. These types of customer information can be pulled from touchpoints and include:

Individual Customer Identities & Demographics
Browsing Activities
Preferences
Sentiments
Customer Support Team Interactions
Firmographics
Sales Interactions
Event Attendance
Social Engagements
Transactions

While each type of data can give specific insights into a customer, they provide a robust view of individuals when combined as an SCV.

Four Steps for Aggregating SCV Data

Single customer view can act as a single source of truth for your business concerning your customers, which can aggregate data from mobile apps, websites, portals, databases, CRM, emails, social ads, e-commerce and customer service. In order to properly aggregate data, follow these four steps:

Extract Data from Different Sources - Target data from mobile apps, websites, portals, emails and social media. This data can be collected from e-commerce, as well.
Cleanse and Standardize - After extracting, convert data into a common format so it’s easier to analyze, especially if it is coming from different global regions.
Merge Identities with PII - Information about the same person should be merged together using Personal Identifiable Information (PII), which includes combinations of emails, addresses and government-issued IDs to help identify individuals with user consent and the ability to remove if requested by customers.
Model and Index - Collected data should be readable and cleanly organized in a unifiable schema so it can be used effectively by data teams.

Once information has been properly gathered through data visualization and analysis, the unified data can be used to:

Create Profiles, Dashboards and Reports - Helps keep track of trends and customer behaviors.
Calculate KPIs - Creates conversion rates, engagement scores, customer lifetime value and customer satisfaction scores.
Support Machine Learning - Feeds data into models to create sentiment and interest analysis or create a prediction model to identify the most valuable customer segments.
Improve Workflows and Audience Targeting - Provides data to workflows like audience targeting, campaign managers and AB testing to improve them.

The ETL Pipeline

Creating a data pipeline with the ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) process can help your business better collect, organize and analyze customer data to gain the most benefits from your SCV efforts. Before you start creating an ETL pipeline that can result in a single customer view, ask yourself the following questions: Where are your data sources? What do you want to measure and analyze? What are your business processes and how is data being collected? How can SCV creation be a company-wide effort?

This process can help you successfully approach a customer data pipeline and help you properly analyze it for the creation of a Single Customer View. The ETL pipeline consists of the following elements:

Extracting data from different sources, both structured and unstructured.
Transforming the data by cleaning, filtering, validating, merging and applying business logic.
Loading the transformed data into a queryable data warehouse ready for visualization and analysis.

By approaching your data through an ETL pipeline, you can have greater assurance that you will be creating accurate insights upon which to base your marketing and online experience strategies. The result can be more satisfied customers, a higher return on investment and long-term customer relationships for your business.

Improving Your Customer View

Great customer experiences are created through effective strategies that leverage data insights. Learn more about how you can transform your customer experience with Liferay Analytics Cloud.

Read about Liferay Analytics Cloud

Six Customer Experience Trends to Expect in 2018

2025-05-29T20:58:52Z

What defines great customer experience in the modern age is constantly changing due to the shifting demands of audiences and the use of new technology. But while CX may change over the years, its importance to prospective customers and the success of businesses is only growing.

According to a study by Spigit, 75% of companies surveyed in 2016 put improving customer experiences as their top objective. However, the path to great customer experience is a continuous one. The following six trends in customer experience in 2018 will help you and your business create effective CX strategies in order to stay ahead of audience demands and find success throughout the coming year.

1. Companies Face Their Biggest Internal Challenges in CX

According to Forrester research, the three biggest challenges for companies implementing their customer experience strategies are organization culture (54%), organizational structures (45%) and internal processes (41%). All three of these hurdles are most often associated with the CEO of a business. As such, 2018 may be a big year for companies, and CEOs in particular, making decisions that could enable their teams to make big gains regarding their CX efforts. CEOs and departments should focus on collaborating and communicating effectively in order to make substantial forward progress.

2. The Prevalence of Frictionless Experiences

Services like Amazon Go are leading the charge in creating frictionless customer experiences by allowing users to skip grocery stores and even removing the checkout process through instant charging upon leaving. As shown by Customer Think, audiences expect customer experiences to consistently move forward and a major player like Amazon often sets the bar for other businesses. In this instance, it comes in the form of frictionless shopping that makes purchases smoother and faster than ever.

3. Improving Location-Based Experiences

Beacon technology has been in use for many years now, but companies are now using it to make customer experiences faster and more seamless than ever. According to Dimension Data, businesses are working to make physical touchpoints as simple and efficient as online experiences. With hotels using beacons to replace room keys and companies providing employees with access to secure locations and sensitive information based on location through beacons, the gap between in-person interactions and online experiences is growing smaller so that customers can integrate all aspects of their lives and histories with companies with everyday activities.

4. Increasing and Improving A.I. in Business Operations

Artificial Intelligence will play a role in many aspects of CX, but ensuring that these helpers can properly perform their duties depends on recognizing customer speech. Customer Think detailed how speech recognition systems can help voice assistants quickly learn how individual users speak, including their unique patterns, dialects and accents, in order to avoid frustration and make their roles within businesses and home essential in the future. Gartner predicts that 85% of customer interactions will be managed without a human employee by the year 2020, meaning that automated systems and artificial intelligence will manage the vast majority of processes. With an ever-escalating usage of artificial intelligence in company operations through chatbots, data aggregation and analysis tools and many more programs, expect 2018 to find many more businesses using A.I. in an even greater variety of ways.

5. Leveraging Customer Identity and Access Management (CIAM)

Data will only continue to play an increasingly important role in the way companies interact with customers. In turn, companies are embracing customer identity and access management (CIAM) solutions, which use features including customer registration, multi-factor authentication, self-service account management, data access governance and more to scale and customize channels to individual users and their personal goals, As discussed by Janrain, CIAM creates personalized interactions by creating engagement strategies based on data insights and eliminating obstacles that may be complicating customer experiences. Companies will be in search of CIAM solutions that are both robust in the ways they can manage data and highly secure in the ways such data is safeguarded.

6. Time Becomes a Commodity

While overall enjoyable experiences will remain a priority, The Economic Times highlights that a customer’s time is a factor that will become increasingly important in CX. From making the checkout process as fast as possible to removing complications in finding a needed item online to getting answers quickly through chatbots, companies should strive toward lessening the amount of time needed from customers in receiving the products or services they want. This should help prevent audience frustration and keep potential customers from abandoning their journey before completion.

Digital Business Changes Coming in 2018

The way companies do business and how they are impacted by changes in digital marketing will once again shift in 2018. Read more about these changes in digital business.

Transform Your Customer Experience in 2018

Keeping up with modern expectations concerning customer experience requires software that is ready to meet a variety of demands. Learn more about the strategies possible with Liferay.

Read “Four Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience”

The Six Advantages of Portal-Heritage Digital Experience Platforms

2025-05-29T21:01:47Z

Gartner has released their first ever Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms and has named Liferay as a Leader. The independent analysis saw Gartner evaluate 21 providers based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute in the integrated set of technologies they provide to customers, with Liferay being named as one of only four Leaders.

The Magic Quadrant for DXPs takes the place of the long-running Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals, which is a natural step given Gartner noted the evolution of portals into digital experience platforms last year. Digital experience platforms (DXPs) provide a set of tools for managing experiences that have grown out of the needs of businesses to offer consistent and connected experiences across channels and touchpoints, such as portals, websites, mobile and IoTs devices.

As shown by the representation of technologies in the report, DXPs most often have a heritage in either portal or content management system (CMS) technology. Providers, including Liferay DXP, that find their roots in portal technology have distinct strengths regarding how they can be used to connect businesses both internally and with target audiences.

The following six advantages of a portal-based DXP can empower businesses in unique ways. While these elements may also be found in some CMS heritage portals, they are often inherent in most portal platforms and therefore have a strong presence in those that become DXPs, even at initial launch.

1. Integration Capabilities

Digital experience platforms allow companies to embrace digital transformation in both how they operate as a business as well as the customer experiences they create. Great modern customer experiences depend on the ability of the customer to shift seamlessly between websites, applications, back-end systems and all other touchpoints while companies gather data and provide customized services. A company must be able to integrate a wide variety of currently existing systems in order to provide such exceptional experiences.

Portal-heritage DXPs have core capabilities for the integration of backend systems, which give customers, employees and other end users access to the data they need across multiple applications within a company. For example, customer data locked in a CRM or company’s marketing automation tool can be unified and shared through a portal-heritage DXP. Doing so can save both businesses and customers time and effort while also helping companies better understand and support their target audience through the insights provided by this shared data.

2. Long-term Customer Relationships Focus

Portals are designed to help connect businesses with target audiences through secure interfaces. This can include specific user bases such as customers who are in need of accessing information and tools integral to their experiences. Rivet Logic highlights portal-heritage DXPs as being particularly strong in the fostering of long-term customer relationships, as their ability to create unique individual experiences through logins to support and serve customer needs has been an established and core tenant of portals since they were first created. This is a distinct advantage over CMS technology, which has traditionally focused on anonymous prospects.

Liferay has empowered a wide variety of businesses to understand and reach their target audiences through the use of portals and portal-heritage DXP. Global IT company Unisys created VantagePoint by using Liferay, a business services portal using integration features to provide configurable services for a wide variety of clients around the world. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report highlights that modern IT departments are frequently finding the solution in horizontal portal heritage DXPs. The customer experiences they create can help increase return customers and better equip sales teams through in-depth customer insights.

3. Digital Workplace Scenario Support

Digital experience platforms encompass a wide variety of online needs, including the ability to support the everyday lives of employees. By leveraging the various tools and methods of communication already used within employee portals, portal-heritage DXPs can take proven methods and expand them into robust digital workplaces. While both CMS and portal-heritage DXPs can be used to create these digital workplaces, portal software has a legacy of being used to create employee intranets and workspaces. These scenarios include customized interfaces based on employee preferences and duties, mobile-friendly interfaces that equip workforces on the go and information management capabilities that improve how a company internally communicates. These various elements are used to an even greater degree in DXP-created digital workplaces.

These online workplaces give teams access to a wide variety of needed information and digital tools that help them better complete their various duties and serve the needs of customers. With the flexibility of a DXP, these workplaces can be accessed on various devices so that employees can find what they need at any moment. Through the use of DXPs, companies are renovating their portals and intranets in an effort to bring the same level of care and customization shown to customers to employees for a more efficient and helpful online work environment. In addition, building workplace support for all departments on a single platform can bridge company silos through the sharing of information and insights.

4. B2B Relationship Management

As already discussed, portals play an important role in B2C and B2E scenarios. However, portals also play a crucial role in DXPs used for business-to-business (B2B) scenarios.

Many B2B companies have used portal technology to facilitate their relationships by creating secure and helpful interfaces with the businesses they serve. Harvard Business Review highlights that the modern B2B sales process has become more complicated than ever, leading to complications and a lack of satisfaction that can be solved by becoming more like B2C experiences. This means a clearer and more customized customer interface that provides needed services that match their unique customer journeys. Effective DXPs with a portal heritage take the well-established connections created by portal software and create a more robust experience through the many features possible via DXPs. In doing so, B2B companies can keep up with expectations and strengthen business relations in an age where competition is high due to rapid innovation in online experiences.

5. Secure Data Handling Capabilities

Data insights play a major role in modern marketing and customer service strategies for companies in all types of industries. However, this data must be secured against potential breaches to prevent harm to companies and the people who have entrusted them with their sensitive information. In addition, the modern audience generates larger amounts of data than ever before, which is used for increasingly specific targeted marketing and customer experience strategies. As opposed to CMS software, portals are based on supporting a large number of users and a large flow of information, which often contains sensitive details from both customers and businesses. As such, portal-heritage DXPs are founded in systems that are encrypted and ready to both store and analyze data for secure and insightful information management.

6. Digital Agility

As highlighted by Gartner, portals are able to be used as a common architectural framework. This functionality of a portal-based DXP allows companies to build a website and quickly reuse the framework they have created in order to build more touchpoints. In doing so, companies can not only ensure that all aspects of their digital presence are uniform in functionality and appearance, but will also save both time and money by avoiding a rebuild from scratch. By turning a portal-heritage digital experience platform into a solutions factory, businesses can quickly advance their digital strategies while still maintaining control over the quality of individual experiences.

Leveraging Portal Heritage with Liferay DXP

In choosing Liferay as a Leader, Gartner pointed to the flexibility and agility of Liferay DXP when being used to build highly customized experiences, the company’s responsiveness and organic growth in creating new product features to meet customer demands, and a strong record of providing excellent customer support and customer experience.

Liferay DXP is built on Liferay’s heritage as a portal platform, using technology created to empower workforces and provide customers with access to the information they most need. Companies around the world have used Liferay DXP to create numerous aspects of their online experience, including websites, mobile apps and connected digital experiences, along with using portal technology to carefully manage a wide variety of assets in order to better serve their customers and support their employees. These portal heritage advantages have helped distinguish Liferay DXP in the field.

Read the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms

Learn why Gartner named Liferay a leader in the field in their recently released Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms and find out more about the advantages of Digital Experience Platforms.

Read the Magic Quadrant Report

Seven Changes in Digital Business Coming in 2018

2025-05-29T20:58:27Z

Businesses are constantly evolving in how they operate, the ways in which they reach target audiences and how they compete in their industries. While this is an ongoing process that is reshaped by changes in technology and the industry landscape, the start of a new year is an appropriate time to predict and take action on the trends and changes that are likely to come over the course of the next 12 months.

The following trends in digital business operations are likely to influence a multitude of industries and their businesses to varying degrees. And while these changes may require restructuring in both short- and long-term business plans, it is important to be aware and plan accordingly so that a company is not caught off guard by shifts in both modern business operations and customer expectations.

1. Contextual Targeting Strategies

The protections created by General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mean that businesses will need to leverage customer data carefully and in compliance with these rules regarding how companies utilize customer data in marketing. In the place of audience targeting that can be hampered by GDPR, Forbes shows that contextual targeting strategies can help businesses market to potential customers based on highly detailed contextual information, which conforms to data use standards while still creating effective personalized marketing.

2. Enhancing Security in Payments

In 2017, major data breaches and identity theft highlighted the vulnerability of many organizations and the effects of having sensitive customer information compromised. The Star highlights that businesses will be working to counteract such threats with many different modern digital solutions. Everything from the use of blockchain to biometrics will be leveraged to an even greater degree in an effort to enhance security measures as digital payments increase and customers use an even greater variety of payment methods.

3. A Surge in Wide Area Networks

Recently released software-defined wide area network (WAN) technology will likely see a major increase in adoption by businesses during 2018, as discussed by Dimension Data. By establishing a communications network that can span a large geographic area but is still tightly controlled by its creators, a WAN can help businesses connect offices and better handle data, system architecture, traffic flow and more. This WAN adoption reflects how modern businesses are attempting to create large networks that balance both widespread data accessibility and needed security.

4. The Increasing Importance of Transparency

Marketing Dive points out that consumers are calling for transparency from businesses regarding their practices, partnerships and policies more than ever. This increasing awareness from audiences means that companies will need to not only be able to show audiences how they operate, but also still market effectively and protect sensitive company information. Companies who are looking to appease the demands of customers must create a strategy for effective transparency that does not compromise business processes.

5. Widespread Use of Robotic Assistants

The rise of robotic software such as chatbots and automation tools has been well publicized and heavily touted by businesses for several years now. But expect 2018 to be the year when these robotic assistants feel like a commonly expected aspect of doing business for most major companies. This acceptance from both employees and customers will cause audiences to expect more personalized experiences across industries. As discussed by CMS Wire, these expectations will create a gap between businesses already providing such experiences and those who do not.

6. The Idea of “Millisecond Marketing”

Reaching customers and responding to their interests is becoming a continually faster process. Thanks to the use of A.I. and various modern technologies, businesses are able to compare customer history with numerous potential advertisements in mere seconds to make the most of marketing opportunities. Expect 2018 to see companies work to achieve “millisecond marketing,” according to AdWeek. This uses complex algorithms to market on an individual basis faster than what is possible in the hands of humans. While this may not truly be achievable by most companies, it is an idea that many will aspire to achieve.

7. Measuring by Cost Per Experiment

Understanding the successes and failures of various business ventures requires companies to find the true return on investment (ROI) of their efforts. With so many different channels and metrics being used by companies at the same time, Forbes predicts that businesses may begin to roll cost per impression (CPM), per click (CPC), per lead (CPL), per pixel (CPP) and more together into a cost per experiment (CPE) metric. This can create a more detailed and measurable view of the wide variety of efforts made by a business in 2018.

Prepare Your Business for Digital Transformation

As digital business continues to evolve, companies across all industries must equip themselves with the technology needed to enhance their operations. Learn how this is possible through the use of digital experience platforms.

Read “Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation.”

How Liferay Unified Business Teams and Customer Experiences

2025-05-29T20:31:39Z

The need to scale from an independent company to one that meets the needs of thousands of people causes a question to arise: how can we improve our customer experience?

Customers expect a better overall experience because the bar is being set higher by other companies, necessitating improved strategies and the ability to better understand customers on an individual level. A company can be disconnected internally when trying to meet the needs of a customer, with sales, support, marketing and consulting all attempting to understand and provide for a unique customer. When these methods are disorganized, the customer can be bombarded by different messages, leading to dissatisfaction.

As a growing company, Liferay worked to improve customer experiences, as well. With the right strategy, the company enabled employees with the right information to deliver a unified customer experience. During this process, Liferay worked toward consolidating internal business systems, using Liferay DXP to unite Support, Liferay.com, Customer Portal, Marketplace, HubSpot and Salesforce, which resulted in the creation of Dossiera.

Reaching Your Customers More Effectively

As a customer reaches the end of a contract, the impending close of their lifecycle can be brought to the attention of a company so that an employee can reach out and encourage contract renewal. However, this awareness can cause issues when various departments are not coordinated with one another. As a result, sales representatives, marketing agents, customer support, consultants and more may all reach out to a customer on their own without knowing that other departments are doing the same. The result can be a bombardment with messages, leading to confusion, frustration and even a lost sale.

Dossiera, an internal workplace built in-house by Liferay that shows the full customer lifecycle, focuses on taking information from disparate systems and bringing them together to create meaningful insights that employees may not be able to create on their own. The system manages separate accounts and separate employees, with the finalized internal workplace showing the full customer lifecycle and the many different interactions experienced by a consumer. These various customer actions can show their unique interests concerning a company and what products and services may best meet their needs.

The lifecycles of the various services and products they have purchased are shown for greater insights into the future of a customer. The goal of these many different insights is to better equip employees with the ability to provide for accounts in timely, effective ways that are informed by many different viewpoints. Liferay is continuing to focus on how analytics, personalization, customer engagement scores and more can be used to further empower employees through Dossiera.

However, the insights needed to not only work efficiently, but work effectively, can be applied to any company through a better ability to both collect and understand customer data.

Insights Concerning Customer Renewal

As highlighted by the use of Dossiera, there are three major traits that have been correlated to the renewal likelihood of a customer:

Customer Profile: Company size, LTV, Tenure, Industry, Location
Customer Behavior: Interactions, Events, Content
Project Attributes: Deal Size, Duration, Issues, Sales Exec.

Interestingly, Dossiera insights showed that a customer’s tenure is correlated to renewal, with the longer they have been a customer resulting in a higher predicted probability of renewal. The continued loyalty of a customer can be seen as a self-perpetuating cycle, so long as they are receiving the services they desire. This bodes well for companies seeking long-term customer relationships and loyalty in an age of increasing competition.

In addition to the length of relationships, companies often wonder how the cost of services and products affect the chances of contract renewal. Specifically, does high cost lead to turnover? Liferay research showed that renewal amount may actually signal commitment, with the larger a deal size is, the higher the predicted probability of renewal. It’s possible that the scope of commitment within a deal, the more a company is invested in the long-term use of these services and products. Therefore, renewal becomes more likely.

Shifting Liferay’s Approach

Using these insights, Liferay was able to better understand the probability to renew for an improved ability to segment and strategize over the long term. By better understanding a target audience through tested and actionable data, companies across all industries can provide their customers with service, care and coordinated insights during not only the renewal phase, but throughout their contract timeline.

Learn More About How Liferay Can Help You

The age of digital transformation has arrived and is shifting how companies operate internally and interface with their target audience. Learn more about how transformation is possible through our insightful whitepaper.

Read “Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation”

Personalization vs SEO: Common Pitfalls of Creating Personalized Experiences

2025-05-29T20:49:53Z

Content and online experience personalization are at the forefront of website innovations, providing users with customer journeys that react to their specific interests and actions. But the drive to create more personalized experiences in public-facing websites can sometimes have unintended side effects, such as negatively impacting search engine optimization (SEO) when implemented improperly. The side effects caused by mistakes including generating multiple URLs for a single page, drastically shifting a page’s content to meet individual users and altering webpage layout from user to user can all prevent search engine bots from properly crawling your site’s pages and ranking them well in results.

Thankfully, personalized websites can still maintain healthy SEO efforts while providing visitors with dynamic, engaging experiences. The following guidelines will help you better understand the technical approaches to avoiding common mistakes that hurt your search rankings while creating a personalized website.

Clear communication is the key to a successful website and takes two forms: gathering an audience and guiding an audience. SEO helps to gather people looking for something a company offers and bring them to a website, while website personalization strategies help to guide them to what they want while on the site.

The Benefits of Website Personalization

Optimizely defines personalization as “the process of creating customized experiences for visitors to a website … (providing) unique experiences tailored to their needs and desires.” Personalization utilizes demographics, such as age and gender, to present products and services that could be right for a targeted customer, as well as context, which includes location, to match visitors with information related to their region. In doing so, a generic site quickly begins to match the unique interests of each individual audience member. Past behavior on a site can also inform personalization, as seen in the way Amazon presents items on its homepage based on expressed interests.

Through localization, a website’s personalization strategies go beyond translating content and targeting a specific language, culture or region. This includes changing the examples used in content to match the interests and needs of target audiences, such as swapping out case studies to fit the region being targeted. In doing so, a personalized website can most effectively communicate its message to the unique demands of each type of audience.

Gathering Your Audience

Every company with an online presence must face the challenge of getting as much of the correct audience to their website as possible. The following two sets of actions can improve the SEO of a brand’s personalized online experiences.

Ensure Site Indexing

Beware of Crawling Errors - Look out for unindexed pages, which will prevent search engines from crawling parts of a website and ranking them in search results. Multiple URLs can cause search engine penalizations for what seems like duplicate content as well as splitting resources, causing users to go to different URLs for the same page and hurting search results for the correct landing page.
Utilize Your Sitemap - Check your sitemap and make sure it is accessible by Google and correctly populated with the right pages for effective crawling for accurate search results. A well-structured sitemap plays an important role in proper page ranking.
Leverage Fetch as Google - Manually submit your page to Google Indexing, ensuring that the pages you want to be ranked in search engine results are properly crawled and preventing incorrect dynamically generated instances from becoming the results seen for your pages.

Optimize Your Metadata

Canonical URLs - Using canonical URLs within your coding will help Google crawl the correct page in the event that multiple URLs are generated for the same page, which can result from dynamic content or custom resources. Doing so will have a positive effect on rankings and direct visitors toward the correct version of your landing page while still providing needed personalization.
Use Localization in Programming - The use of HREFLANG link attributes will help enable localization by automatically providing the correct version of a page based on region and language. This can prevent incorrect personalization that leads to visitor frustrations and high bounce rates. These efforts are all part of effectively gathering a target audience and ensuring that the right eyes are getting on a website, which is where personalization efforts will help provide successful experiences for each visitor.

Guiding Your Visitors

Once visitors have arrived on your website, it is important to leverage on-page personalization in a way that provides targeted experiences while not negatively impacting your SEO efforts. Content targeting helps guide and direct users through a site by matching the content on a page to user interest, however, companies should beware of certain pitfalls to better guide website visitors.

Avoid Overtargeting - Websites should switch out content based on users, but be careful to not change the content too much. Doing so will prevent Google from knowing what is trying to be communicated on the page. In the event that Google crawls the page and is given content personalized to one specific user, the content generated when targeting a different user persona will become unindexable.
Define Functional Page Areas - Break down web pages into sections that cover the concept of the page, why the topic matters to the reader and where the service can be found. While this can somewhat change from page to page, keeping the design and structure fairly consistent can help make personalization easy but still fall in line with other pages on the site. In doing so, visitors will be less likely to be confused when navigating from page to page, hopefully decreasing your website’s bounce rate and having a positive impact on your site’s search engine rankings.
Plan Out Dynamic Content - Determine which aspects of your page will be made dynamic in order to suit the reader and what will determine changes in content. For example, one section of a page can be based on localization to correctly match language and references to the region of the reader while another can be based on user profile and page history to match up products, calls to action or links to related content with their unique interests.

With an effective search engine optimization strategy that works in tandem with personalized website experiences, a company’s online presence can both find and retain its target audience members.

Meet Your Audiences With a Modern Website

Modern websites that not only create personalized experiences, but also reach their target audiences, can positively affect companies year after year. Learn more about creating great experiences today.

Read “Three Key Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences.”

Three Ways to Encourage Employee Buy-In for Digital Transformation

2025-05-29T21:03:28Z

Companies across all industries are in the midst of digital transformation, overhauling and improving both back-end operations and customer-facing strategies through the use of modern technologies. According to a CMO study with Econsultancy, successful and timely digital transformation within a company requires every tier of leadership to be invested in change, including board members, C-suite, upper-level management and mid-lower level management.

Successful buy-in from all levels of a company ensures that digital transformation will be supported with crucial resources. However, digital transformation is not just about updating systems and forms of communication. The way that employees embrace new systems and approach customers are key aspects of transformation and need their buy-in in order to succeed.

Getting employees to buy into digital transformation can be difficult, especially if people fear that it will make their jobs harder. The following three ways to encourage digital transformation buy-in can empower workforces and create a greater return on investment in digital transformation efforts.

1. Back Up Your Strategy with Statistics

While there are many highly publicized digital transformation efforts currently being made around the world, company boards and directors still require proof of value for major decisions. According to Smart Insights, important statistics and topics that should be covered when presenting a digital transformation strategy include:

An outline of your digital strategy phases and a realistic timeline for implementation.
Examples of current company projects or competitor projects that demonstrate the benefits of transformation.
Dependable data analytics that illustrate cost savings, profits, customer retention and more.
Well-researched predictions concerning how the plan will change business operations and customer experience.
A plan for measuring how the strategy impacts the business.

It is helpful to place your company’s potential transformation in the context of the larger marketplace, including showing how your changes can help reposition and improve standings in regards to competitors and target audiences. This includes measuring the results of your digital transformation efforts to show that the successes or shortcomings of the strategy will be fully understood after buy-in and approval.

2. Tailor Your Strategy Presentation to Each Audience

It is likely that your presentation of digital transformation, whether formal or informal, will be presented to different members of the company at various times. As such, it is important that these different discussions are tailored to the unique needs and planned improvements of each audience segment. Forbes highlights that employees need to understand how they will fit into the digital strategy, including how their jobs will be impacted and what the technology can do to help them work more efficiently.

According to Richard Lobo, SVP at Infosys, “people need to believe that this is the right thing,” so communicating the wins achieved through digital strategy and incentivizing continued usage of new technology and strategies after they have been implemented will help encourage both initial and continued buy-in. While illustrating how a digital transformation strategy will positively affect a department is a key aspect to finding employee buy-in, successful strategies should already have department-by-department plans in place to make the most of their transformation.

3. Start Small with Digital Transformation

Most companies undergo digital transformation by starting with a few aspects of their organization and moving on from there. This can be applied to how a customer service department contacts and collects information from consumers, the way that internal communication is handled through modern applications or the file systems used by a business. In any case, starting with specific use cases can prevent complications that discourage employees from buying into transformation and can provide concrete examples of how digital transformation will improve the business as a whole.

As discussed by Dialexa, these smaller efforts will prevent company executives from seeing digital transformation strategies as high risk. In doing so, those in charge of transformation efforts can try different approaches without creating major complications. This allows the rewards to outweigh the risks in the eyes of people throughout the company.

Moving Forward with Digital Transformation

According to a survey by Progress, 85% of enterprise decision makers believe that there is a two-year timeframe for making significant progress in digital transformation before there are negative effects regarding finances and competition. This timeframe should be seen as an incentive for embarking on the journey to digital transformation, as there can still be enough time to strengthen your company and embrace the benefits of transformation instead of feeling negative effects.

Spark Your Company’s Digital Transformation

Successful digital transformation combines employee buy-in with software that is designed for both front-end and back-end transformation. Learn how digital experience platforms can create this opportunity.

Read "Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation"

How to Prepare for the Future of Machine-Driven Search

2025-05-29T20:33:31Z

Today, audiences are taking in information at all times of the day from a number of Internet-connected devices. In addition, search engines are filled with countless sites competing to be the leading authority on many different subjects. In order to compete successfully, businesses and application developers need to formulate their information discovery strategy, rank well in search engine results and reach the right audiences. However, the world of search engines is continuing to change through the use of new technologies and artificial intelligence.

In order to reach target audiences and successfully compete online, it is vital that companies understand the past, present and future of search engines.

1st Generation: Browsing for Content

In the first generation of search, search engines were rather simple and users typically worked their way through a website via a click-oriented customer journey, which saw them navigating through websites page by page in search of what they wanted. Often, websites were structured as a product catalog around a category tree and early search was done through SQL queries. In this journey, the discovery gateway, which is the most common tool for users to find what they want, was found in the navigation menu of a website. Menus allowed visitors to click through a website’s pages until they found what they were looking for or came across something new that sparked their interest.

While applications and strategies have moved beyond this form of discovery, many legacy applications still use this strategy. And although website navigation menus continue to help provide structure and navigation for visitors, modern audiences and search engines no longer solely rely on them to find what they need.

2nd Generation: Searching for Content

Eventually, the growth and increased capabilities of search engines led to customers becoming free from the need for menu navigation in order to find what they are looking for on a website. Rather than a website’s navigation menu, users now found their discovery gateway in the search bar both within websites and in search engines, which enabled them to go directly to the information they needed, rather than through a pathway inside a website.

Search experts Ryen W. White, Joemon M. Jose and Ian Ruthven described web queries as “short, ambiguous and an approximation of the searcher’s real information need,” in their paper Implicit Contextual Modelling for Information Seeking. This form of keyword-oriented information discovery led to a type of trial and error experience that saw users searching for keywords and looking through multiple results pages until they finally found what they needed. In some cases, the trial and error nature of searching can cause frustration, but it can also lead to a faster and more fulfilling online experience, as users navigate directly to what they need, rather than slowly making their way through a website until they reach their end goal. The continued efforts to create more effective and accurate results has led to the next era of search.

The Next Generation: Predicting Relevant Content

Intelligent information discovery is seen as the next stage of search, which goes beyond simple database queries and uses ranking and relevance algorithms to better match results with user interests. Today, results are continuing to go toward user-based predictions, with search engine output using scored predictions for a more successful and tailored search result within both search engines and websites. As reported by Bloomberg, Google’s deep learning system RankBrain helps generate search engine responses with greater accuracy for users in a shorter amount of time. This is just one of the many efforts to improve today’s search.

Rather than having to find the information, products and services that they want, companies are directing users toward them before they even begin searching. This can be seen in the ways that a company like Amazon tailors its homepage to the product interests of users or how search engines are autofilling search results based on a user’s past actions. The advancement of predictive content means that the discovery gateway is everywhere. Applications show users the results they would like to see as soon as possible, with interest-oriented information discovery influencing the customer journey. Data science and machine learning are becoming increasingly important in business and search strategies today. Wired’s coverage of Google’s changing algorithms shows that programmers are having less control over how search results are calculated as neural nets begin to influence a larger amount of search engine results.

Finding Success in the New Era of Search

The essential challenge in adapting to search engines powered by machine learning is modeling your content on meaningful numbers so that the data collected is linked together and better understood by algorithms to create an accurate and useful search result. When calculating search engine results, consider using TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency), which shows how often a term appears in the field you are reviewing, how rare the term is in the whole index and the length of the field where the term appears, in order to accurately score the field when predicting results scores. From there, you can remove stopwords, spellcheck effectively, predict non-text fields and more.

Successful efforts mean the creation of smart content delivery, with a discovery gateway that is everywhere, including front page search results, autofilling in search bars, push notifications, matching new content based on previous successful actions from a user and more in order to anticipate and influence the interests and actions of users. The result is an ever-improving intelligent information score that will benefit a brand’s online presence in the long term as search engines continue to evolve and focus more on delivering personalized predictive content.

Strengthen Your Website for Digital Transformation

Embracing digital transformation will prepare you for the ever-shifting world of online search. Learn more about what is possible through digital experience platforms in our helpful whitepaper.

Read “Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation.”

How to Find Your Customer Journey’s Moments of Truth

2025-05-29T20:32:24Z

This is part two of a two-part blog series concerning moments of truth in your customer journeys. Read part one to learn more about the five moment of truth types.

Today, customers expect brands to provide them with memorable and satisfying experiences that understand and meet their needs. This is done by not only providing a great product or service, but by creating a journey that answers their questions and helps them in the ways they require along the way to purchasing that product or service.

Take, for example, a customer’s entire stay at a hotel, which includes the moment he or she visits a hotel’s website to learn more about accommodations to the moment the customer checks out and leave. This entire journey encompasses a large amount of touch points, such as confirming a booking, how comfortable their bed is, how easy it is to find the hotel’s gym and even how simple the television’s remote control is to use. However, these different aspects do not have an equal impact on how much a customer will enjoy his or her experience with the hotel. Those that have the largest impact are seen as the moments of truth.

Determining the moments of truth within your customer journey will help you create effective improvement strategies that meet the vital needs of your target audience. The following methods will help you more accurately determine these moments, which can be difficult to find without a proven plan. Having created a detailed customer journey map prior to searching for moments of truth will help you to have a complete overview that prevents accidentally ignoring crucial moments.

Learn more about how to create a successful journey map by reading “Why Your Customer Journey Map Doesn’t Match Reality.”

How to Find Moments of Truth

There are three ways to find moments of truth within your customer journey map. Together, they can help you determine what touchpoints are having the greatest impact on your customers in order to make crucial improvements to your overall customer experience.

1. Data Analytics

It’s important to base your moments of truth strategy on measurable data in order to make real, discernable improvements to your customer experiences. A large portion of the modern customer journey takes place online and, as such, can create detailed data for companies to review. In doing so, a company can see the many ways in which a customer moves from first researching a product or service to their first interaction with the brand and eventually to their purchase of an item, so long as the journey is successful.

As detailed by Conduit Hub, analytics can point out areas where customer churn is the highest, which can be seen through bounce rates, failure to complete transactions and other signs of consumers ending their journey before they complete a purchase. Beyond the points where customers leave the journey, analytics can also show the last stage before a customer completes a purchase. This will show what moment has convinced them to buy a product or service.

2. Intuition

If you have been immersed in understanding the customer journey for long enough and truly trying to get inside the minds of your target audience, you will likely be able to intuit some of the most crucial touchpoints in the journey. While the use of measurable data in the previous point will help back up your intuition, trusting your gut when it comes to moments of truth can help eliminate wasted time and get to effective improvements faster.

As you map out your customer journey in as much detail as possible, you will likely find that some touchpoints would be far harder to improve than others. While it may seem daunting, these difficult areas to improve may signal which aspects are real moments of truth and may be in the most need of improvement. As discussed in the book “Solve for the Customer,” intuition can be further strengthened by modeling the moments of truth that have been found. Companies should recreate and test out these moments for themselves in order to see just how well the process goes.

3. Survey Validation

However you determine your moments of truth, it is important that you validate your findings as much as possible. One of the best ways to find validation is to survey your customer base, helping to get their insights into the journeys they have taken and receiving a new perspective that can both validate your results and also shed light on other moments that you may not have found on your own.

Through the use of customer surveys, you can determine the moments that had the greatest impact on your target audience, both in positive and negative ways. In order to prevent skewing the results in ways that validate your findings, focus on creating questions that do not lead to only the answers you want. Instead, attempt to create unbiased results. In doing so, your survey can truly strengthen your findings and may even show where you misinterpreted data or why there may be a disconnect between your journey mapping strategies and the perceptions of your customers. In particular, surveys can highlight what may be the Second Moment of Truth, as shown by Lexis Nexis.

4. Focus on the Customer

In addition to determining what your moments of truth are, companies will need to decide which areas deserve your immediate focus and attention in order to make the most positive impact for your company. When making a decision, companies should focus on touchpoints customers cannot control in order to most effectively address moments of truth, such as how quickly an order is processed or how items are laid out in a store.

This approach to moments of truth can result in a customer centricity strategy, which is a manner of doing business with your customers in a way that provides a positive experience during their length of engagement in order to drive repeat business, customer loyalty and profits. Doing so is in service of providing "customer-first" experiences.

Take Control of Your Customer Journey

Improving your company’s moments of truth and improving your overall customer experiences in cohesive, effective ways takes time and effort, but the results are well worth it. Our four strategies to transform customer experiences can provide you with a plan of action that is right for your unique needs and audiences for success in both the long and short term.

Read “Four Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience.”

What are the Five Moments of Truth in Marketing?

2025-05-29T21:10:56Z

A customer journey is composed of many touchpoints. These points vary in importance, but the most integral ones are known as moments of truth, which Conduit has defined as the points in a relationship with a customer where a business has the opportunity to earn his or her true loyalty through engagement. Although it's important that companies work to improve their customer experiences as a whole, defining their moments of truth and working to improve them specifically can result in major improvements to customer journeys.

The idea of “moments of truth” began in 2005 with A.G. Lafley, Chairman, President, and CEO of Procter & Gamble, and initially outlined two moments. Since then, the moments of truth have expanded to accommodate the modern customer journey, which has rapidly changed through digital customer experiences and the rise of smart devices. Today, up to five different types of moments of truth can be identified in the customer journey.

Although companies don't necessarily consider every one of these moments, we're talking about them here to help you understand the broad scope and effects of these moments when it comes to the unique customer experience offered by your brand.

Less Than Zero Moment of Truth (<ZMOT)

One of the most recent additions to the scope of moments of truth, the Less Than Zero Moment of Truth was coined by Eventricity and is designed to look at the absolute earliest instance of a potential customer beginning their journey and interacting with a brand. At this moment, something has happened in the life of a customer to become interested in a product or service. While their research into a product is seen in the Zero Moment of Truth, the Less Than Zero Moment happens before this research even begins. In this moment, a company can actively reach out to a customer via social media, email marketing, advertisements, and more before the customer even comes to them for more information. Although this requires advanced targeting and monitoring of customer activities, this proactive strategy can decrease the likelihood of an audience member choosing a competitor.

Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)

The idea of a Zero Moment of Truth is a more recent addition to the concept as well. ZMOT was introduced by Google in order to match the modern online customer journey and concerns the moment a person begins searching for information regarding a product or service that he or she is interested in. At this time, a customer will encounter reviews and more information about the product before moving forward in the journey. While companies will not be able to control all online reviews, they can positively influence their online reputation through their interactions with the audience and the quality of the product, which will lead to good reviews that can encourage people to continue their journey with the brand.

First Moment of Truth (FMOT)

The FMOT, as first defined by Procter & Gamble, is centered on when a potential customer encounters your product or service for the first time. Commonly, the FMOT only lasts for a few seconds and can include the customer reading a description or hearing a pitch from a representative in order to better understand how the product may serve his or her needs. This immediate impression hinges on good presentation and the ability to clearly show how the product will fulfill the needs of the audience. This brief moment will have a major impact on whether a person will move forward with learning more about what your company offers.

Second Moment of Truth (SMOT)

After first seeing the product, the audience will move on to the Second Moment of Truth. Here, the customer truly experiences what your company is offering. This can occur before purchasing the product, such as experiencing a hands-on demonstration of a new phone, but may also happen after a purchase, which occurs frequently in the modern age of online shopping where a customer does not truly experience the product until after it arrives. While a SMOT that occurs before purchase will have a greater influence on whether a customer will pay for a service or product, a SMOT that happens afterward will still have a major impact on their satisfaction and continuing relationship with a brand, which can affect reputation and audience reach.

Ultimate Moment of Truth (UMOT)

Also known as the Third Moment of Truth, the UMOT is centered on feedback from customers concerning the product. While not an original part of the moments of truth, this third moment was added by Procter & Gamble soon after the first two were defined. The product’s ability to fulfill the needs of the customer, as well as the company’s efforts to provide an enjoyable experience along the way to purchasing it, will shape the audience’s emotional response to what they have received. During the UMOT, a customer may choose to share their opinions on the service with the company that provided it, write a review online, and give their opinions to family, friends, and colleagues. These takeaways will influence whether they become a return customer—which is why this moment is known as the Ultimate Moment because it may become the Zero Moment of Truth for other people in the future.

Improving Moments of Truth for Great Customer Journeys

While it is important to understand these types of moments of truth, these will be different for every company. Each can take place at different times along the customer journey depending on the company and some will have a greater impact on an audience’s perceptions of a brand. Businesses should work to find these unique moments of truth within their customer journey but also employ strategies to improve their moments in ways that have clear, meaningful benefits for their marketing efforts and customer service.

Read about how to effectively find your own company’s moments of truth in the second half of our two-part blog series or learn more about how Liferay's personalization capabilities can help you target prospects at moments of truth more effectively.

Become Equipped to Create Great Experiences

Successful customer experiences take time, effort, and strategy, but it may be difficult for a company to know where to start or how to improve their own unique journeys. To learn more, read our helpful whitepaper and learn what improvements may be right for you.

Read “Three Key Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences.”

Six Blind Spots in Your Marketing Analytics

2025-05-29T20:58:50Z

Modern analytics systems can leverage AI and machine learning to process data faster and with greater insights than what a single person can do. But they still rely on people making decisions. As such, errors within the creation and management of analytics still happen. These blind spots in analytics mean that they can be very difficult to address as their very existence can go unseen.

The following six areas may be unseen by your analytics strategy, and by becoming aware of them, you can empower and expand your systems in order to find new and useful data to bolster your marketing efforts.

1. Offline Campaigns

Offline campaigns are just as important as online ones and can be enhanced through the use of analytics integration. Because today’s world of online and offline marketing is intertwined, it is important for your company to understand how customers will move back and forth between them. Kissmetrics points out that by providing trackable discount codes and vanity urls in offline advertising, it can be far easier to see what offline efforts are converting audiences into online visitors. Your analytics systems can track their actions from that moment on.

2. Live Chat

Live customer service chat is becoming more useful, and used, than ever before. According to Forrester research, 44% of online consumers in a recent survey stated that live chat is one of the most important features of a website. While simply providing chat is part of a successful strategy, it is important that you turn your chat time into a quantifiable, and therefore improvable, aspect of your analytics. Gauge chat usage time, related revenue, conversion rates and more in order to see how well your live chat is working and what can be done to further improve it.

3. 404 Results

In an ideal world, a visitor to your website would never encounter a 404 page. But the reality is that even the most well constructed and maintained websites will contain 404 errors. However, not keeping track of these issues will prevent your team from making the improvements necessary to keep them from popping up less often. By implementing a Google Analytics code into a site’s 404 page, companies can see what the visitor entered and which page directed them to the 404, according to MarketingLand.com. Once the data is gathered, you can take action to correct these errors.

4. Popup Windows

A well-designed and properly implemented popup window will grab the attention of audiences at the right time and in the right situations. But companies may not know how effective, or ineffective, their popup strategy is without proper analytics usage. By treating your popup windows as separate pages, your analytics can show you if the bounce rate, conversions and more useful insights associated with a popup. With this information, you can see how effective these windows are and what can possibly be done to make them more effective.

5. Internal Traffic

This blind spot comes in the form of traffic that your analytics shouldn’t be tracking, rather than areas that it should. Depending on the size of your organization, a large portion of the traffic being sent to your website or various sites that you manage may be coming from inside your company. That may make the numbers look great, but it actually skews analytics in ways that are detrimental to your overall strategy. By filtering out the IP addresses associated with your company and its employees, you can create analytics results that are not skewed by employee behavior.

6. Cross-Domain Tracking

Your organization may have created multiple top-level domains in order to meet the various needs of your audience, but what happens when one site pushes a user to another site? As discussed by MediaShift, the security measures in place between top-level domains can prevent conventional data collection and cause multiple records to be created for single users. In order to prevent inconsistent and incorrect data, companies will need to modify and connect their tracking codes across these sites and create a filter that shows the full path of content across top-level domains. As a result, you will be able to see how users behave across more than one site that you control.

Getting a Full View of Customer Behavior

Successful marketing analytics depend on strong platforms that not only provide the insights a company needs, but also allow for consistent improvements based on the data collected. As a company collects and connects more data regarding target audience behavior, a more robust and complete customer view can be formed in order to better tailor your marketing efforts. Ideally, the better you customize your marketing to the interests of each customer, the higher return on investment you will find. And it all begins with a stronger platform.

Transform Your Analytics

By building on a modern digital experience platform, your business can better integrate analytics with all aspects of the customer experience for more powerful data insights. Learn more about what DXP can do for you in our whitepaper.

Read “Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation”

Why Your Customer Journey Map Doesn't Match Reality

2025-05-29T21:14:19Z

Great customer experiences are crafted by companies in ways that meet and hopefully exceed expectations by anticipating their target audience’s next actions and interests. However, companies will need to create a detailed and accurate depiction of these potential experiences in the form of customer journey maps, which show the many steps that customers go through when interacting with a business. These maps trace the journey from first interaction to the close of a sale and perhaps even beyond that, but an inaccurate customer journey map that does not reflect the realities of their audience experiences can cause unnecessary complications for a business.

Whether your company is currently creating a map or has already completed mapping, it is vital that you know why a journey map may not reflect reality in order to create a more accurate map and, as a result, better meet your customers’ needs.

Common Journey Map Problems

While each company will need to work toward making their journey map accurately reflect their own unique business, there are several problems that frequently occur in the creation process. Consider whether these issues are affecting your own journey map.

Idealized Steps - There is a difference between how you would like your customers to behave versus how they truly act. If your customer journey only reflects the ways in which you would ideally like them to interact with you, then it cannot be used as a tool for change. Useful journey maps see the true journey as it currently stands so that you and your team can enact positive change.
Leaving Out Steps That Don’t Include You - Great journey maps detail all phases of the process, including the steps that don’t involve your business. This can include when a customer checks out a competitor or learns more about a product through a different website. You may not be able to control these steps, but they impact the overall journey.
Forgetting Customer POV - What does your customer think of you? It’s a crucial question to ask and one which will help a company better understand how each step in a journey influences perceptions and either encourages or discourages the customer in taking the next step. Remember that journeys are still subject to the views and interests of the customer, no matter how effective your customer experience strategy may be.
Lack of Performance Indicators - Effective journey maps identify which areas can be improved by incorporating performance indicators. As discussed by Tandem Seven, these indicators provide insights into customers’ emotional highs and lows in order to see what may be preventing the completion of a sale. Not including indicators can prevent a company from understanding the reasons behind a journey and making the right changes.

Being aware of these pitfalls in journey maps can help companies better understand the effectiveness of their mapping and begin to see the underlying causes of potential problems.

What is Causing Your Incorrect Customer Journey Map?

Most often, inaccurate journey mapping is the result of having a limited scope of vision during the creation process. If a brand does not work to see all stages of a journey and incorporate many different perspectives during mapping, the company will not be able to produce a map with enough detail and scope.

Make sure the journey map is the result of all of your company’s stakeholders providing their insights, which can give a greater understanding of steps that involve various departments. Voices from different departments mean that no single area of the journey will outweigh the others, such as a journey map that is only created by a social media department but leaves out important customer service details. As discussed by The Customer Framework, inaccurate journey maps may reflect an “Ivory Tower” development, which makes a map look complete without actually involving those who deliver essential steps of the journey. The result is the use of a journey map that employees do not know is incomplete until they have used it.

Besides making sure all departments and stakeholders are involved, don’t discount going directly to the focus of your map - the customer. MyCustomer.com points out that no matter how much data can be mined by a business, it is still crucial to speak with customers. In doing so, a company can gain valuable insights and new perspectives that are not possible through data analysis and internal feedback alone.

Creating an Accurate Journey Map

Today, companies can use in-depth analytics that gather large amounts of data from how customers interact with them online during mapping. In doing so, the process can go past the hypothetical and be grounded in measurable data. This data can include social media interactions, advertisements, website browsing, customer service calls and any other action that creates data, which back-end integration of analytics systems can collect and organize.

Accurate analysis means that your company will have the ability to truly see how your customers interact with you for a more accurate journey map. As a result, the changes you make to improve the customer journey have a greater chance at making real, helpful changes that address true customer demands.

Learn more about creating great journey maps and identifying customer pain points that must be addressed in “Finding Your Biggest Customer Pain Points.”

Start Transforming Your Customer Journey

After better understanding your customer journeys, you will want to begin improving them to the greatest degree possible. Learn about how to transform customer experiences in the way that is right for your company through our insightful whitepaper.

Read “Four Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience”

Why Your Business Can No Longer Ignore Digital Customer Experience

2025-05-29T21:14:07Z

Successful businesses rely on great customer experiences more than ever. According to a Walker study, customer experience will become the key differentiator between brands by the year 2020, beating out both price and product. An increasingly important part of that will come in the form of digital customer experience.

Digital customer experience is just as crucial as traditional, in-person customer experience. Brands must consider these two facets as separate yet strongly connected in order to create an effective strategy that appeals to target audiences. But understanding these two types of experiences can be confusing for those who are not fully aware of their differences and similarities.

Defining Customer Experiences

The term customer experience (CX) is a broad term concerning how a consumer feels about their treatment by a company. This includes traditional aspects of customer service, such as in-person help from a representative, as well as newer, digitally-based company interactions, like chatbot services. The term digital customer experience (DCX) is exclusively focused on these digital services, as well as back-office tools that help make these online experiences possible, such as personalization software.

Think of customer experience and digital customer experience as equally important in serving the needs of target audiences and providing them with a cohesive and beneficial interaction with your brand. Although DCX can be included within the larger term of CX, they are distinct from one another in how they operate while still driving toward the same goal of sales completion.

Different Experiences Need Different Strategies

It is important for businesses to understand that the same principles used to create great CX do not always translate perfectly into great DCX. While a business’ target audience should be able to find the same level of service and care both in person and online, companies should note that customer experience and digital customer experience do not have a direct one-to-one correlation.

As discussed by Harvard Business Review, a large part of traditional CX relies on the actions of other customers, the physical environment and location, which often results in customers lowering their expectations for the experience. However, DCX is purely online and subject to the high standards of consumers, including fast loading time, being able to quickly find the items they want and having their needs met in the exact ways they expect. Customers who are in a store know that employees are busy and may need to wait to be helped, but online customers feel like there is no excuse for slow or inefficient service when shopping on their computer. These different expectations will require different strategies in order to be met properly.

Businesses will need to use sophisticated data insights to make the most of how consumers interact with them through digital platforms in order to create great digital customer experiences. Gartner reports that the most popular way to begin refining and improving DCX is by improving how customer feedback is collected and analyzed. In doing so, companies can have a better understanding of how to improve in ways that meet customer expectations.

The Worth of Digital Customer Experience

With the amount of work needed to make great DCX, businesses may wonder if it is worth the effort. But effective digital customer experiences have been shown to have a positive effect on customers and lead to a high return on investment. While the impact of DCX on a company’s profits will vary from business to business, information from Forbes shows that higher adoption of a digital interaction (such as an online shopping cart) leads to higher revenue and lower operational cost. McKinsey research also shows that businesses that have greater digital capabilities can convert sales at a rate that is 2.5 times greater than businesses with lesser digital capabilities.

Like traditional CX, poor DCX can cause customers to turn to a competitor. As discussed in an article on Huffington Post, 67% of customers have cited bad experiences as a reason for leaving a company in favor of a competitor. This includes poor experiences online. It is important to note that even if you are not hearing direct customer complaints, statistics show that only 1 in every 26 unhappy customers will complain about a bad experience. The silence of your target audience regarding poor or nonexistent DCX does not mean you should not improve your online experiences.

The Future of DCX

It is important to note that online and offline experiences, while still different from one another, are becoming closer together than ever in the customer journey. The modern customer often expects to be able to switch between devices while online, as well as begin, continue or finish their journey in person whenever he or she wishes. This means that a company should provide digital experiences that can transfer important information across devices and also access such information at physical locations for a smooth, interconnected experience.

As you manage and seek to improve your current DCX, keep this in mind so that your brand can keep pace with the evolving expectations of the modern audience.

Strengthen Your Digital Customer Experience

Learn more about digital customer experience and what you can do to create great DCX for your unique target audience.

Three Characteristics of Digital Experience Platforms, According to the 2017 Forrester Wave for DXPs

2025-05-29T21:02:50Z

The demand for software platforms that streamline the process of creating and managing digital touchpoints continues to grow. One answer to this demand has been digital experience platforms or DXPs, which promise to bring together the disparate solutions that companies currently use to manage interactions at every point of the customer journey.

The problem is well-defined: in a world of rapidly developing technology, digital leaders need flexible software that can support short release cycles for new touchpoints and eliminate the data silos that slow strategy down.

The exact definition of what a DXP actually does, however, is still taking shape, partly because the capabilities needed to address the problem are so broad. It can be difficult to see through the hype and identify the essential components of a DXP that will realistically help companies evolve their businesses.

Forrester recently released its 2017 Wave for Digital Experience Platforms to help companies clarify their expectations for DXPs. The 2017 report is the third of its kind, following Waves from 2014 and 2015. Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a newcomer to the Forrester Wave, and as one of the few vendors to pivot from a portal-heritage solution, Liferay DXP brings a strong portfolio for creating and managing modern, authenticated experiences for post-purchase stages of the customer journey in uniquely challenging IT environments.

How Forrester Defines a Digital Experience Platform

Forrester identifies eight core areas that a fully realized DXP should include: content, marketing, commerce, customer service, analytics, customer data, personalization, and development and operations. While all eight categories are considered core components of a DXP, Forrester required strong product offerings in only four categories, with prebuilt integration among the components.

From this methodology, we can conclude three things about Forrester’s vision for DXPs:

DXPs should encompass the entire customer journey. Currently, most vendors are geared toward supporting customer acquisition phases, rather than the post-purchase phases that Forrester identifies.
DXPs should integrate broad capabilities in order to reduce friction, maximize reuse and fuel insight. Forrester added two new core areas (personalization, and development and operations) from its 2015 report and required four instead of three product offerings, reflecting that DXPs are continuing to broaden.
The strategy and roadmap of a DXP is just as important as its current offering. Forrester’s definition of strategy and vision includes product cohesion, capturing the “prebuilt integration” that every DXP should have.

The actual score weighting that Forrester uses for the Wave is based on a generic set of business priorities, and Forrester recommends that companies adjust the evaluation criteria according to their actual needs, in order to see which vendors best fit their use case.

All DXP Vendors Have Room to Grow

With only one leader in the 2017 Wave, it’s clear that vendors still have room to grow. The next Wave will likely be a very different picture of the DXP market as vendors up their investment in missing core areas.

One interesting thing to note is that Forrester gives equal weight to vendors’ current product offering and to their long-term vision. Companies would be wise to keep an eye to vendor roadmaps as they evaluate DXP offerings. Already, we’ve seen some major shifts in the Wave for DXPs. OpenText was included in 2014, dropped in 2015, and is back as a Challenger in 2017. Adobe was the only Leader in 2015, and has fallen back considerably to be replaced by Oracle.

This shows that no vendor should be considered a leader based on capabilities alone; it is crucial that they demonstrate an understanding of what digital businesses will need next, especially with a platform that is intended to support a long-term strategy. The more companies can pinpoint their digital strategy needs for the next three to five years, the better they will be able to find a platform that will deliver real business value.

Digital Business Starts With the Right Technology

Digital Experience Platforms are an emerging product category that brings together the capabilities that organizations need to build a foundation for their digital transformation.

See How DXPs Help Digital Transformation

What is the True Value of Customer Retention?

2025-05-29T21:12:27Z

Studies show that acquiring a new customer costs a business between four and 10 times more than it takes to retain a customer. This is caused by the amount of effort it takes to find, target and successfully sell a new consumer a product or service when compared to selling something to a customer who has already previously purchased something from a company. Econsultancy reports that 82% of companies they surveyed agreed that customer retention costs less to execute than customer acquisition. However, Econsultancy also found that companies were more focused on acquisition marketing. In addition, 63% of marketers surveyed by Kissmetrics stated that customer acquisition was the most important advertising goal for their company.

Acquiring customers will always be a vital aspect in the growth and continued profitability of any organization. But retaining customers has a major impact on the bottom line due to its relatively low cost, high return on investment and long-term benefits.

When evaluating your acquisition efforts, consider calculating customer acquisition cost (CAC), as detailed by Kissmetrics. This metric is determined by dividing all marketing expenses used to acquire new customers by the number of customers acquired during the period in which the money was spent. This can be used to create a measurable number concerning the acquisition of both new customers and the return business of retained customers in order to see the differences in marketing for your individual brand.

The Value of Retained Customers

Keeping a previously acquired customer has been shown to not only typically cost less in terms of marketing, but has also been shown to result in higher value purchases. According to Invespcro, increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%. In addition, the average repeat buyer spends 33% more than a new customer. When combined with lowering the cost of marketing efforts, the higher spending of return customers can result in a greater ROI for a company in the long term.

Retained customers are also shown to gain value over time, as Annexcloud reports that the typical return customer will spend 67% more by their third year of buying from a business than in their first six months. This means that long-term customer retention, not simply enticing a second purchase, will yield results that increase in profitability over time.

As discussed by Optimove, the specific value of a retained customer can be determined by collecting data regarding total purchases, retention marketing expenses, customer acquisition costs and the general overhead of the efforts made to retain customers. Determining the price of your business’ customer retention efforts can help you optimize your retention marketing and balance your budget regarding both acquisition and retention efforts.

The Competition of Lost Customers

It is important to note that a previous customer who does not return for another purchase is most likely to have turned to another company within the industry. According to Kissmetrics, 61% of consumers will go to a competitor after ending a business relationship.

There are a variety of reasons why a consumer may be lost to a business; however, many studies find that poor customer service is a frequent reason. In addition, persuading a lost customer to return to a business is often very difficult. According to Accenture, 68% of customers will not return to a company once they have left out of dissatisfaction. As such, it is vital that companies make an effort to better understand what will encourage their customers to remain with them for future purchases in order to avoid losing them to the competition.

While traditional loyalty programs are having less effect on customer retention, Socialannex surveys show that 62% of customers believe that the brands to which they are most loyal are not doing enough to reward them for their loyalty. As such, brands must rethink what is a valuable reward for loyalty and what can make their audiences feel known and valued so that they give the competition less consideration when it comes time for another purchase.

Targeting Audiences for Retention and Acquisition

While both retaining and acquiring customers benefit a company in their own ways, the ability to provide both audiences with effective marketing is more crucial than ever. Today, technology allows for a greater understanding of individual consumers for targeted marketing and a single customer view. Whether an individual is a longtime customer looking for a new product or a potential customer looking for a company that will best suit their needs, being able to create a single customer view and market directly to the unique interests and demands of an audience member will play a crucial role in future acquisition and retention.

For strategies on how to encourage loyalty and successfully retain your customers, read “How to Build Customer Loyalty in the Digital Age.”

Find New Ways to Retain Your Customers

Competition for customers and the willingness of pre-existing consumers to turn to your competitors is higher than ever in the modern age. But engaging and retaining customers is still possible through new strategies that leverage modern technology.

Read Loyalty in the Digital Age: 4 Strategies to Engage Existing Customers

The Pros and Cons of Building a Hybrid App

2025-05-29T21:01:32Z

If you are considering building an application for your workforce, target audience or both, hybrid apps can provide the tools and resources that your users desire, such as fast access to human resources information, customer profiles and intracompany communication channels. While native apps and mobile websites can also help you reach your intended audience, hybrid applications can provide unique advantages.

However, every type of app has both its advantages and disadvantages. The following list of pros and cons of building a hybrid app can help you better understand if this is right for you in order to make informed, effective decisions.

Pro: Saved Time and Money

While native apps will need to be programmed for each operating system they are featured on, hybrid apps have a one-for-all build. The result is less time and money spent developing multiple versions of the same application, as what is built will be suited for all devices when programmed correctly.

According to Hacker Noon, the cost of developing a hybrid app is consistently less than native app development for companies of all sizes. This ranges from a $10,000 difference for small minimum viable products to a nearly $100,000 difference for large enterprise applications. While more aspects than cost alone will need to be taken into account when deciding on app development, this may play a crucial role in a company’s decision.

Con: Potential Lagging

Because a hybrid app is run on many different operating systems, it is possible that complications caused by interfacing with these different systems can cause lag. While this is not necessarily the case for all apps and depends on how each one is programmed, developers will need to take the potential for lag into account while designing the application.

In order to account for and counteract the potential for lag, developers can decrease the frame rate that the app normally runs at, with Venture Beat advising that between 30 and 40 frames per second being less likely to encounter noticeable slowdown while also still being pleasing to the eye of users. UI can also have a large impact on hybrid app performance. While complex CSS can make your app really stand out, features like animation can be both costly and heavy on performance. Consider a visually pleasing layout that is less complex while still adhering to the style you would like in order to strike a balance between performance and appearance.

Pro: Online and Offline Access

If you are considering only having a website and no app, you may be unable to reach a target audience that must operate without internet service at times. Developers have the option of packaging a hybrid application locally or through a server. As such, hybrid applications can be accessed both online and offline.

Determine if offline capabilities will be necessary for your hybrid app by employing the use of beta testers prior to launch, who can provide real world insights that may not have been found during initial development. While it may be tempting to get your app out to the public as soon as possible in order to start seeing returns on your investment, a successful launch will have a greater positive impact than a fast launch with many issues.

After launch, the use of in-app analytics will help provide feedback regarding usage, potential issues and user retention. This can signal where you need to improve, as well as whether a significant segment of your audience is attempting to use your application offline and running into issues as a result. As discussed by Apptamin, cohort analysis can help you understand shifts in your user base in order to determine just exactly who is using your app the most and whether offline access is needed in order to meet their demands.

Con: Variations Caused by Devices and Operating Systems

Lagging is not the only effect that the wide variety of systems and devices could have on a hybrid app. The appearance of your app can vary from user to user, depending on the version of the software they are using and the type of device displaying your app. As such, your app may not always look the way you intended and you will need to test it on a wide variety of possible operating systems and devices in order to optimize it for the broadest audience possible. In doing so, you can create a design that has fewer incompatible features or experiences known complications when being displayed on certain operating systems.

Studies show that 79% of consumers will retry a mobile application only once or twice should it fail upon the first try. As such, it is important to ensure your app will work as consistently as possible to avoid immediate abandonment, which may be complicated by how a hybrid app could perform based on device.

Pro: Effective Updates

After development, updates will be needed in order to keep applications running smoothly and to eliminate bugs that may be negatively affecting user experience. Like the development process, updates will be able to affect the application across all operating systems, resulting in a higher return on investment for the update process.

Y Media Labs points out several reasons why hybrid app updates can be so effective. This includes having a single code base for multiple platforms, not needing to bring in additional employees to supplement your current web team for development, the ability to avoid API development and not needing to submit each version of the application to an app store for approval.

Making the Right Choice for Your Business

The balance between advantages and disadvantages concerning a hybrid app will often come down to the individual nature of your business and industry. When considering the creation of a hybrid app, use company surveys and analytics to determine how the previously listed pros and cons of a hybrid app may apply to you. In addition to the creation of hybrid apps, brands can also consider cross-platform solutions, which do not necessarily use web technologies. These solutions produce native apps, but from one code base only.

Leverage Your Mobile App

There’s always more to learn when it comes to effectively applying the benefits of hybrid apps and other mobile platforms to your unique goals as a company.

Learn How to Estimate the Long-Term Cost of Mobile App Development

How to Estimate the Long-Term Cost of Mobile App Development

2025-05-29T20:32:21Z

Mobile app development takes more than the initial cost to launch a product. Rather, successful development takes long-term strategies into consideration and plans for how an app will grow and be used in the future.

In order to ensure the highest possibility of success in your mobile app, it is important that you have an accurate estimation of cost. This will include not only what it will take to develop and launch a well-made application, but what the long-term cost of maintaining and updating the app will be in order to keep users satisfied, prevent app abandonment, and meet the demands that caused you to create the app in the first place.

While initially, launch costs will play a large role in how you plan and shape your app, it is the long-term costs that will determine how your application impacts your budget and goals year after year. Effective and well-used applications show their worth repeatedly over time and through many different scenarios. In order to be effective, take the following long-term cost factors into consideration in order to have successful app development that plans for the future.

Initial Structure

The structure of your app will not only determine the initial cost of development, but highly influence long-term cost. The operating system of choice, features such as login, social media implementation, and the creation of profiles will all influence how much will need to be spent in order to maintain the features that make up the app. In addition, the complexity of your app’s design will influence how in-depth updates must be to be effective.

According to a report by Standish Group, approximately 45% of typical application features on both web and mobile are never used, with an additional 19 percent of features deemed as being rarely used. These unnecessary features mean that a large portion of what makes up your application is costing you money with very little or no return on investment. Removing unused features, which can be determined through accurate analytics, from your app early on in development will not only lower initial cost of development, but also lower the cost of future maintenance and updates.

Frequency of Updates

How often will you try to update your mobile app, and will these updates be small tweaks or large overhauls? While regular updates will be necessary in order to ensure that an app is functioning correctly and growing in order to meet the changing needs of a user base, these updates will affect the long-term cost. Small, frequent updates can provide minimal but necessary tweaks while large updates can provide big overhauls and changes to major portions of the app. In either case, a company will need to determine what is the best balance between providing a consistent app and their yearly budget.

Application Maintenance

What is involved in application maintenance? This is a continual process that includes managing and correcting issues, backing up data, implementing small needed enhancements, preventing future bugs, patching in the event of a sudden problem and more. All of these aspects of maintenance keep apps running as they should in order to provide users with the consistent experience they expect. According to research, typical yearly application maintenance costs are between 15% and 20% of the original development costs, which will help you determine a general cost outlook for your app’s future. In addition, this projected percentage means that you should make informed decisions regarding the initial development cost of your application.

Hybrid or Native App

Will you build a hybrid or native app? These two types of applications will have their own unique development and maintenance needs, which will impact your long-term mobile strategy. In addition, hybrid app updates allow for a single update to be applied to all apps, while native apps will require updates to be applied based on their operating system, which leads to additional work and an increase in cost.

Non-Development Costs

While development costs are our main focus, spending related to actual development must be taken into account. These costs include marketing to drive new and returning users to your app, fees from the App Store and Google Play, the cost of running servers and back-end support, accounting and legal fees, and any other extraneous costs that come with providing for a team of developers outside of the direct costs of developing and maintaining an app.

Get the Details on Your App’s Cost

There are numerous tools available online that will help you combine these estimations for an outline of your app’s cost. However, many of these only determine the initial cost of development and not the long-term costs. Take these factors into consideration and remember that they may change over time, which will require you to rethink your app’s cost and what you can do in order to meet these shifting needs. Long-term success can come from accurate estimations, a willingness to adjust your mobile app to meet your audience’s needs and a budget that will help achieve long-term success.

What Makes an Effective Long-Term App?

There’s always more to learn when it comes to creating an effective mobile app that meets your unique needs as a company.

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The Retail Bubble - How to Compete in an Era of Change

2025-05-29T21:01:33Z

In the wake of numerous companies declaring bankruptcy and large amounts of stores closing across the United States, both brand executives and news outlets are declaring that the retail bubble has burst.

However, retail companies everywhere should understand that this should not be seen as a time of widespread financial losses, but rather, a time of major industry-specific change. As a result, companies need to understand that the way of doing business has shifted away from traditional forms and toward a more modern, customer-centric approach that blurs the line between in-store and online commerce. Retailers should respond appropriately.

The first step toward rethinking your strategy in post-retail bubble burst is to understand why it happened, followed by adopting new techniques that have caused some brands to experience continued success while others do not.

Causes of the Retail Bubble Bursting

The bursting of the retail bubble is not the result of a single cause. Rather, this is due to several factors coming together at an inopportune time. These include:

Oversaturation of Physical Retail Space - Too much square footage taken up by retail stores across the country caused an imbalance in store representation versus number of customers. According to a CNN report, the amount of retail square feet per capita in the United States is more than six times that of Europe or Japan.
The Continued Move Toward Online Shopping - Even traditionally in-person shopping experiences like shopping for clothes are moving online even more. Customers are gravitating toward stores that enable cutting-edge online retail experiences and leaving those that do not.
Inadequate Direct-to-Consumer Sales - While companies have seen online shopping as a way to counterbalance a decrease in sales made in brick-and-mortar locations, many retailers are only partially replacing in-store sales with digital sales, leading to decreased revenue.
Increasing Rental Costs Outweigh Profits - Besides profits falling, rental costs continue to increase for real estate across the nation and the massive expansive of brick and mortar stores in recent years pushed retail space rent prices even higher, according to Richard Hayne, CEO of Urban Outfitters, Inc. The expense of simply having a physical location cuts into retail chains' earnings.

Understanding what has caused the retail bubble to burst is the first step toward formulating and enacting an effective plan. But what are the next steps to take in order to compete today in the retail industry?

Digital Tactics to Address the Bursting Retail Bubble

Not every business has been negatively affected by the recent bubble bursting, as Walmart, Costco, Best Buy, Children’s Place and Home Depot have all experienced growth throughout the year. Many of these companies have been able to use their online presence and technological innovations to improve sales and retain customers. The following digital transformation strategies can be used to address the causes of the bubble burst discussed earlier.

Incentivize Online Purchases - Walmart’s recent purchase of startup company Jet was used to encourage online orders by dynamically dropping prices and discounting shipping when customers ordered large amounts of items through their website. In doing so, the company was able to supplement their physical location with online shopping.
Enhance Brick and Mortar - While many retailers are closing stores due to the costs of running physical locations, in-person shopping still plays a major role in closing sales. As such, retailers would be well-advised to merge online capabilities with in-person shopping. Equip workers with mobile portals that allow them to see the purchase history and interests of customers they are helping, allow online purchases to be immediately available in person and give customers info via smartphones on the items they see.
Encourage Customer Loyalty - Today’s customers are more likely than ever to abandon brands for competitors after only a few poor experiences. As such, loyalty is difficult to achieve, but can occur by providing consistent, helpful experiences that reward customers for continued purchases and make them feel known by a company. Omnichannel experiences and employees who can quickly understand and meet the needs of customers, both online and in person, can enable such possibilities.
Streamline Operations - Retailers must decrease the cost of running businesses to meet shifts in profits, and while some may see closing stores and cutting jobs as the way, retailers must look at day-to-day operations, such as how headquarters-to-store communications and inventory management. Digitizing more processes can eliminate waste, redundancy and lost time, which will save money in both the short and long term.

The opportunity of digital transformation and the necessity of change caused by the retail bubble bursting can come together to push your business into a new phase. Consider where your brand can grow and what areas can be most positively affected by embracing new strategies.

Embracing Retail Digital Transformation

Coach, Inc. was able to shift their processes online through Liferay, which helped connect stores worldwide and eliminate wasted time and resources through their intranet, CoachWeb. Read how Coach digitally transformed and streamlined their operations in our case study.

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Why Audience Targeting Depends on Microsegmenting

2025-05-29T21:12:37Z

Audience segments help marketers organize people into groups that share similar, quantifiable attributes. This kind of categorization allows companies to impact these groups with targeted products and messaging. But it also helps companies provide a better customer experience. In order for businesses to effectively target audience segments, they need to make sure each audience segment is categorized effectively.

According to Gartner, most marketers use a variety of rules and approaches to draw up audience segments. On a fundamental level, audience segments are drawn around basic human actions: who people are, what people think and what people do. However, the more precise and specific marketers can be, the more successful a business can become. While broad-based segments help businesses categorize different users, microsegments help businesses deliver content to the most appropriate audience.

Types of Segments

More specific segments might be defined by location, product and media use, social behavior, lifestyles and attitudes. Below are common audience segments as identified by Gartner.

Behavior - Buying patterns and preferences
Benefits - Functional or emotional benefits of the advertised product
Geodemographic - Regional influences and sociological trends
Occasions - Special occasions that influence purchase
Psychographic - Lifestyles and attitudes

However, while demographics and lifestyle categories have made for successful targeting in the past, digital trends suggest that even higher attention to personalization is necessary. For example, one reason Amazon has been so successful is because every transaction gives them data and insight into the who, where and what of the buying process. Suddenly, two individuals who share the same age, ethnicity and zip code can be segmented by mobile use, search history, and personal preferences (among other identifiers). A wide variety of flexible categories that can be consistently reorganized give businesses even more control to connect for audience targeting.

One criticism to group segmenting is that because the public is so saturated with advertising, consumers can tell when they are being targeted. The rule suggests that the more data a company has on its customers, the more data it has to “pattern match” similar buyers. But just like the 18–34 age range is enormous and diverse, more granularity is necessary in order to satisfy consumers.

According to Hitwise, micro-segmenting is replacing broad-based segments. By layering hundreds or even thousands of data points to identify granular customers, marketers can set rich sets of attributes to increase the quality of the audience. That is, an audience with a higher likelihood for conversions. “The result is a rich mosaic of tens, hundreds or thousands of micro-audiences, rather than just 10 to 20 segments.”

Targeting to Microsegments

With set and defined audience segments, audience targeting becomes easier. For example, if your site displays advertisements, pre-set rules allow you to display one set of advertisements to one user segment, and a different set of advertisements to a different user segment. The same targeting rules can be applied to content like news, images and entire campaigns.

This can be an especially smart strategy for businesses with partners or subsidiaries. By staying in control of carefully defined segments, businesses can prevent any one player from cannibalizing another partner’s target audience. Careful planning can improve results and increase ROI. However, appropriate audience targeting is not just for content delivery. Using an audience targeting application can help you quickly measure the effectiveness of these campaigns.

Instead of relying on demographics alone, Air Asia pursued the granular level by leveraging their CRM database to define and value audiences based on the overlap of travel frequency and social media brand awareness. According to Ad Age, this let the airline serve individual consumers with custom messaging and improved ad spend by 58%.

How Businesses Can Win

The digital world must think of audience before content. Audience segmentation is about breaking down target markets based on certain criteria in order to deliver content to the right people in the right place at the right time. Doing this increases relevance, so increasing volume means adding significance to the bottom line.

It is important to remember that parameters are just guidelines that marketers can use to reach dynamic audiences. No two users are the same, so if you create a label, you should be willing to change it. When Netflix announced changes to their recommendation algorithm, they suggested that demographic rules were much less important than other variables, like personalized ranking and viewing history. However, if the logic was simple, the change wasn’t easy. Netflix was required to build individual models for each region and then combine these models into a global model that could still reflect local taste differences.

This level of attention can have significant impact on your audience. Netflix was only ready to turn conventional personalization on its head when they had redefined their ideal audience segments. If viewers in India and Brazil are both interested in Bollywood films, then they should be able to get equally curated recommendations.

This kind of shaping and reshaping is the kind of customer experience more and more consumers desire. By studying the data, testing carefully across segments and microsegments and changing the business models accordingly, your business stands to have a profound impact on its audience targeting.

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Is ECM Really Dead?

2025-05-29T20:35:45Z

At the end of 2016 Gartner declared that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is dead, and has been replaced by the term Content Services. This was met with a surprising amount of controversy and rebuttals, but overall, Gartner’s idea seems to be on point. The term “ECM” no longer captures the complexity of content management in enterprises today, and our way of thinking about these software systems could do with a healthy refresh.

ECM: A Strategy or a Solution?

One of the reasons Gartner gave for the change is that ECM is actually a strategy for how enterprises manage the entire breadth of their content. Because software solutions have traditionally been designed for specific use cases (web portals versus CMSs, for example), there didn’t used to be an issue with using one term to describe both a strategy and a solution.

ECM was never meant to describe a unique set of technologies that applied to one use case, but analysts need to segment software somehow, and that’s how the ECM label was used for a while. If you look at the evolving definitions of the term, however, it’s clear that ECM expanded beyond the technology a while ago, and now describes the complexities of managing and delivering content in an enterprise. Companies tackle these challenges with a monolithic, custom platform or a CMS that integrates additional capabilities as needed, which makes the prospect of setting clear boundaries for this technology segment unrealistic.

In fact, with the broadening of features in solutions, many traditional categories are converging into new terms. This is why we continue to see industry buzzwords change. Software isn’t static, and vendors are developing solutions in response to customer needs, even when that breaks the accepted industry boundaries.

ECM, DAM and CMS Are All Becoming Content Services

The term Content Services, in a way, is a smaller reflection of the trend towards the DXP product category. Because content is becoming a core feature of everything, the services and extensions that it requires are pushing CMSs, ECMs, DAMs and other content solutions to overlap into one category. Content Services simplifies this by pulling together all software that enables you to manage and publish content of any kind, with the necessary sophistication to accommodate all advanced services, tools and extensions. It’s a useful term, but calling your software “content services” doesn’t erase the need for a comprehensive ECM strategy.

Building a Roadmap for the Future

Rather than focusing on shifting terms, enterprises should look at their current content and what it will need to be able to do in the next six to 12 months. These questions can start the process of building a roadmap:

What new devices are coming, and are you prepared to deliver content to them?
How will new technology affect the content you produce? For instance, Artificial Intelligence can already write basic content, which shifts the priorities of what your content creators work on.
How can Content Services better support employees in their current work tasks? Cloud-based repositories open up access to content, but introduce potential security threats which your organization will need to prepare for.
What capabilities can be consolidated?
What API-driven services or other integrations need to be implemented? Disruptive technology such as Internet of Things devices or Virtual Reality may turn into new channels that need to consume and deliver content.

In the meantime, it would be beneficial to keep an eye on the evolving definition of digital experience platforms, many of which bring a CMS-heritage that will become an essential part of ECM. As product categories continue to converge, the concept of integrated, lightweight platforms will continue to be relevant, whatever term we settle on.

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Is An Open Source CMS Right For Your Business?

2025-06-27T18:10:25Z

In the past decade, enterprises have increasingly turned to open source software (OSS) to replace proprietary solutions, due to four factors:

Open source software are more mature
The innovation achieved by a collaborative community is arguably better than closed, proprietary solutions
Services and support are more widely available
The true total cost of ownership is far less than proprietary vendors

However, with this increase in adoption comes an increase in OSS solutions to choose from, and this surge has created expectations in the market that not every OSS meets. Here are ten critical things to consider before choosing an open source content management system (CMS). Note that most of the questions apply to open source solutions in general, if you’re looking at OSS for other areas of your business.

1. When you say open source content management system, do you mean software you don’t have to pay for?

Open source software (OSS) are known for being free, as in “free speech”, not “free beer". This means that users have the right to change and redistribute the source code. The creators of OSS projects can distribute the software at any cost they want; as long as there is access to the source code, it’s still considered free. As you start reviewing open source content management systems, stay aware that the promised benefit is in the access to the source code, and not necessarily the cost (though many open source CMSs are free or offered at a more competitive price than proprietary solutions). However, there are still other costs involved if you’re planning to launch a successful website, such as paying a web host for a web hosting account.

2. Do they have an enterprise edition (or enterprise support)?

Many companies offer a version of their OSS that has been coded for enterprise use cases and provides additional security and support that a typical open source user may not need. If there isn’t an enterprise option, have a plan for how you’ll support the solution in the long run.

Because OSS is developed with a community, it can often be created at a lower cost than proprietary solutions. Even the additional cost for an enterprise edition tends to be more affordable than non-free programs, which is another appealing benefit of OSS.

3. How active is their community?

Part of the promise of open source is the innovation that comes from the community — but that requires an active community. You can check this by looking at the volume and frequency of posts in their community forums, seeing if there is a healthy amount of conversation on sites like Stack Exchange, or doing a simple Google search to see if there are open source contributors that are actively working on the project.

4. Does your dev team like it?

Open source CMSs are, by nature, incredibly flexible. With enough elbow grease, all of them can be developed to do whatever you need them to do. But if your development team is unfamiliar with or doesn’t prefer a particular CMS platform, getting the right functionality will be difficult. One of the biggest draws of open source CMS usage is having a more affordable solution, but extended project timelines or new development trainings undermine these cost savings.

Another consideration is whether the CMS software works with your current technology stack. For example, if most of your organization uses Microsoft and .NET, it doesn’t make sense to use a CMS built on Java. These are some of the more popular open source CMSs for different platforms:

Java
- Alfresco
- Liferay
- LogicalDOC
- OpenCMS
- Magnolia
Microsoft ASP.NET
- DNN
- Kentico CMS
- Umbraco
PHP
- WordPress
- Drupal
- Joomla
- Magento
- TextPattern
Python
- Django CMS
- Mezzanine
Ruby on Rails
- Radiant
- Browser CMS
- Refinery CMS

5. Do your end users like it?

After the initial development, you still need to convince your content writers and administrators how to use the CMS software. Many CMSs have trials or interactive demos online that will give your users a sense of what it’s like to use the system. Give them a chance to identify significant pain points so that your dev team can review whether they can create easy fixes for them.

6. How mature is the product?

The three popular open source CMS providers — WordPress, Joomla and Drupal — are all mature products with at least 12 years of development behind them. That history ensures a level of stability that enterprises and advanced users need, something that other CMS platforms (particularly younger open source projects) may not have reached yet.

7. Does it fit with the rest of your platform?

Many open source and headless CMSs are evolving into digital experience platforms, and integrating capabilities normally associated with portals or ecommerce platforms. DXPs seek to meet the needs of companies undergoing digital transformation, with the ultimate goal of providing better customer experiences, especially for ecommerce stores. They can be single products or a suite of products that work together; both options rest on the understanding that every component of your web platform should be integrated and capable of sharing data.

CMS platforms are particularly critical, because of the increasing need to release and manage content on every channel as quickly as possible, which requires companies to eliminate data silos and streamline workflows. As such, the user interface, the ability to put out user-generated content, and the content management on these platforms are factors to always take into consideration.

8. Are extensions/plugins/modules actively maintained?

While an open source CMS software may have great support for its core out-of-the-box features, that doesn’t always extend to functionalities that you bring in with plugins, additional extensions, or integrated applications. Often, these third-party apps or tools can vary in their support and security. Just because an open source CMS can provide all the features you need with third-party applications, doesn’t mean that it will receive the same support and ongoing innovation as the core software.

9. Is a CMS really the product you need?

Because of the popularity of solutions like WordPress CMS, many people will recommend open source CMSs for all kinds of websites. However, there may be better open source product categories, such as portals.

If you’re thinking of an open source headless CMS as a general website builder for your web pages or blogging platform, it would be good to research other categories of website products to ensure you’re really using the best solution. This is especially important if you have different needs, such as having a flexible CMS or being able to build an ecommerce store, create websites, create content, and so forth.

10. How often are updates released?

Solutions that run updates often can risk your entire site going down. Updates are unavoidable, but ideally, you should be able to run the update on a test site to scan for any possible errors. If the software provider is releasing updates every other week, this can quickly become burdensome, so it’s good to gauge before you commit to a solution. Check online user reviews to see if people complain about frequent updates breaking their sites.

Open Source Is Key to Digital Innovation

Open source software offer more flexible, affordable solutions, and for a common solution like a headless CMS, choosing something that will help you sustain digital innovation is critical to staying competitive. An open source headless CMS should exist within a broader platform that weaves all the different digital experiences together. It’s important to take key features such as an easy-to-use interface and user-friendly software into consideration.

Even if you plan to start with a small project, the technology choices you’re making should have the potential to scale and support your company’s innovation elsewhere. Digital leaders who manage to accomplish this have greater agility and are able to act on opportunities faster, because they aren’t hunting for new solutions every time they have an idea.

In addition to these considerations, your company should still conduct a thorough evaluation of open source CMS options such as the WordPress site and perhaps include some proprietary solutions as well to find the best CMS software with all the tools you need. Every project is different, and taking the time to review what you really need will benefit your project in the long run.

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Enterprise Website Design: 7 Elements to Master

2025-06-27T18:10:38Z

Often, what we consider the “best” examples of website design focus on stunning visuals or original layouts. For enterprises, however, there are functional elements of web design that are much more important to consider.

Whether you’re building a marketing site or an internal web application, enterprises have complex organizational needs that most web design advice doesn’t acknowledge. A beautiful UI is a good thing to strive for, but it shouldn’t outweigh a hard review of how overall user experience impacts your company’s bottom line, including performance, navigation, branding and analytics.

Here are some eye-opening statistics that show just how much impact website design has on your bottom line:

Every dollar you spend on user experience improvement brings between $2 and $100 in return.
70% of website projects fail because users didn’t like the final results.
Up to 15% of IT projects are abandoned and at least 50% of a programmer’s time during the project is spent redoing work. If proper measurements, goals and test processes were implemented upfront, the majority of this wasted time could be prevented.
Spending 10% of your development budget on improving usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%.

A new coat of paint on your website isn’t going to fix the problems these statistics highlight. Many of them fall under the umbrella of user experience, aided by streamlined technology that forms the foundation of a truly well-designed website.

The below list isn’t meant to replace all of the other great information online that can help refine your organization’s website. However, for enterprises that need their website investments to show significant return, starting with these seven high-level elements will focus your improvement on the parts of your website that provide real business value.

1. Conversion-Centric Design

Optimizing your site for conversions is about determining what you want your customer to do next, then filtering out anything that distracts them. There are many different ways to guide your user to the preferred action:

Directional Cues: Use icons, animations or bright colors that call attention to certain elements on the page.
Z-Pattern and F-Pattern Layouts: People scan more than they read, and they generally do this in either a Z-shape or an F-shape. There are detailed guides available online to help you determine when to use which.
Decrease Choices: There’s a well-known jam study that shows how too many choices make people less likely to make a decision. This doesn’t have to mean removing other choices completely. You can highlight one or two actions, then put the rest on another page for users who continue to look for more information.
Measure Everything: Opinions shouldn’t lead to design changes unless they can be backed up by numbers or qualitative data (such as user feedback).

Of these seven elements, conversion-centric design will likely have the greatest impact on your bottom line. As long as your business goals are tied to keeping people engaged on your site, a conversion-driven mindset is a must for enterprise websites.

Whole Foods uses bright yellow to draw your attention to the digital coupons tile.

2. Balancing Business Goals and UX

Of course, optimizing for conversions leads to a discussion about what you should do when business goals conflict with a good user experience. You may want your user to click on a purchase link, but if they’re looking for something else and can’t find it, they’re likely to leave your site altogether. In that case, UX design should override your business goal.

UX and business priorities often seem at odds, but good design is good business. Stakeholders representing both sides should have a voice in the design of your website. Websites are business tools that need to drive value, but opting for a poor UX that forces users to behave a certain way can undermine your business goals in the long run.

For example, some retail websites require users to create an account before making a purchase. This can drive away visitors who only intend to purchase once and don’t want to go through an extra step. This can be turned into a better UX by moving the account creation process to the end — after the visitor has finished her purchase, ask if she’d like to add a little more info to create an account so that she can track her order and check out faster next time. This facilitates the process without sacrificing the business goal of keeping customers engaged.

3. Information Architecture

Information architecture refers to how you structure the content on your site. Liferay.com, for instance, uses a primarily hierarchical structure, with broad categories at the top that open up more narrow options as you click through. Attention to information architecture and navigation ensures that your visitors are able to find exactly what they need on your site, in as few clicks as possible.

There are at least seven different ways you can structure your content:

Hierarchical: Possibly the most common structure, and one that users are used to seeing on public enterprise websites. This starts with broad categories of information and drills further down into more detailed content.
Sequential: This structure requires users to go step-by-step through a determined path. This is often used for online products that need to gather a lot of information from users. TurboTax online is a good example. Users answer one question at a time, and the site takes care of funneling them to the correct next step.

Matrix: Matrix structures allow users to choose how they navigate through content. This can be achieved with filtering options (so users can sort by date or topic, for example) or by clearly interlinking pages, so users can click through as needed.
Alphabetical: Often used as a secondary navigational component to make sorting through content easier.
Audience: Content that has been segmented by user groups. Clothing retail websites are the classic example, with items sorted for men, women, children, etc.
Chronological: Organized by date and commonly used for blogs or other content-heavy sites.
Topic: Organized by subject matter, as in wikis or online magazines.

These structures aren’t mutually exclusive, and many enterprises use them together to successfully organize their sites. Ultimately, the question you should ask is, How many clicks between my user and what he wants? Your information architecture should streamline that as much as possible. Conversion rates decrease with every new page users have to click through; decreasing that with a clear and enjoyable way to navigate your site will make it easy to engage visitors from the start.

4. Testing and Engagement Tools

If you think of website design only in terms of the front-end experience, you may overlook the importance of testing tools. Having an accurate and consistent way to measure engagement with your site ensures that you’ll have the data you need to find actionable insights and use them to increase those conversions.

There are tons of engagement tools that can measure everything from social media engagement to which push notifications are driving your users to unsubscribe. One way to filter them is to look for tools that help you listen to your customers and optimize for that balance between a great experience and goals that are tied to your KPIs. Don’t settle for tools that measure clicks or simple traffic views; measures like heat maps or A/B testing are more suited to helping you discover, not just what your users are doing, but why they’re doing it.

Heat maps show you where most people click on your web page.

5. Mobile

As Google continues to adjust its search algorithm for mobile sites, companies need to think about more than just making their website responsive. Now, Google penalizes things like large interstitial ads (which can be annoying on desktop, but are unbearable on mobile), unplayable videos, or poor site performance.

Keep in mind that, whatever information architecture or other design components you’re using for your desktop site should match the mobile experience. A well-designed website should support consistent experiences on every screen size, with the same ability to optimize for conversions, measure engagement and structure content as the desktop experience. Research shows that, if a business site doesn’t work well on mobile, 48% of users take it as the business not caring. That definitely isn’t helping your bottom line.

Sumo uses an interstitial ad to offer a free marketing class to its readers, but disables it for the mobile view. You can still see the content offered as text where it says “Bonus Material,” a much better experience for mobile users.

6. Modern Design Practices

Yes, at the beginning of this article, we said that good website design is more than the visual experience. However, that doesn’t mean you don’t need to keep up with current trends in web design. This is particularly important when it comes to your user interface (UI).

As new design trends spread online, people get used to websites looking and feeling a certain way. Research shows that website credibility is 75% based on aesthetics. In other words, a modern website design convinces users that you know what you’re doing. Even a company intranet can benefit from good typography, modern images and contemporary layouts to help boost user adoption and ensure your site isn’t a wasted investment.

Lufthansa uses a bright, engaging image and simple navigation on its homepage.

7. Simplicity

We’ve already discussed the importance of decreasing choices for conversion optimization, but sometimes it’s important to step back further and consider the complexity of your site overall. Do you need a blog? Do you need the company page to include a full history of your founders? Is there content that hasn’t been viewed in months that you can prune? This makes the website overall easier to manage, and gives you more options for streamlining the content navigation on your site.

Vroom’s homepage has a clear, direct call-to-action that gets straight to what users are looking for.

These Elements Are Just a Start

There is much more to each of these elements than we’re able to cover in this article, but doing a quick assessment of website design based on these will give you a place to start. These seven core elements are meant to build a foundation for enterprise websites that need to get work done and deliver real business value to your company.

How to Design a Website That Drives Conversions

Learn five steps for developing a proactive, user-centric design strategy for your website.

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How to Evaluate Website Platforms

2025-06-27T18:11:17Z

The evaluation system for website platforms can be vastly different depending on your organization’s culture and the personalities of your project management team. By laying out a standardized evaluation approach, you can streamline the purchasing process, review platforms on equal footing and create a record of scores that can be revisited for future projects. Here are five steps for evaluating website platforms that can easily be applied to any other software solutions you plan to compare.

Tip: Accelerate your evaluation process by downloading our editable spreadsheet of evaluation criteria. It includes the criteria categories and calculations detailed below. Download Now

#1 - Define Evaluation Criteria

Defining evaluation criteria starts with gathering requirements at the beginning of a project. Take your user requests and split them into clear categories, with a list of features within each one. These features should be easy to define and measure. For instance, “good UI” is not a useful requirement, but “System simplifies the development of web pages leveraging themes, access rules and web components” is better.

There are five recommended areas of website platform criteria:

Cost: Established stack players such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have expensive platforms and complex maintenance and support pricing structures, but often compete with a wide network of partners. Open source platforms can offer more affordable options with a much wider network of specialists, thanks to the use of open standards and development methodologies.
Risk: Determine the acceptable risk level for long-term costs, integration capabilities, product chaining risk and end user satisfaction.
Control: Companies often need to strike a balance between centralized and distributed control to streamline decision making and maintain a level of team responsiveness.
End User Capabilities: No one likes a solution that’s difficult to use. Prioritizing solutions that are intuitive encourages user adoption. This is especially true for solutions reaching a diverse audience of users, such as portals or collaboration tools.
Heterogeneity: Companies can reduce maintenance and supports if they simplify the review and enforcement of organizational needs for product and content management at a high level, especially where central and departmental needs differ.

These areas can be organized by function instead, such as Portal or Social Collaboration. Just be careful not to overlook areas that aren’t tied to a specific feature, such as the risk of implementing a system that will force you to use more products from the same company down the line.

#2 - Quantify It

Quantifying the evaluation process makes the comparison easier and more accurate. Each vendor should be evaluated separately with the same table of criteria, then rated on a numerical scale. Often, stakeholders can become tied to a particular feature in one platform, and will argue for it without considering the overall strength of that solution. Quantifying your criteria ensures that you are giving weight to all criteria.

You can build your table of criteria based on the requirements from your team, or look for a sample of criteria online. Here is a sample from our Liferay Buyer’s Guide Checklist, which is a platform-agnostic guide that identifies critical categories for website platforms and breaks out key features for each one.

Whether you build your own or use a template, the important thing is having the ability to assign those numerical values. Once you have that, you have deep insight into the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. You can compare vendors by category, by the total composite score, or you can weight the criteria that are more important for your project. We’ll discuss this more below.

#3 - Determine Use Cases

During the initial research process, vendors’ sales and marketing teams will likely present you with every possible scenario of how their platforms can be used. There are two ways to filter out the noise and focus on what’s relevant to your evaluation:

Choose one use case: By narrowing your scope to a single use case, you can limit the project requirements that you need to evaluate, and possibly eliminate some standard criteria altogether. This is especially useful if you’re choosing a platform for a standalone project that won’t need to integrate with other environments.
Set a timeline: Determine your project timeline before reviewing solutions, then prioritize the features that you’ll need during the initial implementation stages. This ensures that you’re taking into consideration functionality that you’ll need in the future, but not sacrificing the capabilities you know you need first.

Also See:

Seven Popular Liferay Use Cases

Need help narrowing down which use case to focus on? Download our e-book to learn more about seven popular use cases, including ecommerce sites, self-service customer portals, public websites, and more.

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#4 - Compare at Different Levels

There are three different “levels” you can (and should) use during your evaluation.

Overall Score: After all the vendors have been reviewed, look at the overall score for each. In our Buyer’s Guide sample, this is the total value of all the rightmost numbers added up, for a possible total of 1,465 points. Additionally, look at the distribution of scores throughout the table. It’s possible for a vendor to have a high overall score, but still have more 1’s than another vendor. Looking for an even distribution of high scores helps ensure consistency and accounts for the overall balance of the platform.
Category Score: Each platform can also be broken into categories — for example, Portal, Collaboration, Web Content Management and so forth. By comparing scores in the categories that are most important to your project, you can gain further insight to making a value judgment. Keep in mind that a vendor with the highest overall score can still score lower in the most important category for your project.
Weighted Score: Some criteria will be more important to your project than others. While one vendor may score well on three questions but poorly on one, a second vendor may do the opposite. If a vendor scored poorly on one of the most important features, then the final score may misrepresent the vendor. To adjust for these priorities, add a weight to each row after the table is completed. Project teams can use a 1 to 5 weight for each row, and then multiply to calculate the value placed in the rightmost column for each row. For example, if the vendor rates “4” for a question given a weight of 5, then the value placed in the rightmost column would be 20.

#5 - Don’t Rule Out Qualitative Evaluation

After your team has gone through the quantitative scores, you should counterbalance with a qualitative review. This should include review and discussion of the final scores, as well as a mix of the following:

Q&A demonstration
Proof of concept
Software trial
Reference customer outreach
Online evaluations

For these conversations, it’s important to bring in stakeholders from multiple departments, in order to account for concerns from all end users.

A Better Decision-Making Tool

An evaluation process isn’t meant to spit out one clear number to help you choose a platform. It’s a tool to guide your team in thinking through all the capabilities of a platform and be intentional in how you weigh the strengths and weaknesses of each one. By identifying, not just your requirements, but how those requirements impact one another and clarifying your priorities, your company is much more likely to choose a website platform that fits both your short-term and long-term needs.

How to Design a Website That Drives Conversions

Learn five steps for developing a proactive, user-centric design strategy for your website.

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Four Ways Retail Predictive Analytics Boost Store Performance

2025-06-27T18:11:32Z

Research shows that, more than ever, shoppers want their favorite brands to immediately fulfill or even predict their needs and desires. Purchasing an item is no longer an isolated event, but part of a seamless, integrated experience that blurs the line between online and offline shopping. While changes in retail technology trends have had noticeable effects on brick and mortar stores across the United States, with many chains experiencing massive closures, integrating modern digital technology with the appeal of in-person shopping can have many benefits for companies.

Today’s benefits of omnichannel retailing include being able to gather previously untapped information regarding shoppers’ behavior and interactions with brands. The potential uses of this data are plentiful, but one of the most impactful in today’s retail world is the application of predictive analytics to shopping behavior. By understanding how past shopper actions can be used to determine future actions, analytics can anticipate and fulfill the needs of customers for more successful marketing than ever, both online and in-store.

The following benefits of retail predictive analytics can help shape the future of retail companies and find success for stores in ways that were previously impossible.

1. Improved Targeted Promotions

Targeted promotions are commonly used by companies across industries in order to add a layer of personalization and improve customer relations. However, poorly planned targeted promotions can have the exact opposite effect on a customer base. Research from Access Development found that 57% of the customers they surveyed said receiving offers for products after submitting negative reviews of related products to be a top reason for ending their relationship with a brand.

Properly targeting your promotions means that in-depth knowledge of individual customers will greatly inform the offers that they receive. This includes being aware of past shopping behavior and predicting customers’ future needs, such as supplemental products to what they have previously purchased and well-timed refills based on behavior patterns, like ink cartridges for printers. This can also improve engagement both online and in stores, as well as form a stronger relationship between brand and customer.

2. Predictive Search

Modern websites help customers find what they are looking for in as little time as possible through strong search functions, which are designed to pull up accurate results that reduce the time spent looking for an answer. However, the use of predictive analytics takes things one step further by using personalization to predict what customers will search for ahead of time. This includes both autofilling searches as users begin to type out their query and populating landing pages with products and services that visitors may have come to look for before they can even begin their search. The Amazon analytics system is one of the great examples seen today, as the system keep users coming back to the site and becoming interested in products they may have not normally seen.

Strong retail predictive analytics systems properly understand user behavior and make accurate, helpful predictions that encourage return sales completion without offending or interrupting customers. However, it is very important that these predictions are accurate, as providing inaccurate or unwelcome results can unnecessarily complicate the search process or potentially offend customers, such as the now-infamous Target pregnancy ads. When done correctly, website visitors will be less likely to explore their options with competitors and more likely to return to your site for future needs.

3. Optimized Inventory Management

The use of personalized shopping isn’t just about making customer interactions easier. It’s also about making sure your stores are properly stocked and prepared for their clients. This will not only decrease customer frustration caused by out-of-stock items, but will also save money by decreasing the chances of understocking or rush shipping. As discussed by Harvard Business Review, predicting demand is far more effective in cutting costs and determining needed inventory than basing inventory on aggregated total sales, as using analytics will create hyperlocal forecasts that distribute inventory geographically.

According to Accenture research, only a third of retailers currently offer omnichannel basics for their audience, such as store fulfillment and a visible inventory accessible across multiple channels. Consider how cutting costs through predictive analytics and more can impact your company and in what ways you can efficiently meet customer needs for the most effective uses of omnichannel retailing, which connects online shopping with brick-and-mortar stores.

4. Continued Customer Relationships

Customers want to feel like they are known by companies and seen as individuals, including before, during and after a purchase. Rosetta Consulting research indicates that highly engaged customers will complete purchases with a brand 90% more often than those who are seen as not being engaged. In addition, they were shown to spend 60% more per transaction. By using predictive analytics, omnichannel retailing can show customers that they are aware of their needs. Purchases made in-store are reflected online and online shopping history can be provided to brick-and-mortar employees so that they can identify individual customers and quickly answer their questions, creating a continual and consistent relationship between brand and customer.

All three of the previously discussed aspects of retail predictive analytics are focused on continuously improving customer engagements. Predictive shopping will grow in importance in the coming years for retailers as audiences begin to expect intuitive online shopping and companies who can understand their needs and interests. When used correctly, these features can show that your brand cares about customers and is on the leading edge of modern shopping technology.

Equip Your Brand with Predictive Analytics

While each retail brand will need to determine the role that predictive analytics plays in their strategy, its effects on the speed and accuracy of each store’s reactions to customer needs can be a great help in this era of shifting industry trends. Building your front- and back-end systems on a platform that can collect customer data and build actionable insights will help you better understand your customer base and take effective action as soon as possible.

Embrace the New Era of Retail

Retail technology trends are changing, but that doesn’t mean you have to be left behind. Find out more about the modern digital era’s effects on the retail industry and equip your company for success.

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Five Retail Technology Upgrades Every Brick-and-Mortar Store Should Make

2025-06-27T18:11:49Z

In the last year, retail companies experienced the sudden and widespread effects of what many are calling the bursting of the “retail bubble.” This has led to numerous store closures and, according to The Atlantic, nine retail companies in the United States have filed for bankruptcy within the first half of 2017 as more and more customers turn toward online shopping experiences.

However, brick-and-mortar stores aren’t becoming a thing of the past, they simply need to match the new expectations of customers. The in-store experience is ready for an upgrade and the modern era of retail technology innovation is what can make it possible.

The following five aspects of modern retail technology are currently sweeping the industry and can be applied to a wide variety of companies, with their unique benefits tailored to specific needs and goals. Consider how these aspects of digital transformation in the retail industry can help you innovate in the most effective ways possible.

1. Internet of Things

Interconnected devices will only continue to grow in number during the coming years, with IHS research predicting that there will be 30.7 billion IoT-enabled devices by 2020. These developments will further connect people with the many services around them via their smartphones. While some may currently see this as a fun but inessential aspect of digital innovation, IoT services are quickly becoming an aspect of everyday life. But how does this apply to your retail store?

Retail companies can participate in the larger world of IoT by allowing customer devices to integrate with both their products and their stores. For example, when a customer walks into a brick-and-mortar location, their smartphone can be connected to in-store services and products, so long as they give permission. For example, a customer can use their device to quickly scan an item on a shelf, which will pull up reviews and further information in order to give helpful insights. By doing so, customers can experience what it’s like to have your products in their life or see how your services can match their unique needs. If your company wants to present itself as being technologically advanced, making sure that your devices have easy-to-use IoT capabilities will be crucial in maintaining your relevance.

2. Omnichannel Retailing

Today, customers expect to smoothly transition between any Internet-enabled device while interacting with a brand. It’s crucial that retail companies keep up with these expectations, as unsatisfied customers will be more prone than ever to abandon their shopping journeys in favor of competitors who offer the experiences they expect, according to Accenture. While many think about transitioning between desktop computers and mobile devices when they hear the term “omnichannel,” true omnichannel retailing experiences extend to in-person interactions.

The data and online shopping history of a customer can be made available to in-store representatives so that they better understand their audience. When a customer walks into a store, well-orchestrated omnichannel retailing will provide their profile to employees, ensure that any appointments have been tracked and that what they are looking for can be found quickly and easily at brick-and-mortar locations. This ease of use and transitioning will make for pleasant and satisfying shopping experiences that make customers feel known as individuals. By building on an ecommerce platform that connects all of these actions, stores can connect mobile, desktop and in-store experiences for successful omnichannel retailing.

3. Beacons

While beacons are an aspect of IoT integration, they can provide enough advantages for stores to be discussed on their own. Most often, beacons can be set up in physical retail locations, connecting to and providing alerts, offers and other customized messages to the smartphones of audiences nearby to attract them to the location.

One of the most applicable uses of beacons in stores is to reach out to and snag customers that are passing by. For example, Macy’s uses beacons to send discounts to shoppers in the area of their stores while Carrefour’s beacons track customer behavior to better understand their actions while in stores. Doing so can create notifications about items that have recently become available or sales that are currently in progress in order to peak their interests and encourage a store visit. As discussed by Forbes, beacon usage can also provide stores with useful immediate audience feedback without a massive amount of time and money needing to be invested. Beacons add another layer to how stores interface with customers, adding digital communication to the face-to-face interactions only possible at physical locations.

4. Virtual/Augmented Reality

Virtual reality is an up-and-coming, but highly attractive, retail technology development. While VR may still be too expensive to implement throughout stores, augmented reality (AR) is now much more achievable through modern mobile apps. While VR most often requires dedicated headsets that place audiences in a different world, AR can be experienced through equipped smartphones, allowing new information to be overlayed on the real world when seen through the device’s camera. Think of how Pokemon Go caused a sensation by allowing people to “see” Pokemon in the real world. This can add new possibilities to experiencing what a retail store can offer.

By using virtual and augmented reality within brick-and-mortar stores, companies can offer audiences something new and different to further incentivize them to come inside and see what the company is offering. As discussed by Forbes, AR use can promote gamification and increased digital engagement between customers and stores. AR apps can allow customers to interact with your brand in new ways, including seeing new features and services while inside your store. Doing so can encourage them to come into your brick-and-mortar location for an experience they can’t have while only interacting online. With more and more companies attempting to move the in-person experience online, AR can allow you to provide a one-of-a-kind experience that can only be found in stores.

5. Artificial Intelligence

AI may be thought of as a distant technological development, but its uses are already coming into play for retailers. Most specifically, chatbots are being quickly developed and deployed by businesses in an effort to embrace what is being designated as “conversational commerce.” This personalized connection provides individualized interactions with large amounts of customers in ways that would be extremely costly if done via individual employees, such as answering quick questions regarding services and setting up appointments at any time of day. According to statistics by VentureBeat, demand is consistently growing for chatbots, with half of all people surveyed already preferring to contact businesses by messaging rather than phone. Chatbots can make this preferred method of conversational commerce possible and financially feasible.

AI can be used to make all four of the previously discussed upgrades more useful and successful in their implementation. AI allows IoT devices to trade information more smoothly, helps in-store employees use omnichannel retailing, provides beacon notifications that are applicable to a customer’s sales history and frees AR experiences of frustrating glitches. As AI continues to improve and become further implemented in retail technology, its place within your in-store experience will only grow more necessary.

The Benefits of Digitally Upgrading Your Store

By implementing all five of these digital upgrades to your brand’s in-store experience, you can be better prepared to connect with the modern customer. Equip your employees and take your brick-and-mortar stores to the next stage of digital transformation with an ecommerce platform that equips them in the ways that customers today demand.

Making the Most of Retail Customer Experience

Upgrading your in-store experiences is only one aspect of making the most of your customer interactions. Read more about what customer experience improvement strategies are possible in our whitepaper.

Read 3 Key Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences

Seven Intranet Examples That Boost Productivity

2025-05-29T20:58:29Z

The fostering of an engaged workplace remains vital in a workforce that has been reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly as employees increasingly work remotely and require new communication tools. Ensuring productivity and employee engagement in this altered work environment is top of mind for senior executives operating in an extremely competitive marketplace.

Not surprisingly the digital experience is at the heart of the modern workplace. Organizations need tools to connect employees across continents with seamless internal communications, as well as tools to interact with their customers, partners, and suppliers.

An intranet is a keystone of the employee experience, providing an important function in basic communication as well as in increasing productivity and improving company culture. In this article, we’ll break down the benefits of an intranet in driving greater productivity, as well as share some best-case intranet site examples to inform and inspire your next intranet refresh. Let’s get started with the basics.

What is an Intranet?

An intranet is an enterprise network, similar to a regular website but is accessible only to employees. Intranets are designed to support employees to access corporate information, communicate, and collaborate. They serve a broad range of purposes and uses, but at its core, an intranet enables you to face the challenges of today’s evolving workplace by:

Increasing productivity for in-office, remote, and deskless employees
Reducing information overload
Enhancing employee engagement and experience
Preserving institutional knowledge
Rapidly onboarding new employees
Improving collaboration, internal communications, and feedback

Intranets vs Extranets

Intranets and extranets sound similar, and both play an important role for digitally-focused, modern organizations. So what’s the difference? While intranets are an internal site, designed for employees only, extranets help employees collaborate better with external parties - such as authorized customers, partners, or vendors.

Both intranets and extranets offer powerful search functionality and have the capability of facilitating software integrations - both important for ensuring a high degree of usability and productivity.

How Intranets Can Improve Employee Engagement and Productivity

One of the most appealing promises of a healthy corporate and company intranet is boosting productivity for your employees. Intranets don’t do this on their own, unfortunately. It requires assessing your team’s current obstacles to productivity, then implementing tools that cut through them. Intranets may not always achieve this out-of-the-box, but plenty of organizations have found effective ways to impact productivity and encourage employees.

One of the easiest targets for most companies is to cut down on the time their employees spend waiting for other people to do their part of a task, thus improving internal communications. This can mean waiting for someone to send them a document or maybe waiting for IT to teach them how to use a new tool.

Increasing Productivity in Remote and Hybrid Workplaces

The movement to hybrid or fully remote workplace arrangements accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations now face new challenges maintaining a strong culture and ensuring productivity when teams are no longer face-to-face.

In hybrid workplaces, employees switch between working in the office and at home. In these workplaces, intranets serve to ensure a seamless transition between both spaces. An intranet solution can act as a central repository for information, such as company news, updates, or messages from senior management. This ensures that all employees have centralized access to information no matter where they are.

For entirely remote workforces, the company intranet plays a crucial function in building a strong workplace culture. From helping the remote onboarding process and training to supporting office chat groups and other collaboration spaces such as the intranet homepage, intranets help remote employees feel a sense of connection to their company and to team members.

For both hybrid and remote workforces, corporate intranets can be used in innovative ways to recognise and reward staff, a crucial tactic in ensuring engagement.

Intranet Site Examples

It’s hard to know where to get started when it comes to building a new intranet of your own. Browsing employee intranet examples can help, as can looking at different intranet design templates and ideas.

Start with mapping out what you like from your existing intranet and what you’d like to change, then look for examples with the intranet features and functionality you’re looking for.

Here are seven company intranet examples showing how different organizations have used this technology platform to make work more efficient and increase employee engagement to enhance productivity.

1. Search-Enabled Content Management

Most public websites have a capable search engine these days, especially if they have a significant amount of articles and pages. However, many companies don’t implement these same features on their intranets, which are often more likely to have large repositories of content.

Try counting the hours your employees spend hunting down documents without search — it adds up alarmingly fast. Whether they’re contacting coworkers and waiting to be sent a copy of the relevant document or clicking through page after page of unsorted content, reclaiming these wasted hours is an easy way to improve productivity with your intranet.

This US-based national healthcare network is an intranet example that recognised this. Their team was put under a tight time frame due to the outbreak of COVID-19 and was faced with the goal of maintaining a connected workforce. The company incorporated a fast, advanced live search feature for individual pages to help their document management so that employees could instantly find the content they needed. It was one of many critical implementations due to the flood of documents being uploaded and allowed them to combat non-working links.

2. Mobile Device Access

Intranets were once confined to internal networks in the entire company, accessible only to those sitting within the company office. This helped ensure security for a while, but with today’s mobile devices and remote workers, it no longer makes sense to limit the access this way. To ensure all employees receive corporate messages when they’re sent, companies need to enable access for every device.

Australian transportation and logistics company, Toll Global Express, designed their intranet to be accessible by mobile because many of their employees - which include frontline drivers and forklift operators - didn’t have regular technology access but still needed to be connected. Workers who require offline access can get access to the intranet by registering their mobile number and receiving text updates. Some of the most important communications they send out relate to policies, procedures, and company news, and it’s vital that these get through to employees.

Intranet design examples such as Toll Global Express demonstrate how implementing characteristics such as a mobile-friendly company intranet design ensures that there is no delay in the information and enables employees to get what they need to increase productivity. This included a variety of self-service capabilities such as retrieving payslips and keeping informed on policies or procedures. This has improved their employee experience with efficient knowledge sharing of vital information.

3. Tacit Knowledge Management

One of the weaknesses of most knowledge management tools is that they only capture final products. For instance, you might have a company-wide document library of sales-approved PowerPoint decks, but does it allow you to view the edits and discussions that poured into each one? Usually, this is captured in something like comments on Google Docs, but once it’s finalized, the content is saved without these comments.

The Biostatistics Center (BSC) of the George Washington University saw value in tacit knowledge content management and decided to leverage effective intranet software that allowed employees to have access to features such as Kaleo workflow and message boards to accurately review and submit feedback for their manuscripts. It has not only allowed researchers to use custom features built for specific studies, but also to repurpose these for other research projects.

This made tacit knowledge visible to everyone, making it possible to reference past collaboration processes and track the progress of current projects to improve productivity.

4. Global Collaboration

Many kinds of projects require intensive collaboration and if you happen to be working with a global team, trying to coordinate meetings across time zones considerably slows your momentum. Rather than trying to coordinate live conversations, having a robust collaboration tool within your intranet allows people to contribute within their own schedules.

This is exactly what the international technology company, Schott, decided to do. Because it develops products globally, it relies on effective communication between its 10,000 staff in 35 regions worldwide. By incorporating this work into the intranet, they remove the risk of information being lost in back-and-forth emails or critical tasks being forgotten, thus improving employee communication.

5. Independent Administrators

Many organizations need to quickly make changes to their intranets without the help of IT, such as within the intranet homepage. A department manager might need to quickly get out a piece of news to their team, or maybe the director of HR needs to distribute benefits information to the entire organization. In these cases, it’s critical to empower administrators to create and manage content on their own, without waiting on IT.

The City of Vienna is one such intranet example where with digitalisation, employees and administrators have been able to collaborate on and manage their content in an easier manner. With the new intranet, creating and editing web content has been simplified and collaboration tools have meant it’s been easier to work together without needing to learn a new set of digital skills.

This improves productivity as well as relationships, because each department feels empowered to do its job well.

6. Sophisticated Integration

Thinking beyond the intranet can enable organizations to create an entire digital workplace, integrating with multiple internal systems, facilitating and digitizing processes and services for the employee.

One such forward-thinking organization is Brazilian paper manufacturer, Klabin, who launched a ‘Minha Klabin’ digital workplace to replace their previous fragmented ecosystem, integrating with dozens of internal and external systems and featuring several progressive web apps.

Minha Klabin offers services and content through an integrated digital system, with a personalized work experience to all its users so they can communicate, collaborate, and be productive securely, no matter where they are.

As an intranet example, Klabin has seen positive results not only for internal communication but also for IT and other areas of the company. Among the main gains are having visibility into news from all business units, improving engagement and internal alignment for many employees.

7. Replacing Email

For most office workers, email is an increasingly overwhelming chore. According to research by McKinsey, the average professional spends 28 per cent of their workday reading and answering email - negatively impacting productivity and morale.

It’s no wonder many organizations are looking for intranet solutions to reduce email communication.

When materials supplier, Materion, realized they had an over-reliance on email, they looked at how they could revamp their intranet to better meet the company’s communication needs while improving the employee experience. Their vision was to create a platform that employees could actually use to engage with content, job aids, and corporate news, without resorting to company-wide emails.

Their new effective intranet, Materion Matters, gives employees a valuable communication platform and has seen strong improvements in dwell time and engagement.

Company Intranet Design Ideas

The best and most effective intranet examples take several key factors into account when designing their corporate intranet. They ensure their intranet is:

Mobile-first for an on-the-go workforce
User-friendly, featuring intuitive navigation and search functionality, such as within the intranet homepage
Attractive, modern, and visually pleasing
Easy to use and update
Based on employee needs and requirements
Interactive, and encourages a sense of community
Secure with strong data integrity and privacy features

Having clear goals of what you want to achieve with your intranet, and partaking in planning, testing, and careful research, will ensure your intranet helps foster an engaged workforce, and isn’t just a fancy phone directory.

The Soft ROI of Intranets

Intranets aren’t just about bumping up your productivity numbers, though it is one of their more tangible benefits. The more important advantage intranets offer is their ability to impact the intangible aspects of business, such as unifying a company’s culture or a higher employee retention rate.

It is difficult to measure the direct impact of intranets on these areas, but research suggests that it’s significant.

This is why it’s valuable for your business to have a strategy for measuring the effectiveness of their intranets which can be carried out with the help of an internal communications manager. After intranet adoption, companies should ensure KPIs are aligned with achievable company goals, such as increasing employee satisfaction on a number scale or increasing retention rate by a certain percentage.

Single tools or initiatives you roll out on your intranet - such as an intuitive and easy-to-use intranet homepage - may not seem to immediately impact these, but give it time. A habit of incremental but constant improvement will produce these valuable benefits over time.

User Experience and APIs: The Future of Traditional Banking

2025-05-29T21:07:02Z

As digital banking transforms, it is unclear what the bank of the future will look like. But one thing that is clear is that physical branches will become less important. Online channels will increase in priority and financial institutions will focus on optimizing innovative and consistent experiences to increase market share.

A 2017 study from Capgemini and Efma, the World Retail Banking Report, explores how traditional banks and fintechs must work together to create a new financial ecosystem. Developing open APIs and improving user experience are current priorities for financial institutions. We’ve included some of our conclusions from this study here.

Traditional Banking Must Compete with Fintechs to Provide a Satisfying User Experience

Traditional banks still have significant control over their customers. Nonetheless, digitally-native financial technology companies (fintechs) are gaining ground. Fintechs have differentiated themselves by their ability to deliver personalized value to the final customer. According to the study, almost a third of traditional banking customers have some kind of relationship with them already.

This new competition is forcing traditional banks to improve their front-end experiences. By improving and increasing loyalty and satisfaction for current customers, big banks can drive retention and avoid losing customers looking for other alternatives.

This tipping point between interest and retention has been called the moment of truth. Key moments in which customers interact, through their preferred channel, with their financial services provider. The moment when a particular opinion about products or services is formed; an established relationship that develops before the point of sale. Examples include increasing the limit of a transaction, asking for credits online, managing notifications in real time and et cetera.

As technology becomes more and more important, moments of truth are becoming increasingly important online. As customers demand better services with better experiences, technology must be equipped to aid moments of truth in the customer journey. But what does technology need to do? There are four suggestions:

Extract existing corporate information from outdated computer systems, or connect these systems, to put the customer in the center and offer better service.
Innovate quickly by launching new products and services to the market, thereby creating new value on current business models.
Release corporate information to the market efficiently by different web or mobile channels, through an omnichannel experience.
Customize the content and services depending on the type of user.

APIs will change the future of traditional banking and promote open banking models.

So far we have talked about the user experience on a general level. However, the development of APIs can help traditional banking compete in a fully digital environment. In addition to developing new products and services in an agile manner, traditional banking should collaborate with third parties to create a valuable marketplace for the end customer, which is key to improving long-term consumer loyalty. According to the report, 91% of banks and 75% of fintechs expect to work together. This is notable; the expectation, even the desire, to innovate together is high.

PSD2, APIs and Their Impact on Traditional Banking

The PSD2 is the new European directive that aims to create a single payment framework within the European Union. The measure brings relevant changes to the financial sector by allowing access of banking client information to third parties. If mismanaged, enforcing the directive may mean that traditional banks lose a "monopoly" on their current customers. Without being able to meet digital demands, users may be forced to look for alternatives to manage their payments and finances through third parties (fintechs).

Although the new directive does not explicitly mention APIs, in this context APIs will play a key role. José Manuel de la Chica, Ventura Solutions Architect in New Digital Business of BBVA points out, that "although PSD2 does not speak specifically about APIs, most professionals in the technology and financial sector assume that APIs will be the technical means that allow banks to comply with the regulations." However, BBVA also points to the creation of standards in the sector of banking APIs for definitions, nomenclature, access protocols and authentication (i.e., OAuth, certificates, tokens, double factor, etc.). This is the real challenge towards a practical application of PSD2—to be really effective for transforming the digital payment media market in Europe. As highlighted by Cinco Días, PSD2 "is not only a new regulation to enforce, it is the starting point of a new open banking ecosystem."

In short, traditional banking in Europe has two options, either resist the change or lead the change. The latest movements indicate an intention to lead, and we see traditional banks are becoming increasingly open to innovation and collaboration with third parties, evolving day by day towards the open banking model.

Do you develop projects in the banking sector? We can help.

This post was first published in Spanish by Javier Puga.

Intranet vs. Extranet: How They Work Together

2025-08-22T18:35:55Z

Note: This article was last updated August 22, 2025.

Key Takeaways:

An intranet is an internal site for employees to work more productively together.
An extranet is a portal designed to help teams collaborate better with external parties. For example, partner portals, vendor portals, supplier portals, and dealer portals are examples of extranets.

Intranets vs. Extranets: What’s the Difference?

There’s naturally a level of confusion people have on the difference between intranets and extranets. This is understandable given there can be overlap in the way they are used.

A modern intranet is an internal site, designed for employees to work together more productively and seamlessly with other employees. Intranet functions enable employees to create content, access department information, and employees chat directly with colleagues, all within a secure environment. Intranets are valuable tools for improving communication, streamlining internal operations and processes, and supporting project management across multiple locations. They help keep staff informed and connected, no matter the industry. Extranets, on the other hand, help employees collaborate better with external parties - such as authorized customers, partners, or vendors - who are granted secure extranet access.

Think of an intranet as a private, internal network for employees using familiar internet technologies, but operating securely away from the general global internet. Similarly, an extranet is like an extension of an intranet. It remains secure, but in this case it’s a custom built platform accessible for specific, authorized external users who wish to collaborate together.

Most organizations - especially as their networks and supply chains become more complex - will benefit from both. Whether from using an intranet or an extranet, employees especially stand to gain in terms of making their working lives easier and more streamlined. Intranets enable internal users and internal stakeholders to collaborate more effectively. Equally, intranets and extranets are a potent source of data and analytics, which enables management to find opportunities to improve employee engagement and the employee experience.

Benefits of Intranets

How would you use an intranet or an extranet more specifically? Do you need either of these solutions for your own organization’s purposes? Let’s start by summarizing the benefits of both intranets and extranets, individually:

Intranets Boost Employee Productivity and Internal Communication

Intranets benefit your company by increasing engagement, collaboration, and productivity among your employees. A well-designed intranet is a tool that makes it easier for people to do their jobs and streamlines the process of jumping between different sites and applications that most people use in a typical work day. Instead, all the required information people need to do their jobs is centralized and up to date in one convenient location, ensuring that employees always have access to relevant information. Intranets can help employees find the information they need faster, onboard and get started quicker, and raise questions easily if they need.

Intranet Help Establish and Improve Company Culture

Intranets act as a central hub or digital hub for communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing – fostering community and reinforcing company values and mission. Intranets can create a transparent culture which encourages employees to share their ideas and opinions openly. This helps to create a sense of belonging, even for remote teams.

Intranets Help Reduce Operational Costs

By reducing reliance on paper-based or manual processes. intranets can lead to cost savings in printing, document management, and administrative tasks.

How to Build an Intranet That Boosts Productivity
Read five intranet case studies that improved employee productivity, plus guidelines for designing your own. Read the E-book now.

Benefits of Extranets

Extranets Improve Information Sharing with External Audiences

Extranets can extend a lot of these intranet benefits to your partners or other external stakeholders, while importantly maintaining security and control over who is accessing what. Extranets facilitate secure information sharing and collaboration with business partners and external partners, strengthening business relationships through efficient data exchange and real-time communication. They enable external communication and provide limited access to specific groups, ensuring that only authorized users or specific groups access certain information. Picture this: Your partners want to collaborate with each other on a project but they need to access specific customer data that you store securely. An extranet can make the most of the collaboration features of an intranet for those who are outside the organization, while keeping any sensitive information securely stored within the organization.

Extranets Accelerate Onboarding

Extranets can help streamline the registration, validation, and onboarding process for external organizations. By digitizing these processes, these groups can understand how to work with your business faster, thereby accelerating supply chain and go-to-market.

Extranets Streamline Manual Business Processes

Centralizing tools and resources into a single interface makes it easier to digitize manual processes, such as placing orders, uploading and managing documents, and submitting warranty claims. Extranets also support remote access, allowing users to collaborate securely from any location, 24/7, without geographical constraints.

Comparison Between Intranet Software and Extranet Tools

While intranet and extranet solutions may be targeted towards different audiences, these portals require many of the same capabilities in order to effectively unify their audiences and deliver the resources, information, and tools needed to succeed.

How Both Networks Can Work Together

Similarities Between Intranets and Extranets

Robust authentication and permissioning: Intranets and extranets are both private networks that require secure web-based logins. Therefore, strong authentication capabilities are required to ensure that only the right users are able to log in. For example, you don’t want a customer to accidentally be able to access internal company documents within the intranet. Look for software that offers secure and efficient authentication tools including multi-factor authentication (MFA) and single sign-on (SSO). Additionally, it’s just as critical to manage what users have access to after they log in. With granular permissioning and roles, you can define what users are able to view, edit, or manage.
Personalization for tailored experiences: Employees, partners, vendors, dealers, suppliers -- any audience really -- wants a personalized experience. Tailoring their portal experience helps the user see what's most relevant to them quickly, but also helps to make them feel valued and understood. So users not only feel more productive, but also more engaged and committed.
Powerful search functions: Because they are both based on modern web technologies, both intranets and extranets feature powerful search functionalities that significantly help today’s knowledge workers in locating the right documents and features. This is particularly important in an extranet context, assisting disparate external groups with cross-company collaboration that keeps everyone on the same page, literally.
External software integration: Both intranets and extranets have the capability for facilitating software integrations, although the exact application of this feature will vary project by project, and collaboration ecosystem by ecosystem. These integrations help both employees and external parties by housing familiar tools within the one space - this could be anything from Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) to Office 365, Salesforce, Slack, SharePoint Online, and more. It’s all about improving collaboration and productivity.

Differences Between Intranets and Extranets

Internally vs Externally Housed: While both act as a central repository for important documents and projects and also allow for collaboration among various groups, an intranet is housed internally whereas an extranet is more likely to be accessible via a secure web-based platform. The technical structure of each also tends to vary, particularly with relation to permissions and access rules which can be set by the project owner.
Different End Users: Both platforms feature capabilities for content and document management. The primary difference is an intranet is naturally focused on usage by employees only, whereas an extranet facilitates document processing and editing for external parties such as suppliers, agencies, partners, and so forth.
Privacy and Data Security: When it comes to privacy and security, there are a couple of differences between intranets and extranets. Passwords and data encryption is used in an intranet context, meeting the needs for internal groups and company data security. Additional security layers are often deployed for extranets to protect external access to confidential data and tools. This might include firewalls to isolate certain information away from the private network. Identity authentication plus access and permission management can also be used as an additional protective layer.

How Both Networks Can Work Together

Extending an Intranet Platform With Extranet Capabilities

Today, companies with large networks of partners, vendors, or other external non-customer user groups need to account for a variety of needs, and well-designed extranets allow companies to create useful, productive workspaces for each audience.

However, justifying the creation and maintenance of an extranet can be a challenge, especially for teams with limited development resources. Building your extranet as an extension of your intranet is one way to break past this obstacle. It allows you to reuse components that are valuable to all audiences, maintain consistent and connected databases between different sites, and ensure that security policies are correctly applied according to sites and users, reducing the risk of external parties having access to confidential information. In many ways, it can be helpful to view your extranet as a sub-project of your intranet, conforming to the same standards and design processes, even as each site delivers services unique to its audience’s needs.

Extranets are Built for Complexity - Controlled Access on a Private Network

Extranets are suited for managing extremely complex business processes and relationships, communication, and collaboration - beyond what an intranet can achieve on its own. For example, Hewlett Packard uses an extranet to support its ecosystem of global partners. The company has to support 650,000 users across 174 countries in 25 languages. Moving everyone onto a single, global URL was groundbreaking for managing the company’s relationships with all of its partners.

Likewise, Volkswagen Group France uses both a modern intranet and an extranet to manage more than 30,000 users across 5 brand sites. While the intranet features employee-specific services for team members, such as booking a conference room, the extranet allows all authorized dealers to receive company news and other information they need for day-to-day business. Integration with the intranet allows them to access the same repository of business documents, making content management easier for Volkswagen’s team.

Technical Requirements for Implementing Intranet and Extranet Solutions

Successfully implementing an intranet or extranet requires careful attention to technical requirements and security considerations. Organizations must ensure that their network infrastructure can handle the demands of both platforms, including robust data security measures, access controls, and sufficient bandwidth. It’s important to select intranet and extranet software that integrates smoothly with existing systems and provides a user-friendly experience for employees.

Special attention should be paid to managing external access, as this introduces additional security risks that must be mitigated to protect sensitive internal information. By proactively addressing these technical requirements and potential security risks, organizations can create a secure environment that supports improved communication, collaboration, and productivity across both internal and external user groups.

Consider as well what kind of technology could help you build the intranet and extranet tools you need, like a digital experience platform (DXP) that gives you the capabilities to build both an intranet and an extranet on the same platform.

Do You Need an Intranet or an Extranet?

If you’re deciding on whether to build or extend an intranet or an extranet - or both - the main question to answer is: Do we have the resources to make it a great experience for users?

Companies have to be intentional about maintaining and improving their intranets and extranets so that they are user-friendly and provide true value to users. This means regularly seeking out feedback and incorporating fixes and feature requests into your updates. This may be something your team can monitor, or you may want to bring in a partner manager to offer their perspective on what partners want.

Keep in mind that intranets and extranets have different goals. For example, while it’s appropriate for your intranet to have a page for the company jogging club, that kind of culture-building will be less relevant to your vendors. Stay aware of the relationships you’ve built with partners, and make sure that your extranet appropriately reflects that work culture. You’re designing a tool for them, not for your own corporate initiatives. When done well, the loyalty and satisfaction earned will prove its own ROI in the long run.

Learn more about Liferay’s modern intranet solutions, which are designed to help your business run more efficiently, better address the needs of an evolving workforce, and drive consistency in service delivery for employees across the world.

Mobile Website vs Native App: Which is Right for Your Customer Experience?

2025-05-29T20:45:02Z

Creating a great mobile experience is vital for the success of any organization today. More people than ever are interacting with companies online and the majority of purchasing experiences see customers transition between devices multiple times. Customers now expect great experiences with a company’s mobile presence. Any organization looking to improve their customer experience (CX) strategy and embrace digital transformation in all aspects of their business will need to make wise choices concerning their mobile platform future.

If you are considering where to take your online mobile presence, you may be weighing mobile web design against native applications when determining where to invest your time and money. Consider the following pros and cons of mobile websites and native apps for what your customers want from your business and determine what is the right path for your company’s mobile experience strategy.

The choices you make can help you empower your organization and meet your target audience’s unique needs.

Mobile Website Advantages

Optimized mobile websites are responsive versions of your organization’s online presence that can be seen on any device. These sites can be programmed as responsive, meaning that they will automatically alter their layout to suit whichever device they are displayed on, or as mobile first, meaning that they are given many different mobile web designs to specifically suit various devices.

Customer experience advantages of mobile websites include:

Discoverable - People search for fast answers on mobile devices today more than ever and Smart Insights reports that 48% of consumers start mobile research with a search engine. Mobile-friendly websites are being prioritized by Google more than ever, so having your site optimized for mobile is crucial for being discovered in search engine results.
Fast Content Updates - Customers expect a brand’s online presence to reflect the latest news and updates as soon as possible, and when they encounter inaccurate information online, they can quickly grow frustrated and have a poor customer experience. Mobile websites built on a strong platform will allow you to edit and update content across all versions of a site at the same time to reflect new developments or fix any mistakes for better and more satisfying CX.
Consistent with Desktop Presence - If a potential customer has interacted with your website on a desktop computer and then switched to a smartphone or tablet, he or she may be able to more easily access the same information, products and more for a consistent and helpful online customer experience than with a native app. Research from Wolfgang Jaegel found that 83% of mobile users believe that a seamless experience across all devices is very important, so it is up to you to meet these expectations with your integrative website.
Accessible Across Devices - Customers want to be able to interact with brands online on their own preferred devices. McKinsey & Company research has found that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site after having trouble accessing it, with 40% visiting a competitor’s site instead. A true omnichannel experience enabled by a mobile-friendly website means that any user can have a continuous and consistent interaction with your brand across any device. In order to do the same with an app, different iterations will need to be programmed for various operating systems.

These CX advantages of mobile web design may be right for your company’s specific target audience and should not be ignored when deciding how to improve your online presence.

Native App Advantages

Native apps are built for a specific operating system and are then distributed through an app store for download onto mobile phones. Unlike mobile websites, native apps are not explored through search engines, but are self-contained programs on mobile devices that can interact with other programs.

If you are considering mobile app development, potential customer experience advantages of native apps include:

Offline Access - While Internet service and WiFi are more accessible than ever, there is no guarantee that devices will be able to connect no matter their location. As such, your audience may be unable to access your services at critical moments on mobile websites. Native apps do not need an Internet connection to work, but they can still support features that require online access. Should your audience require digital support in offline environments, such as working in areas with little cell phone coverage, a native app can provide great help, better solidifying the value of your brand through good customer experience.
Native Capabilities - Mobile devices can provide highly useful information about users, including location, interests and other various data collected from their actions. Apps can be given access to this information in order to create experiences that are customized to each person’s unique interests and needs. Native mobile applications are built for a specific mobile platform, such as iOS or Android. While that means developers will need to rebuild if they want to work on various platforms, it also means that the app will work smoothly with the operating system that is running it when programmed correctly. However, platform updates may cause issues with an app, requiring more maintenance for proper performance.
Consistent User Experiences - Poor displays on certain mobile devices, issues due to Internet connections and more complications both within and outside of the control of companies can cause disruptions in the mobile experience. Applications can be tailored to numerous types of devices, screen sizes and internet connections they experience. As such, users and companies can expect consistent CX for apps.
Specific Uses to Empower Customers - According to Smart Insights, 89% of mobile media time is spent on apps, meaning that not providing an app may cause you to lose out on a large percentage of potential interaction. Customers will find a greater appreciation for and a stronger connection with brands that provide them with useful tools for their lives, which can often be found in well-designed applications. Mobile apps can be created and distributed by companies as specific services, providing much-needed support to target audiences for their unique needs. While these apps may not have wide-ranging uses like a mobile website, they can provide in-depth and specific services for great customer experiences. For example, Ray Ban’s mobile app allows customers to use a photo of themselves to see which sunglasses are right for them, which is unlike anything available on their website.

While an app may not be right for every organization, consider the needs of your target audience and whether mobile app development can help meet their needs in ways you do not currently provide.

Creating a Hybrid App

Hybrid mobile apps may be the right choice for many companies due to their ability to bridge some of the gaps between mobile websites and native mobile apps. Hybrid apps are hosted inside a native application but use various web technologies to access the Internet within the application. In doing so, hybrid mobile apps can leverage the advantages experienced by both mobile websites and native applications, but may also be subject to the disadvantages experienced by both, such as potentially being broken by operating system updates and losing functionality when cell phone service is unavailable.

If you are considering hybrid mobile app development, consider your target audience’s desired customer experience as well as how it would fit into your omnichannel experience and determine if this application type is right for you and your customers. Do your customers expect repeat services, such as those found in the retail, travel, and food industries? If so, an app may be right, as these are readily accessible and continually used. Or will they only have a one-time purchasing experience with you? In these instances, mobile websites may have more value for you.

In any case, making the choice requires thoughtful consideration and care for your audience.

Make the Most of Your Mobile Strategy

Deciding which type of app is right for your company is only part of developing a successful mobile strategy. Learn more actionable steps for your mobile strategy with our whitepaper.

Read Mobile Strategies

Three Mobile Platform Implementation Roadblocks and How to Overcome Them

2025-05-29T21:03:01Z

Are you in the midst of mobile app development or responsive web design but keep running into major roadblocks that stop you from finding success?

You are not alone in facing these issues. Thankfully, there are solutions to your biggest application development problems, which can result in a successful and helpful mobile platform that improves the lives of both your employees and your customers.

During the creation of a mobile app strategy, which will help determine how you create, launch and integrate your app with other platforms and larger goals, it is crucial to be aware of both the benefits and difficulties that may be encountered. There are multiple potential complications that could prevent a company from successfully implementing a mobile platform. These, and the solutions to your mobile app strategy and responsive web design problems, include:

Roadblock 1: Not Possessing Mobile-Friendly Integration Technology

Some companies have had mobile-friendly platforms for years, while others have still not gotten around to creating such experiences. Whether you are looking to improve your mobile platform by integrating it with the rest of your online presence or are trying to create your first platform, not having the right technology for your needs is a major hurdle in finding success. The modern mobile platform allows for fluid and easy integration with other platforms, allowing users to begin an action on one device, such as filling out a form on a desktop, and then completing it on another, such as finishing the form on a smartphone. Without mobile application development technology designed to allow for greater integration with other platforms, you may find yourself using numerous workarounds and falling short of a true omnichannel experience.

Solution: As omnichannel experiences become increasingly demanded by consumers, businesses will need to develop mobile sites and apps that integrate with the rest of their online presence. Forrester predicts that the number of smart home devices being used throughout the United States will grow 25% from 2016 through 2021, but mobile devices will be the key to staying connected and using the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT). As such, the ability to integrate with any device or platform will become an increasingly important advantage for mobile applications.

When choosing mobile software development technology, determine if it has the tools for your unique needs, both immediate and in the long term. Crucial elements of successful mobile tech include push notifications, geo-targeting, app development capabilities and cross-platform connection. These can allow you to make the most of your mobile platform. In addition, successfully integratable mobile apps will have back-end services used by different devices so that data is shared, a library of application extensions that allow you to meet varying levels of complexity in integration and the ability to create and edit responsive websites and native or hybrid apps as needed. Flexibility is crucial in successful integration and the right software will allow you to be as flexible as you need.

Roadblock 2: Not Having Proper Resources to Maintain Your Mobile Strategy

Every business strategy needs resources in order to successfully reach its goals in an effective, timely and financially-minded manner. But what resources do you need in order to succeed in your mobile app strategy? Without a plan, an experienced team and a budget in place before beginning your mobile app strategy, you may find yourself going over budget and falling behind schedule, rather than staying focused on making the most of your responsive web design and mobile app development plan.

Solution: Before you begin to implement your new mobile platform, examine your resources and make sure they are the right fit for your goals.

Do you have proper server capacity? This will be crucial in making sure your app can consistently meet the demands of your audience. Consider whether dedicated servers or cloud storage is right for you. Some companies will be able to save time and money if the cloud is the right decision for them.
Is an in-house team or development firm right for you? In-house teams will be solely focused on your specific platform, but will generally cost more than a development firm, which you can contract out for your needs. However, firms will work on a schedule that accommodates other projects, as well. Consider what will help you best reach your goals for the budget you have both now and in the future.
Have you taken search engine optimization into account with your marketing strategy? A responsive website is taken into account by Google’s search algorithms when ranking results ever since its mobile friendly algorithm update in 2016. Don’t be left behind by continuing changes in search engine algorithms and make the most of your mobile presence today.
Are analytics in place for your app? Better understanding user behavior is the key to improving and changing elements over time in order to improve app experiences. Having analytics in place will keep track of the time spent on your app, what aspects are used the most and who is most often using your software in order to see where you can make adjustments.
Have you budgeted properly? You will need to assess all your resources and prepare your team before you begin the process. Websites like estimatemyapp.com can help give you a general but helpful view of your potential budget before you begin development in order to better understand the cost.

Roadblock 3: Being Unable to Scale Applications During Implementation

During the early stages of user testing and beta development, it will be crucial to scale your application in order to meet the size of your audience and avoid potential complications and poor user experience. In addition, the issue of scaling will only continue as your user base hopefully grows after launch. In order to create a mobile platform that will be able to meet the needs of its target audience and consistently perform in the ways in which it was designed, an app should be able to scale to the size of its audience for both long- and short-term success. Should you not be prepared to scale your app to a changing audience, complications can quickly arise. Once an app begins to malfunction, especially those that are brand new, it may be difficult to recover from bad impressions and to regain those who were initially interested.

Solution: Be ready to scale before your app even launches so that you can react quickly and with as few complications as possible. A major component in successful scaling is to develop a database that is right for your unique app. As discussed by Venture Beat, cloud storage is ideal for newer online companies who deal with spikes in bandwidth needs and traffic that changes from day to day. However, it may be best for companies who have consistently increasing storage needs to build on top of dedicated servers.

Ensure that your app’s response time is optimized to stay fast and consistent. If you use dedicated servers, be ready to supply more servers whenever necessary to handle your data as needed. By taking these scaling solutions into account, you can be ready to respond to the unexpected as quickly as possible.

Create Effective Mobile Strategies

Great mobile platform implementation is possible with software designed for integration and long-term mobile strategies. Learn more about effective mobile integration strategies and how Liferay can make them possible in our whitepaper.

Read Mobile Strategies: What Every Company Needs to Know

Three Reasons to Use a Portal Platform

2025-05-29T21:03:25Z

Portal Platforms Are Designed for the Long Game

Most companies buy solutions based on what they need to complete their projects today, without considering what their tech stack will look like in a few years. This is why so many companies have problems with silos. If you make a habit of buying software on a project-by-project basis, in a few years you’ll have an unmanageable number of products being used throughout your organization.

This process can seem unavoidable, especially if you have a large organization with diverse teams that need to operate independently. Portal platforms are well-suited to solving this problem of siloed systems, as their primary strength is in consolidating a wide variety of tools.

For those in the middle of digital transformation, using a portal platform to house sites and applications can cut down on the amount of custom development work, because most of the necessary features are likely available out-of-the-box. Here are three major pain points that justify using a portal platform.

#1 You Have Too Many Systems

Portal platforms give you the ability to reverse the habit of buying too many systems in two ways. You can use portals to stitch together disparate systems or you can re-engineer these processes so they are baked into your platform. From there, your company is positioned to develop or integrate new tools as needed, without sacrificing the cohesiveness of your platform.

Additionally, a modular portal platform will make it easy to change one business process at a time, without running the risk of impacting your other existing processes. This is vital to most digital transformation initiatives and enables companies to control the pace of change within their organizations.

#2 You Have a Large Number of Diverse Audiences

Portal platforms are built for offering different content and services to different audiences. Many sites today use basic content targeting or context tools, but that often amounts to something as simple as swapping out an ad for men’s socks with an ad for women’s socks.

For companies that have truly diverse audiences (for example, a retail bank that targets college students, young homeowners and retirees), portal platforms can create a unique site for each segment, all within the same platform. Users see only what is relevant to them, and managing site content is easier for the administration team.

#3 Your Users Need to Be Able to Build Sites on Their Own

If you have users that need their own sub-sites that can be customized, but still stay within the control of the main site, then advanced site templating will make the job much easier. Portal platforms are equipped with templating for companies that need to create the same basic site over and over, before handing off the customization to the site owner, who adds her own content.

For example the GLOBE Program allows teachers all over the world to create classroom sites on globe.gov, which functions as an online teaching space for their students to learn about earth science. To make this possible, GLOBE uses key portal platform features to create site templates, so every classroom site has the same core functionalities for students. This makes the data they collect easier for GLOBE to manage, and it gives teachers less work to do in maintaining their individual sites.

Build for the Future, Not for Today

Portal platforms are a lot like toolkits, especially now that so many include adjacent technologies out-of-the-box. When companies have the opportunity to move a complicated manual process to a streamlined digital solution, they should also consider moving to a portal platform that can automate standardized tasks and free up employee time to innovate.

Some digital leaders are even addressing this by building innovation into their IT strategy. Rather than gathering point solutions, they focus on building a framework that standardizes as much as possible for any future application or website they need to build. This strategy allows developers to focus on engineering only the components that provide true business value, rather than always recreating the same basic foundation. Strategies like this are the backbone of many digital initiatives, and having a reliable platform that is capable of supporting it is key.

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How Mobile Orchestrates Your Omnichannel Experience

2025-05-29T20:31:42Z

Companies around the world are searching for a way to create omnichannel experiences for their target audiences, which connect all types of devices, online experiences and in-person interactions for a complete and fluid relationship. While the benefits are clear and modern trends show that customers have increasing expectations concerning omnichannel experiences, many companies find it difficult to know where to start or where to put their focus in omnichannel experience strategies.

Mobile is the fulcrum that omnichannel experiences pivot on due to its ability to connect audiences whenever and wherever they are. While laptops, Internet-of-things-enabled devices, in-store beacons and more create a network of omnichannel experiences, mobile devices are what truly connect all of these elements in order to make this experience happen.

If you are considering how to develop an omnichannel experience for your company, the following four elements will play crucial roles in finding success. However, effective omnichannel experience creation requires a strong platform. A properly constructed and flexible mobile platform can help prepare businesses for continued integration of experiences. Without one, it may not be possible to create a true omnichannel experience that satisfies both your needs and the needs of your target audience.

Four Key Elements of Omnichannel Built on Mobile Devices

The ways in which mobile helps to create or prepare for omnichannel experiences, and how businesses should use their mobile platform to create omnichannel experiences, include:

1. Gateway into Internet of Things

Mobile devices connect with sensors and devices anywhere you go for true IoT connectivity. Businesses should begin building their mobile apps and various other pieces to quickly connect and communicate with one another for a fast and natural approach to IoT in both a person's home and in in-store experiences.

Because mobile devices go everywhere with a person and are given access to a wide variety of information due to app usage, they are best equipped to connect with other IoT-enabled devices at any moment and to use collected data to trigger and inform the actions of other nearby devices. The amount of technology making up the worldwide Internet of Things will only continue to increase as time goes by, with Gartner reporting that there will be approximately 8.4 billion different IoT-enabled units by the end of 2017, which is a 31 percent increase from 2016, and an estimated 20.4 billion units by 2020. Only by building a properly integrated mobile platform can your company have the ability to become part of the Internet of Things, which users will come to expect in the coming years.

2. Inter-Device Movement

A true omnichannel experience means consistency and fluidity between all types of devices, no matter the location or content, and also includes in-person interactions that leverage online history for informed and effective communication. Frequently, mobile devices play the largest role in these experiences, as they are often the one device that goes everywhere with a person, and according to Harvard Business Review research, 73% of those they surveyed in a recent study switch between multiple channels during their customer journey.

A strong mobile platform will be able to transition between any device seamlessly for real omnichannel experiences. When crafting a mobile platform, ensure that user IDs carry over across devices to ensure seamless transitioning.

3. Voice-Activated Assistants

Mobile voice assistants that are integrated with at-home voice assistants mean your personal AI can be everywhere you want. The current state of assistants like Alexa and Siri show that while these voice assistants are not quite past the stage of being an interesting addition to the omnichannel experience, they will eventually become an essential aspect of most companies’ digital presence due to their continued advancement and integrations with more and more applications.

According to Forrester research, 60% of US adults online already use online messaging, voice, or video chat services, showing the increasingly common usage of voice-activated assistants. Mobile platforms will need to be integrated with, or be ready to integrate with, voice assistants in order to embrace an increasingly common aspect of omnichannel.

4. Bots That Learn Your Needs

When bots are integrated with mobile tech, they can learn daily habits and interests to provide info when you need it, wherever you need it. Brands should begin integrating bots into their mobile services so they can become a natural part of everyday life, such as Apple's Maps app, which learns daily routes and provides instant updates when connecting with your car. Doing so creates a natural and helpful assistant.

Strong mobile platforms allow bots to travel with you, allowing them to better understand your daily needs and habits in order to leverage machine learning. While bots will often take actions in your home environment, their integration with smartphones and other devices through mobile platforms will help shape fluid omnichannel experiences that occur wherever you go.

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How to Create the Best Employee Portal

2025-05-29T20:32:19Z

Creating the Best Employee Portal Starts With Empathy

If your company is currently going through digital transformation, having an employee portal to help manage the culture shifts is incredibly important. Many of the top challenges in digital transformation have to do with change management and empowering your employees, two things that well-designed employee portals can support.

The current trend of employee portals is often called the social intranet, or intranet 2.0. Rather than static information sites, today’s best examples incorporate social features such as blogging, instant messaging and commenting. This shift has often been credited to the new audience of Millennials, who are used to having these new forms of communication available at all times.

To create solutions that this audience of millennials will actually use, IT teams should treat employees as their customers when designing a new intranet or employee portal. Customer experience is just as important here as it is on your public website. The development team needs to stay open to feedback and improvement. The payoff for this work will be evident in improved employee retention, which could be seen as the ultimate measure for whether your employee portal is a success.

Six Questions to Ask Before You Start

There are two things every employee portal needs to take into account from the very beginning of the project.

The first is accessibility, meaning that it must be easy to use so that people don’t get a headache trying to get their work done.

The second is relevant content so that the portal has enough draw on its own that people will actually use it. Ideally, the site would gain enough momentum that employees are regularly contributing content and making use of its tools on their own initiative.

To address these two areas, here are six questions you can ask to get you started on building an employee portal that people will actually use:

Why do we need an employee portal?
If you don’t have a solid vision for your portal, the design process will quickly lose focus. Companies often cite the following reasons for building an employee portal or intranet:
- Increased productivity
- Unified corporate communication
- Streamlined business processes
- Easier knowledge management and collaboration
- Digital onboarding and training
What's the ROI?
The clearest ROI is often in eliminating inefficient processes, such as employees spending time searching for documents across multiple repositories. Laying out your best opportunities for ROI will help you prioritize development during later stages of the project.
When we look at our current tools, what doesn't work like it should? This question begins to develop that empathy for your end users. For instance, most companies have at least one process that relies on a couple employees manually entering data into an Excel spreadsheet. That system might work for a small amount of data, but it isn’t scalable as the company grows. Or you might discover that employees never use the search feature in your current intranet because it doesn’t return the right results.
This is where you start your design plan. By fixing a frustrating process, you can earn credibility and buy-in early on in the project.
What do our employees have to do?
People don’t like change, even if you promise that the new portal you’re building will make their lives easier once they get used to it. The first roll out of your employee portal should take the tasks people have to do — logging timesheets, requesting vacation time — and place these functions completely within the new solution so that employees have to use it. That may seem forceful, but it should hold IT accountable to making a portal that is actually efficient, reliable and easy to navigate. Despite most of the advice for intranets you find online, designing the best employee portal is not about making something pretty. It’s about making something practical. This, if done well, drives usage and engagement.
Which tools do our employees like?
Modeling your User Experience after tools your team already likes can help build early engagement, because the experience of the portal will feel familiar. If your employees love using Facebook pages to plan company events, then create an internal social platform that includes those same features.
How do our employees collaborate?
Effective collaboration through a portal is difficult to get right, but it promises some of the biggest gains in increasing productivity and facilitating communication. If you can achieve a deep understanding of the pain points around collaboration, you position yourself to develop a portal with significant ROI. Spend time researching how your users get a project done from start to finish, making note of every tool they use in the process, from sticky notes to whiteboards to text messages.

The Best Employee Portals Pay for Themselves

Ultimately, the best employee portal is the one that takes the least resources to manage, while having the most impact on efficiency and engagement. Your solution should be something that employees feel confident using, and there should be enough buy-in that you are receiving a healthy amount of feedback and requests for new features. However, it should also be supported by a portal platform that can implement these new features without a huge commitment of resources. The right balance depends on your organization’s goals, but in most cases, the benefits of a solid employee portal more than pay for themselves.

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How to Achieve Operational Excellence

2025-05-29T20:32:10Z

Attendees at this year’s Liferay Symposium North America (LSNA) can expect to learn how digital operations and customer service are part of the same conversation. On one hand, a business might notice the most impact by creating a terrific customer experience, but on the other hand, creating digital experiences at scale depends on powerful core technology. In a previous post, we discussed three strategies that are essential when planning a digital transformation. But strategies alone can be difficult to process without real-world examples.

Here, we highlight three businesses that reinvented their business models to improve the customer experience by focusing on operations, distribution, and the supply chain.

Three Companies Transforming Digital Operations

Forrester predicted in 2016 that digital transformation would depend on operational excellence. “Bolting on” a digital front-end, like a new website or mobile app, without transforming back-end operations, are important services for the short-term, but they are not enough for long-term growth. The following examples, identified by Forrester, illustrate how today’s enterprises are investing in the future.

1. Walmart

As a brick-and-mortar retailer, Walmart is no stranger to rapid growth. According to the Harvard Business Review, the company maintained a compound annual growth rate of 43% from 1968 to 1988, when it had only 1200 stores and saw $16 billion in sales. Between 2011 and 2015, this rate had slowed to an average of 2.7%. To maintain its own profitability, and to compete with online retailers, Walmart announced at the end of 2014 that it would invest up to $1.5 billion over the following year in e-commerce and digital initiatives.

Walmart admits that this is long-term thinking, anticipating a loss until the fiscal year 2018. The majority of this investment went to fund new fulfillment centers in the US, Brazil and China, and expand its global technology platform, “with new data capabilities to enhance customer experience,” according to the company. In 2016, Walmart increased its commitment to e-commerce with the $3 billion acquisition of Jet.com. In a statement from CEO Doug McMillon, the purchase helps the company “offer the simplest, easiest shopping experience because that’s what our customers want.”

Not only was the operational core restructured, but Walmart also lifted its average hourly wage to $13.38 in 2016, almost double the federal minimum wage. This restructuring shows attention not just to operations and customer experience, but to the company culture, too.

2. The Home Depot

Like Walmart, The Home Depot announced an investment of $1.5 billion in 2014 to update its technology and supply chain in order to support same-day delivery for online purchases. This also included plans for new distribution centers and an overhaul to the fulfillment process, so customers could order from the company catalog without the inventory limits at their local store. According to then-CEO Frank Blake, this operational overhaul not only benefited customer service, but improved the efficiency of their supply chain.

The Home Depot’s end-to-end digital transformation is also evident in its investments in mobile and big data. Merging physical stores with distribution centers for customers with many devices is what the store calls “interconnected retail.” However, this omnichannel commitment to its B2C market has also had a positive impact on its B2B partners. According to The Home Depot’s EVP of Merchandise, Craig Menear, “We have created competitive advantage with our strategic partners that allow us to be leaders in assortment. This gives the supplier the confidence to make us their client of choice for R&D and capital investment.” Not only did The Home Depot see success with engagement, but the company became more efficient as a whole.

3. General Electric

Unlike Walmart and The Home Depot, whose major initiatives were installed to improve operations for an existing service for its customers, General Electric (GE) announced plans to invest $1 billion in 2016 to build out its subsidiary, General Electric Digital. GE hopes the subsidiary will position itself as one of the largest software and analytics companies. By continuing to develop Predix, its industrial internet platform, GE Digital can focus on creating software to make smarter machines, as well as techniques that can collect data generated by those machines. In short, GE’s digital venture is an operational overhaul for its digital transformation.

Bill Ruh, the CEO of GE Digital points out that “the industrial internet is not an IT project.” Planning change requires cooperation from technologists and business leaders. Because Gartner predicts that the number of connected devices will reach 20 billion by 2020, moving from an industrial manufacturer into a digital business is urgent, even for a 125-year-old company that has outlasted many of its peers.

Learn More About Operational Transformation at Liferay Symposium

Digital transformation depends on comprehensive cooperation from all parts of a business. The customer experience improves when operations are improved, and processes move faster when a business has a positive and productive culture; when all parts are connected. To ensure success, it is important to select the right technology on which to build and scale your omnichannel digital business.

At Liferay Symposium North America we will discuss how real transformation happens, with technical and business-oriented topics that include customer experience, personalization, OSGi, and conversations about operational reinvention. Learn more about Liferay solutions and discover more insight and strategies at this year’s Liferay Symposium North America, October 16–17 in Austin, Texas.

Portal vs. Website: When to Use Each

2025-05-29T20:52:07Z

Portal vs. Website: What’s the Difference?

Websites are for driving traffic, whereas web portals are for limiting traffic to a specific group of users. Most web portals require a user to log in, which allows the site to deliver more specific content and services based on who that user is. Websites are destinations that everyone can get to, and are generally designed for a broader audience.

That said, there is a lot of overlapping functionality between websites and portals today. Websites can use content targeting or other tools to create personalized experiences for users, and web portals can have public-facing pages that don’t require users to log in.

Portals can have anonymous public pages, as well as personalized access.

Platform vs. Page

One difference between portals and websites is whether the team that manages the site intends to create pages or platforms. In most cases, company portals and websites will be owned by different teams and thus have different expectations for how they should work.

The Marketing team may own the public website and prefer software built for blogging, measuring user engagement and enabling a strong visual design of web pages. Their expectations will be built around these core priorities. They need a solution that can build pages quickly that are either connected or independent, with complete control over where they fit into the overall structure of the site.

However, most organizations have to manage more than a public website. The Support team may own the customer self service portal and need a solution that integrates their other applications. They need a solution that is focused on building a platform, complete with multiple types of users and systems that are all connected.

Should You Build a Portal or a Website?

Like every technology solution, the decision to build either a website or portal comes down to your unique situation and needs. With the amount of overlapping functionality between portal platforms and more traditional WCM website platforms, most projects can be built with either option (given enough planning and elbow grease). Here are a few guidelines for when to use each.

Use a portal if:

you need to create specific audience experiences.
you need advanced control over what users see.
you have multiple systems that need to be integrated into one visual design.
you need advanced user management and permissioning features.

Use a website if:

you're creating a public website focused on delivering and managing content.
you need to have a site that operates separately from internal site/systems.
you need to draw traffic from a broad audience of anonymous users.

Still Not Sure?

It’s helpful to think of the portal versus website question in terms of an online journal versus a blog:

An online journal likely has multiple contributors that need to access the site on the back end. Writers need to submit drafts, photographers need to upload their photos, designers need to make updates to the UI as needed and editors need the ability to manage the rest of these roles. A portal solution would be able to meet the needs of this complex system with granular role permissions, integration of different tools for each kind of user, built-in workflows and control over the presentation layer.
A blog likely has one main contributor, whose primary concern is being able to manage his library of content efficiently. Other roles may need to be added (like a guest blogger), but they have simple requirements. Integration with social media and marketing tools is important, but they don’t need to be brought into the main UI in a visually consistent way. The top concern is building a strong customer experience on the front-end with easy access to sorting through and editing content on the back-end. A website solution built on WCM functionality would excel at this use case, by providing simple tools where needed and allowing the site owner to focus most of his energy on enhancing the front end.

Focus on What Your Team Is Prepared to Maintain

When you’re deciding between a portal and a website, you need to consider the project’s needs, the needs of the team managing it and your current technology investments. Portals can function as websites, and websites can function as portals, so the technology you invest in should go beyond features to what you will be able to sustain long-term for your organization.

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Types of Portals: Three Major Areas to Consider

2025-05-29T21:06:31Z

With all the focus today on mobile-first and digital transformation, portals can seem blasé. But many types of portals play an incredibly important role in managing the culture shifts that come with digital change. If you’re in the middle of a digital transformation initiative, then it’s worthwhile to see where portals fit into that picture.

What Defines a Portal?

Broadly, a portal is a web-based platform that collects information from different sources into a single user interface.

Think of the last time you logged into your online banking account. One username and password combination took you to a page where you could pay bills, update account information, access self service options and more. This is a typical example of a modern portal.

Traditionally, the industry defines a portal as either vertical (appealing to one industry) or horizontal (appealing to all audiences). Try to dig into these two categories, however, and you’ll soon be down in the weeds of trying to understand the difference between nearly identical use cases (knowledge portal versus employee portal versus intranet). These categories have their place, but if you’re trying to learn how portals can help your organization, you’d be better off starting the project by looking at three key areas: Content, Access and Form.

Content: Audience & Function

Portals personalize content based on a balance of audience and function. In other words, they need to know who is using the portal and what those users need to get done.

Generally, the more specific your audience, the more specific kinds of functions you’ll be expected to provide. For example, think of the difference between a patient portal and a student portal. Both are vertical portals, targeted to a fairly specific audience. With the two examples below, you can see the impact this has on the type of content each offers.

The MedImpact Member Portal has tools that only relate to health care, such as a drug price comparison tool, a pharmacy locator and health benefits information.

The Capella University student portal features course enrollment, class assignment updates and a way to contact classmates, all features that you only expect within the context of a student portal.

Now, if the MedImpact portal was only for patients with heart disease, the content and services offered on the homepage could be narrowed even further.

On the other hand, if Capella University created a portal for all US students preparing to enter university for the first time, the dashboard might change to offer information on nationwide scholarship programs, links to common applications for schools or lists of the top universities for popular programs.

The content you offer on your portal depends on your audience and what functions they expect a portal to have. On the back-end, however, there is not much difference between designing for a broad audience or a narrow audience. For that, we need to move on to access and form.

Questions to ask about content:

Who is this portal for?
What do they need to do?
Which benefits our organization more: designing for a broad audience, or creating a hyper-targeted experience for one kind of user?

Access: External vs. Internal

Though portals usually require a login, they can still be either internal or external. An employee portal may show a login page to anonymous users, whereas a customer portal could show almost the entire site, and ask users to log in for certain features, such as making a purchase.

Access is an important consideration, because it has a big impact on how much work it will take to design and maintain your portal. Consider the different aspects of developing a public retail site that incorporates a customer portal, versus a customer self service portal that requires a login.

A clothing retailer that requires an account for purchases will focus on:
- integrating user specific features without dramatically changing the UI from the public site
- making the transition from anonymous to logged-in seamless
- hiding important/sensitive information from anonymous users
- customer loyalty management (like tracking rewards)
- SSO integration (logging in with Facebook or other platforms)
- integration with engagement tools to track user behavior
An internal customer self service portal that requires all users to log in has more control over who accesses the site, allowing them to focus on:
- easy navigation of content topics
- effective and fast search
- integrating with call center operations and enabling click-to-call or click-to-chat features
- chatbots to handle simple inquiries
- updates on pending orders, such as tracking shipping or returns

One could argue that these are the same type of portal (vertical portals designed for retail customers), but they have very different purposes and could easily exist side by side within a single company.

Questions to ask about access:

Who needs to access the site, and what security concerns does that bring?
What roles and permissions do we need to create in order to maintain this site?
What kind of experience do we want to give to anonymous users?
Does our site have enough value to convince people to create an account?

Form: Gateway vs. Dashboard

The final major area to consider is the form your portal takes. What does a typical user see when she first logs in?

The two most common forms are a gateway or a dashboard. Both provide personalized information, but a gateway design will usually have set, standard portlets with content that updates dynamically within the apps. These are simpler to develop and don’t require much refining or maintenance.

The Grants.gov homepage is a solid example of a gateway portal. The portal aggregates a ton of information from different systems and programs, but the layout is fairly simple. We can see a section for News (the image banner at the top), Updates and Open Grant Opportunities. The content within each of those might be changed manually or through an audience targeting tool, but its overall form is a gateway to more information.

Portals Make Digital Transformation Easier

Digital transformation requires significant shifts in business models and corporate culture, so it makes sense that it will also require shifts in how we think about different kinds of software. Portals have continued to evolve over the past ten years, but they have always been defined by one core priority: delivering a personalized experience that cuts out the noise and offers only what is relevant to the end user. With the increasing emphasis on customer experience, portals remain a key part of any digital transformation strategy, no matter what the final project looks like.

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UX + SEO = The Future of Your Rankings

2025-05-29T21:07:06Z

For websites to rank well in today’s search engines, they must be relevant to the topics they cover and popular with visitors. But how does a website, especially in the enterprise, become relevant and popular? Search engines look for quality content that is easy to use and presented in an accessible way. Search engine optimization is the process of affecting and increasing website traffic with practices that can improve a website’s rank in a search engine. User experience refers to a person’s behavior and feelings when interacting with a product. To drive traffic to your site it is important that user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) are working together.

New Priorities for Your Search Rankings

Early search engines understood context by analyzing keywords and backlinks. Sites were ranked through the number of keywords and synonyms found across their web pages, which helped signal relevance for the term searched. And backlinks across the web indexed a website’s popularity.

Today, search engines use machine learning to understand both the context of a search and the quality of a website—to deliver the best search results. When Google updated its search algorithm with Hummingbird in 2013, the new algorithm included new technology that allowed it to understand context. Previously, searches were deployed to retrieve sites that matched each keyword separately. The update allows Google to understand the context of long-tailed keywords, and even predict the question a user is trying to ask.

This shift signals how new priorities affect search engine results. According to Moz, “Usability and user experience are second order influences on search engine ranking success. They provide an indirect but measurable benefit to a site’s external popularity, which the engines can then interpret as a signal of higher quality.”

Businesses that lack a designed UX must attend to this in order to improve their search engine rank.

The Importance of User Experience

According to Nik Donovic, “SEO focuses on the customer’s journey before and after they arrive at a website and UX focuses on the customer’s journey while they are visiting a website.” Working together, SEO and UX should consider a range of entry points into a website, to ensure that a user has the best experience possible. To accomplish this, UX must be data-driven.

With the help of analytics, a data-driven UX strategy tracks user behavior on the websites they visit. By measuring this data, SEO and UX teams can see where and when people are dropping from a page and fix bugs and problems faster. Thus, a data-driven UX strategy improves the site experience, and a better user experience may improve the overall search engine rank. Because search engine algorithms can understand user behavior, a page with quality UX that keeps visitors engaged will begin to rank higher than a website with strong SEO, but poor UX.

Data-driven UX will also help a web team gauge if the current experience is optimal for a variety of uses. David Freeman argues that designing a user experience with a linear approach lacks flexibility, as more than half of consumers do not start their journey on a site’s homepage. Just like software, UX requires constant attention, with updates to keep it responsive, intuitive and inviting. Studying data gathered from visitor journeys in a site helps UX teams make informed decisions that benefit a site’s ongoing success and search rank.

The Rise of Mobile

Mobile-friendliness is one of the most important factors for high quality SEO. Shortly after releasing the new algorithm, Google announced that it would be prioritizing mobile friendly websites in its ranking. The Pew Research Center believes that 12% of adults rely on a mobile device for web use exclusively. And some sources even estimate that 60% of all web searches happen on mobile devices. As many businesses adapt to an omnichannel strategy, it may come as no surprise that Google prioritizes fast, mobile-friendly websites. Thus, it is important for SEO and UX teams to prioritize responsive, mobile-friendly design.

In addition to site speed and responsive design, good UX also depends on image use, easy-to-read text and an organized, logical sitemap. It might seem obvious, but pages with at least one tagged image rank higher than web pages without any images. As listed by Google’s instructions for improving the landing page experience, transparency and trustworthiness are also highly important. Visitors should be able to understand what your business does, and what your products are for, before they are asked to fill out a form. Attending to clarity will keep your site relevant, which will improve the quality of your site’s traffic.

Creating a Cross-Functional Team

Today, search engines can understand semantics, context and user behavior. These advancements mean that strategy must change too. No longer can SEO marketers and UX designers afford to work on projects separately. These teams must collaborate to ensure the best possible journey for the user.

A terrific UX not only keeps users engaged with the page but increases the potential for organic sharing and distribution. The more traffic a site receives, the more data that a team will have to plan revisions and improvements. A successful cross-functional team can be independently successful, but only if they are mutually supportive.

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How to Successfully Scale Your Customer Experience

2025-05-29T20:33:40Z

Creating and scaling great customer experiences are more crucial than ever to the success of businesses, but what does it mean to scale customer experience (CX)? And how can your company scale successfully?

Scaling means being able to create and control customer experiences for any type of customer, any size group of customers and for any or all portions of a business.

According to Walker research, CX will become the key differentiator between brands by 2020, instead of price or product. Companies will find it to their advantage to better scale their experiences, no matter the size of business or type of customer. When applied correctly, scaling customer experience for your company can save time and money while improving customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Scaling customer experience goes in two directions: personalizing company-wide business processes to individual customers and taking individual interactions employees have with customers and using those insights to reshape business processes. By applying both approaches to a flexible and digitally transformed business, you can be better equipped to adapt to the ever-shifting nature of modern business. The key to any successful scaling of CX is to learn the right lessons from day-to-day business and be willing to rethink how you meet your customers’ needs.

Strategy #1: Applying One-on-One Experiences to Larger Processes

As outlined by Ericsson in their report, “Generating actionable insights from customer experience awareness,” a customer-centric organization is characterized by being attentive to requests, proactive in addressing concerns, consistent with their experiences and adaptive to changing needs.

Imagine a moment when someone contacts your customer service to help find answers to a source of frustration. It’s easy to do so, it happens every day. He or she can’t seem to complete a needed service request on your website or is running into a consistent error with your product. If you’ve enabled your customer service representatives well, they will be able to quickly understand and solve the problem the customer has presented over the phone or via chat. As a result, that customer will leave the conversation satisfied and with a renewed sense of trust in your company. According to an American Express Survey, 78% of consumers have decided to not make an intended purchase because of poor customer service experiences. However, the value of a properly equipped and connected customer service center does not stop there.

If a customer has reached out to your customer service branch due to confusion and complications in their journey, such as trying to complete a purchase online, it’s likely that they are not alone in their frustration. Take the customer’s frustrations into consideration and consider what can be done to simplify this process for all customers, whether or not they ever contact your customer service.

Successfully scaling solutions to customer pain points can result in greater satisfaction and a higher sales completion rate, as unresolved frustrations can lead to abandoned carts and lower rates of return business. The biggest challenge is in scaling correctly in order to apply these takeaways to a potentially massive corporate network while also retaining the individual customer-level detail that made these applicable customer experiences a success in the first place.

Strategy #2: Using Technology to Scale Effectively

The challenge for every business in the age of digital transformation is to run massive everyday operations while making each customer feel like he or she is seen and treated as an individual. It’s no simple task, but a major factor in its success is to correctly scale customer metrics, which analyzes feedback concerning experiences for actionable insights. Research from Ericsson shows that customer metrics can be scaled by evaluating insights based on several metrics, including:

Scope - If the feedback concerned an individual, a group or the entire organization.
Outreach - The number of customers who provided the feedback.
Subjectivity - How objective or subjective the feedback is determined to be.
Predictive - If the insight is based on measurable facts or predicted for the future.
Latency - How quickly experiences should be changed to reflect insights.
Frequency - How often the score should be updated.

By evaluating the feedback you receive based on these scores, you can have a greater awareness of how to scale effectively.

The ever-increasing use of automation in data analytics can play a crucial role in effectively scaling your metrics without putting additional strain on your workforce. Through successful back-end integration, your digital business can receive in-depth data from customer interactions, process it for valuable insights and then modify experiences based on what that data shows. In doing so, takeaways based on real, insightful customer interactions can be applied in scalable ways that make the most of technology to adapt to unique business sizes, structures and approaches to customers.

The End Goal: Stay Focused on the Customer

Companies are constantly striving toward effective innovation in the way they run their businesses through digital transformation that improves customer experience. Using great takeaways from individual customer experiences to improve the brand as a whole can have widespread success, but it’s also crucial to remain focused on personalizing these experiences. Customer expectations concerning personalized experiences with companies are more widespread than ever thanks to their increasingly common occurrence across industries.

If your company has equipped its workforce with the right technology, employees will be able to respond flexibly and quickly to the demands of customers, even if they do not have a set protocol for new situations. For example, if a customer enters a store and has a question about a brand new product that was just announced, a digitally transformed business will have that information ready and waiting at an employee’s fingertips even if he or she has not personally heard about the product yet.

It’s this fast and adaptable approach to CX that will make individual customers feel seen and heard in their everyday interactions with your brand, reinforcing positive impressions and loyalty.

Personalize Your Company’s Customer Experience

As scalable customer experiences become a more and more common expectation in industries around the world, businesses will need to prepare themselves to reach such goals. Read our whitepaper to learn more strategies for CX transformation and begin your journey today.

Read “4 Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience”

Three Hurdles to Digital Transformation

2025-05-29T21:02:55Z

Liferay Symposium North America is more than just a chance to study Liferay features and support, it’s also a space to explore the current challenges facing digital businesses. But what does digital transformation really mean? To prepare for this year’s event, it’s important to understand what digital transformation looks like, and what prevents many companies from achieving real transformation.

Liferay Symposium North America is equal parts instruction and invitation. This year’s theme, “Discover what real transformation can do,” is a challenge for attendees to consider how and why cultural and operational change is so important today. We invite you to discover, alongside the Liferay community, how real transformation can be effective and valuable for your business.

What Is Real Transformation?

According to analysts at Forrester’s Digital Transformation summit, “business transformation is digital transformation.” In other words, real transformation means transformation across the entire enterprise; it’s not enough to just keep adding digital front-end experiences. By coupling digital experiences with deep operational change, a total transformation makes it possible for companies to better serve customers and accelerate innovation. In a recent webinar, Liferay CEO Bryan Cheung discussed this transformation in his own words. He presented three main problems that companies must address in order to see success.

1. Lack of Urgency

It’s obvious that technology is changing quickly, but Cheung believes that this rate of change will continue to increase exponentially. As the pace of technological disruption increases exponentially, businesses must recognize this urgency and transform operating and revenue models in order to remain competitive; they must prepare to move faster. To do this companies must reframe the competition and recognize that the playing field is less segmented than in years past. For example, PayPal is not just in competition with Venmo, it must compete with Facebook Messenger now, too.

However, recognizing this urgency can also be a tool. The reality of a competitive climate can empower companies to take risks and make changes they otherwise would not. Today, one of the largest barriers to digital transformation is competing for priorities with other departments. Businesses must recognize this urgency and overcome departmental differences, for immediate and future benefit.

2. Failure to Value the Customer

Even though conventional wisdom reminds us that “the customer is always right,” this does not mean the customer is always valued. Cheung points to his own experience with a major airline as an example. Despite being a frequent flyer with nearly one million miles to his credit, the system still doesn’t recognize that Cheung lives in Los Angeles. When he books a return flight to LA, he is offered a coupon for a rental car, for which he has no need. But having one wrong choice is as impersonal as having too many right choices. When banking online, Cheung explains that he has seven options to transfer money, but no context for what tool is most appropriate for what task. Too many options make the process more complicated and less convenient.

The issue with these products is that they lack an indication that the company really knows him; the service isn’t personalized. Companies that recognize and engage customers on a very personal level stand the best chance to increase customer loyalty. To respond, companies must support a culture that can respond to failure and quickly improve. Companies must invest in knowing the customer, using this knowledge to serve and delight the customer’s needs.

3. Inability to Change Business Culture

With so much emphasis on efficiency, it can be problematic when a business prioritizes process over people. In order for a culture to innovate and adapt, it must support a fast-paced and agile work environment, with some permission to deviate from the rules.

But culture can be very hard to change. To start, it’s useful to isolate small projects and test accordingly to prove results—before tackling the next small project. At the Forrester summit, executives at Gap discussed their real attention to speed, by only allowing only 48 hours to make business decisions. This forced them to embrace a “learn fast, fail fast” mentality, without getting restrained by indecision and inaction. According to Mary Ransom, the Global Vice President of Ecommerce at Bloomingdales, “Data should have the loudest voice in the room.” Using data to set goals and review success is an authority that can make this kind of transformation easier.

Make Real Transformation Happen

Disruptions across every channel of business will continue to impact digital businesses in a significant way. Forrester predicts digital transformation will separate the leaders from the laggards in even just the next few years. In essence, transformation happens when digital business leaders change business culture to match customer expectations. To prepare for this change, and to equip your company with the necessary tools and practices, attend Liferay Symposium North America to learn more!

Liferay Symposium North America 2017 will be held in Austin, from October 16–17. Register now, or learn more to convince your boss.

Why Chatbots Are Critical to Banking Innovation

2025-05-29T21:12:43Z

The sudden popularity of chatbots is understandable considering that we’ve been talking to machines regularly since Siri’s debut in 2011. But while nearly every smartphone user has tried a voice assistant, many people are too embarrassed or uncomfortable to talk to their tech in public. In 2016, Business Insider reported that the four largest messaging apps surpassed the four largest social networks with monthly active users. This shift signals that chat bypasses the friction of voice recognition with texting; a message or search can be entered and translated with less error, faster. The benefit of chat is that it can be intelligent and personal. Increasingly, chat is getting easier—and many people are more comfortable typing than talking. If the number of times Siri “didn’t quite catch that” were replaced with direct, useful responses in a chat, a lot of people would be happier.

While a shift in use indicates that “chatting” has become the preferred mode of communication for many people, it also suggests that consumers may just as happily chat with businesses and banks, as they do with their family and friends. According to Gartner, the key aspect of conversational commerce is that “it allows users to converse in their platform of choice, and therefore takes channel transparency to the next level.” Financial services will not only benefit from an inexpensive customer support tool, they stand to gain tremendous value from the data that chatbots can collect.

A Changing Landscape: Virtual Assistant or Data Scientist?

A chatbot is a conversational algorithm that you interact with via a chat interface. Early on, chatbots functioned mostly as informational proxies or niche virtual assistants powered by rules-based logic. Now, as major messaging platforms have opened APIs to third-party developers, it’s possible to make complete transactions without leaving the chat. For example, you can shop at H&M or Sephora on Kik, or order lunch from Taco Bell on Slack. Now, FinTechs are cashing in on this new technology as well. Pure plays like Digit, Plum, and Cleo let you save, budget and transfer money through a friendly, ongoing relationship with a chatbot directly in Facebook Messenger. As the possibilities grow, so does the data. Because chatbots are being developed with artificial intelligence via natural language processing and machine learning, they’re optimized for collecting data. After all, they are data.

The difference between a rules-based chatbot and an intelligent chatbot is the data behind it. Many chatbots from the past few years have been limited in a very vertical way; the right answer depends on asking the right question. Until recently, data has revealed behavior through mouse-clicks, screen-taps, time on site and shopping cart activity. But generating a human-like conversation with the customer presents a much more dynamic method for understanding customer needs. A one-to-one relationship with the customer means the possibility of understanding emotion and intent.

Chatbots and Data Collection

While chatbots are still relatively new, their benefits are hard to ignore. A chatbot strategy that optimizes the data a bank already owns has many benefits. Chatbots reduce costs by eliminating and qualifying customer inquiries, increase sales through personalized offers, build brand loyalty across channels with a consistent voice and add value by teaching financial literacy. In many ways, a chatbot is a positive feedback loop. Using data to appropriately segment and target its users, a chatbot can engage these users and collect more data. As the chatbot gets smarter, it gets better—and so does the data. The loop repeats and improves.

Chatbots built into a customer support strategy work well at scale and help limit costly turnover. According to a 2016 report from Forrester, 73% of people say that valuing time is the most important thing a company can do to provide great customer service. But while chatbots will help reduce traffic to customer support centers, they won’t replace it. Savvy banks are using chat assistants as an additional tool to help customers, not as an overhaul to replace support staff. Unlike waiting hours or days for an administrator to respond to a question over email, or the hassle of navigating a traditional call center, chatbots can connect you quickly to human agents in the same interface, if they can’t answer your question or request. This makes the experience faster and more convenient.

The Challenge and Opportunity of Chatbots in Financial Services

Initially, the flagship use case of the chatbot was customer service. [24]7, an AI development company, estimates that chatbots may reduce call center volume by 35% and email traffic by up to 50%. But more than saving cost, chatbots make it personal. Because chatbots can identify and verify users automatically, they can go further than customer service. Besides merely answering questions, chatbots initiate conversations, too. Recently, Forrester argued in a report that banks must create this kind of value and relevance in customers’ everyday lives in order to avoid commoditization.

According to the report, “Firms will deliver personalized and contextually relevant interactions by combining profile data about who customers are, historical data about what they have done and situational data about what’s happening in their lives now. When digital banking leaders get personalization right, they will then be able to offer digital services that are as simple as each individual customer needs them to be.”

Because chatbots can learn, banks face the challenge of teaching chatbots to engage differently with different users. A small-business owner may want help filling out lengthy applications, signing forms, and keeping track of financial documents. But a retiree will need help with transferring funds between portfolios and accounts. By responding directly to a user’s needs through a conversational interface, financial services can personalize the experience, and in turn, use this information to develop even better products and services.

Chatbots are one tool that can help banks get personal. And many big banks have deployed chatbots already, including Wells Fargo, USAA, MasterCard and Capital One. In the fall of 2016, Bank of America introduced Erica, a chatbot that responds dually through text and voice. Also, Erica can talk to you, too. By studying your spending, Erica might let you know how you can pay off your Visa bill faster, or help you identify opportunities to refinance a loan. Another example is a new chatbot from Western Union and Facebook Messenger, which lets you easily send money worldwide through a card or an account, without leaving Messenger.

Chatbots and the Bottom Line

As chatbots move from help desk to interface, their value increases revenue and data collection. Most mobile users spend time in just a handful of apps, where they find the most value. According to a report from Personetics, close to 25% of downloaded apps were abandoned after just one use. Chatbots make it easier to identify why people are engaging with the bank, how much they know about available products, where they get frustrated or abandon transactions and whether or not they are satisfied at the end of their experience. Knowing this information will let banks adjust the experience to create what Forrester calls “personal value ecosystems.” That is, digitally connected products and services that individuals combine to help satisfy their needs and desires.

Chatbots make life easier. Whether you need to ask a bank a question, or move money from one account to another, chatbots can fulfill that request quickly and easily. More importantly, chatbots are a solution for personalization. As Forrester suggests, one out of three people today thinks all banks are basically the same. Chatbot or not, banks will need to challenge this opinion in order to avoid the disintermediation from FinTechs and other marketplaces. The result won’t just be convenience, but consumers that recognize that banks know who they are what they need. Better yet, not just consumers, but happier customers.

Jumpstart Your Banking Innovation

For more information about digital strategy in financial services, and to explore the role technology plays in digital transformation, read the whitepaper.

Read "Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions"

How Digital Experience Platforms Fulfill Digital Transformation Needs

2025-07-22T08:46:30Z

As technological innovation and the continued shift toward smartphones worldwide changes the ways in which both companies and customers perform business, the process of digital transformation has become the next step for every company seeking to stay relevant. But it’s not just business strategy that has transformed. The way in which software enables businesses is also evolving. Portal platforms are now becoming digital experience platforms in order to give more power and greater flexibility to companies seeking to embrace transformation.

However, the idea of a digital experience platform is still relatively new to many companies and its ability to enact a digital transformation strategy may be unclear to some. Because true transformation is seen as creating innovation in both how customers are treated and how businesses are run, digital experience platforms are uniquely equipped to address this wide variety of needs.

The following five principles all make up successful digital transformation for businesses, which includes creating better customer experiences and eliminating business process issues. Each of these digital transformation principles is paired with an accompanying aspect of digital experience platforms, which can help execute these principles for the unique needs of a company.

1. Digital Transformation Need: Back-End Integration

As discussed by ORM London, successful digital transformation strategies are focused on both front-end user experience and back-end systems management. While many companies work to provide front-end experiences that are useful and pleasing to customers as well as back-end processes that help teams create needed services, many are not truly integrating these two sides. Real transformation does not just bolt these sides together. It creates a cohesive process where front-end and back-end processes function as one in order to pull detailed analytics from customer interactions and reshape processes to better fit target audiences.

DXP Solution: Innovative Interfaces and Frameworks

Strong digital experience platforms can quickly create workflow tools and business service management processes while also building a front-end experience that can adapt to changing customer needs. These features allow for true back-end integration for a more effective online presence, as the data collected from customer interactions can be analyzed to continually change and improve a company’s online presence.

2. Digital Transformation Need: Legacy System Transitioning

It’s understandable that most long-standing companies have some or most of their processes hosted on long out-of-date software. These legacy systems are frequently pieced together from various programs in order to meet changing internal and external needs, but are never truly updated. Digital transformation is seen as moving past legacy systems and embracing new, all-encompassing software that allows businesses to follow strategies previously limited by legacy systems. If you are in need of transformation, but find that your legacy systems are holding you back, know that you are not alone. According to a recent study by Nimbus Ninety that interviewed 251 senior stakeholders responsible for their company’s transformation, 50% of those surveyed said that legacy systems were a barrier to their transformation.

DXP Solution: Flexible Architecture for Transformation

DXP technology is designed to help businesses transition from out-dated technologies to modern platforms. In addition, the flexible architecture of DXP means that new technologies and modern approaches to software, such as microservices, can be used in order to adapt to changing trends and new customer needs in the future.

3. Digital Transformation Need: Omnichannel Experience

The term “omnichannel experience” is much-discussed in modern business, it is a very real and crucial aspect of reaching today’s target audiences. The modern customer typically connects with a company via mobile, desktop and in-person interactions before completing a purchase. However, companies that do not keep track of their customers’ information and history across these platforms may cause frustrations that discourage further interactions. When a customer can move across these touchpoints fluidly, they have an omnichannel experience that can better push toward purchases. As reported by Forbes, omnichannel experiences reduce the conflict between inter-company channels to create a single, cohesive marketing channel for a united workforce and cohesive image.

DXP Solution: Digital Channel Unification

A digital experience platform allows all digital channels to be built on the same software and to stay better connected to one another. As such, a user can jump from desktop sites to mobile sites to mobile apps without having to start over fresh each time. This allows for a seamless transition that encourages completion of a transaction and can also be carried over to in-store experiences.

4. Digital Transformation Need: Addressing Customer Journey Pain Points

Every customer has a journey, which includes considering, purchasing, using and returning to a company’s services, or failing to do so. As discussed by I-Scoop, digital transformation mandates that companies have systems in place that allow them to see the complete customer journey from start to finish in order to eliminate potential pain points and base their customer personas on measurable data. Customer journeys have always existed, but transformation allows companies to see them by collecting large amounts of data through touchpoints, rather than creating a purely theoretical journey map.

DXP Solution: Customer Touchpoint Management

Through the use of DXP technology, companies can have detailed control and the ability to analyze all ways in which a customer interacts with the brand. Being able to analyze and adjust these touchpoints means that a business can have a more complete and understandable picture of a customer’s journey based on measurable interactions, instead of creating hypothetical customer journey maps based on fragmented information.

5. Digital Transformation Need: Unifying Silos

As discussed in Forbes, one of the biggest hurdles in reaching true transformation is in silo walls that segment departments and complicate internal collaboration. Through breaking down silo walls, a company can improve their own business processes by allowing internal data to be more openly shared for more effective collaboration. In addition, better connections between departments means that customers are less likely to be affected by stall points when their journey crosses company departments.

DXP Solution: Deep Integration of Systems of Record

DXPs can integrate systems of record throughout all aspects of a business, which allows for customers to interact with every level of a company’s business process. The information gathered in these interactions can then be released across the board within a company, allowing for all departments to share crucial data and collaborate in a more organic and effective manner.

Embrace Digital Transformation with Digital Experience Platforms

Are you looking to take the next step in the digital transformation of your business? Choose one of the five previously mentioned needs and focus on what requirements your software will need in order to meet them completely. Learn more about how to successfully digitally transform through the use of a digital experience platform in our informative whitepaper.

Read Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation

Three Ways Banks Can Convince Me Their App is Secure

2025-05-29T21:03:26Z

Mobile banking apps have become a crucial aspect of how financial institutions connect with and empower all aspects of their customer base. According to a recent study by Market Force, 77% of consumers whose banks offer a mobile app have downloaded the program, with all age groups surveyed steadily increasing their banking app adoption rates over the last three years. People are becoming more and more comfortable with mobile banking and its capabilities have helped banks around the world reach previously untapped audiences in developing nations.

However, mobile banking can present serious security risks when exploited by hackers.

It’s crucial that banks not only work to keep their apps secure, but put customers’ worries at ease in order to encourage continued app usage and prevent potential threats. The following three measurable, proven app security improvements can convince customers that an app is secure and ready for long-term usage.

1. Explain How You’re Securing Data

The biggest threat to banking app security is the exploitation of weak data encryption and communication between devices and servers, and customers are becoming more aware of these dangers than ever. Creating and consistently updating data encryption is not just crucial to ensuring secure apps, but also putting users at greater ease when considering whether they should use the app.

There are numerous ways in which data breaches can occur, including unsecured data transit, access to app source code from users and improper usage by employees using enterprise apps. While it is crucial for businesses to fight back against such security issues through data encryption, it is just as important that security measures are communicated to app users in order to encourage continued usage. The perception of security from users can be reinforced through numerous methods, including:

Fast App Patches: News travels fast when a banking app is breached. Security faults are exploited by hackers even faster. That’s why it’s crucial that app developers patch their software as quickly and completely as possible. Should concerns arise, a banking software team should be able to provide answers and assuage fears in as little time as possible and before damage can be done.
Sign-In Procedures: Signing in may be a frustrating process for some, but it is crucial for any app containing sensitive financial data. An efficient, strong and consistent sign-in procedure that can visually illustrate the safeguards being put in place will help assure security. Biometrics sign-in procedures, such as fingerprint sign in, are both secure and fast.
Detailed App Updates: When updating any aspect of a banking app, update notifications should detail what has been improved in easily understandable language. Far too often, app updates are given vague descriptions that can cause confusion or even worries in users who are unsure of what such updates actually mean. Clearly defined updates can have the opposite effect.

Consistency and clarity in these areas will result in increased trust and long-term usefulness for your mobile banking apps.

2. Selective Remote Wipe Capabilities

In order to run more smoothly and quickly access needed information to prevent frustrations, mobile apps often store some amount of data and documents on the device in which they have been installed. This includes mobile banking apps, which by their nature contain far more sensitive data than most other types of applications.

But what happens if a device containing a mobile banking app is lost or stolen? Having password protection on a phone can only provide so much security when someone has an unlimited amount of unwanted access to the device.

The fear of losing a device is enough to discourage many from including sensitive-information-accessing apps on their phones. As such, it is crucial that banks provide advanced security measures that can handle the loss of a smartphone or other mobile device. As detailed by Appcelerator, a remote wipe capability can erase crucial data in the case of a device being lost and can put your users at greater ease. Doing so can prevent customers from seeing a mobile banking app as a constant possible security risk to encourage installation and consistent usage.

Just as importantly, having an easy to access but highly secure way to approve and begin a remote app wipe can help put customers at ease in the event that they quickly need to secure their finances.

3. Control High-Risk Mobile Transactions

Mobile apps should allow their users to execute a wide variety of actions to reinforce that they have value in the day-to-day needs of users. However, apps that take risk factors like device security, user location, and network connection security can help prevent unaware users of taking actions that could put them at greater risk. In doing so, users can be shown that banks are actively looking out for them.

As discussed by Dark Reading, risky behaviors that a banking app may want to prevent include:

Transactions made at suspicious times and locations
Devices compromised by viruses and other security issues
Higher-than-normal financial transactions
Processes completed over unsecured internet connections

Mobile app users want a certain degree of freedom and when they come up against usage restrictions, they may be tempted to ditch their app. However, when these restrictions are shown to be the result of a bank actively looking out for its clients’ well-being, app users can see that their financial institutions are thinking about them, not simply leaving them up to their own devices. When the right balance is struck, the result is a stronger bond between bank and customer and a much more personal, loyalty-forming relationship.

Creating Better Mobile Banking

Want to see real world examples of how mobile banking can strengthen a financial institution? Learn how the LGT SmartBanking initiative was made possible through Liferay.

Read the LGT Case Study

The State of Digital Transformation in Financial Services

2025-05-29T21:01:59Z

Digital transformation is often referred to as a sort of road. The beginning is uphill and it’s hard to get started. Later, you see obstacles ahead blocking the way. When a finish line appears in the distance, a new road appears beyond that. But setting the metaphor aside, the point is that digital transformation is critical for the demands of customer experience. Your company must start traveling down the road, and the sooner you do, the better. With research from Liferay, WBR Digital created a report to explore the financial industry-wide transformation taking shape. Based on the findings, we’ve illustrated survey data, sampled from digital leaders in banking, to show what the landscape looks like, where the competition stands and how to jump the hurdles waiting ahead.

See the Full Report

Getting Started

It’s no surprise that an overwhelming majority of digital leaders at banks recognize the intrinsic role technology plays in digital transformation. What’s alarming is the 56% of respondents that claim access to IT resources as an obstacle. Thus, a cycle emerges. Stakeholders are aware of the significant investment that must be available for effective transformation, but it is difficult to get approval for an appropriate, multi-year budget. Business executives and IT leaders must work together to prioritize a digital transformation strategy that is owned across departments.

The Journey Ahead

Especially for large enterprises, updating technology takes time. According to banking leaders surveyed, 49% of companies consider their strategy halfway completed, 37% of financial institutions are beginning to roll out their strategy and only 13% of respondents report completing (or being close to completing) their digital transformation strategy. While these mile-markers are somewhat subjective, companies past the imaginary midpoint have likely created a strategy and are integrating existing with new technology. Banks are building their digital strategy with digital experience platforms that can address immediate problems and prepare for scalable growth.

Obstacles en Route

The challenges facing banks along this journey are largely operational. This includes lacking any central repository for customer information, or a problematic volume of unstructured data (and the inability to contextualize customers and their needs, because of disorganized data). The good news is that understanding these barriers makes it easier to overcome them. While no specific obstacle takes the lion’s share of the challenge, some impact revenue more than others.

In order of agreement, these are the top three challenges for banks seeking an omnichannel customer experience: availability of IT resources, regulatory compliance, fragmented data resources. It’s interesting that almost the same percentage of financial businesses who consider their strategy halfway completed are also taking the time to create continuity across all customer touchpoints. This will ensure success in the immediate and long-term, as customers prefer companies with interconnected digital experiences.

Are We There Yet?

Transformation requires vision. And vision requires strategy. In order to build momentum, respondents identified that to execute such a strategy, banks must build a system for better collaboration. Creating a cross-departmental digital team and promoting a flexible culture are essential when preparing for operational change. It’s no longer applicable to rely on marketing for everything related to customers. In agile, the customer comes first, no matter what team you’re on.

For more information on digital transformation facing financial institutions today, read the report.

How to Create Customer Surveys That Actually Tell You Something

2025-05-29T20:32:17Z

Customer surveys are a tried and true method of peeking inside the minds of both existing and potential clients so that companies in turn can better serve customers. While these question and answer forms may have their roots in printed-out sheets and face-to-face interactions, the customer survey has remained viable and even more accessible in the age of digital business.

Thanks to online platforms, customer surveys can be distributed to a larger audience than ever. As such, businesses have been given the opportunity to receive large amounts of detailed feedback that can help to better shape their business and digital marketing strategies. By receiving honest, insightful answers from customers through digital surveys, companies can receive crucial takeaways, including a better understanding of client behavior, pain points and customer journeys.

However, great opportunities require careful planning. The best questionnaires lead to eye-opening survey data and improved services that may not have been possible without the feedback of target audiences.

If you are searching for ways to improve your surveys so that you are not only making the most of your opportunity but also better serving your client base, consider the following five customer survey guidelines. You may find that even the smallest improvement can cause more useful answers and improved long-term results.

5 Guidelines to Improve Your Customer Surveys

Surveys take time, effort and investment to get them to audiences. But when their questions are flawed and their deployment misses the mark, the results could be disheartening and even lead to incorrect takeaways that affect your future strategies. The following five guidelines can be implemented in the creation and release of future questionnaires to improve survey experience, receive honest feedback and prevent the pitfalls frequently experienced in survey creation, including letting your own bias influence results and failing to target the right audience for your specific needs.

1. Define and Address Your Audience – Defining your audience is the first step that every successful survey needs to take to make the most of the opportunity at hand. While questions posed by your team may have sparked the need for a survey, determining who exactly is answering those questions will be the only way to receive usable survey data. According to Vertical Response, segmenting the audience may be right for your specific survey goals. Even if you have a large database of contacts, cutting them down to a group based on product purchases, geographic location, industry or another definable characteristic may be the most accurate way to get the specific feedback you want.

2. Remove Leading Questions for More Honest Answers - It’s easy to let your bias and hopes result in phrasing questions that lead survey takers toward specific answers. As detailed by Help Scout, the best surveys lead to honest feedback and perspectives that you may have been unaware of prior to the survey. After you have completed your questions, attempt to look at them from a more objective point of view. Do your questions contain words that ascribe some sort of value to the subject? For example, “How have you enjoyed our new and improved online features?” pushes toward only positive responses. Instead ask, “What is your opinion of our recent update to online features?” This remains far more neutral in tone. Stay away from assumptions and pre-supposed facts and keep your questions as straightforward as possible, while still encouraging smart, open-ended answers.

3. Align Questions with Your Survey Goals – Every survey should be created with the intent to reach several goals. Typically, these goals concern creating survey data used to improve services, evolve digital marketing efforts and understand opinions on your brand. Useful and successful surveys constantly drive toward this goal and every question should be in service of fulfilling this. As discussed by Help Scout, goals should be definable in two to three sentences to keep your questions on point and consistently directed toward what you are interested in discovering. An added benefit is that your survey can be made much shorter while still remaining effective. Research reported on by Client Heartbeat has shown that shorter surveys, typically under 10 questions, have a much lower abandonment rate.

4. Move from Simpler to More Complex Questions - A survey should be structured in a way that guides readers deeper and toward more complex questions. This is accomplished by arranging questions in a way that encourages more robust, informative answers after first grabbing them with simpler questions. Think of your question layout as warming up the survey taker, which accustoms them to your questionnaire and encourages them to become more invested in completing all the questions. Putting complex questions too early within the survey could cause them to drop out or rush through their answers, leading to poor, unusable results. According to research from Bain Insights, the lower the response rate, the more random the survey data. So making your survey more likely to be completed is crucial in trusting your results.

5. Use Tools That Enable Greater Customization and Analysis – There are many potential tools that can be used when creating an online survey. But which one is right for you? Major advances in form creation in recent years include collecting data on dropout rates for each question so that these problematic sections can be eliminated. Also, advanced survey forms can be customized to dynamically change questions based on how a person identifies him/herself earlier in the survey, such as being a first-time loan applicant versus a renewal. While making sure that your questionnaire is easy to read and complete is essential, it should also be customizable for your unique needs. A successful customer survey will be flexible enough to accommodate both simple, multiple choice questions and more open-ended, text-based answers to encourage useful, detailed information from audiences. In doing so, businesses can completely incorporate the previous four guidelines into their new survey.

Make the Most of Your Customer Surveys

Customer surveys are just one way in which businesses can better understand and serve their client base. Learn more about how to strategically improve your customer experiences and meet the needs of target audiences to stay ahead of today’s trends.

Read Four Strategies to Transform Your Customer Experience

How to Build Customer Loyalty in the Digital Age

2025-05-29T20:32:12Z

The age of digital transformation has helped companies better understand and connect with their target audiences, with everything from dynamic content to page behavior insights helping to create a better picture of how individuals interact with companies. However, it has also greatly affected how loyal customers are to any given company.

Studies show that customers are more likely than ever to jump to competitors when they become dissatisfied with their current services, no matter how long they may have had a relationship with a company. Research from Vision Critical has found that 42 percent of Americans will stop shopping with a brand after only two bad experiences, making consistent high-quality customer experience critical in customer retention. While that lack of loyalty may mean ample opportunities for companies looking to expand their clientele, Harvard Business Review research shows that it costs approximately seven times more to gain a new customer than it does to retain one. As such, cultivating customer loyalty has both reputational and financial benefits.

But the question remains, how does a company improve customer loyalty in an age where loyalty is in short supply?

Encouraging Customer Loyalty Through Good Customer Experience

Changes in modern customer loyalty can be seen as an outcome of digital transformation, with more services than ever made convenient and easily accessible online. However, today’s customer often takes greater advantage of these online opportunities than the companies themselves, leading to today’s drop in customer loyalty. One of the largest factors in constantly shifting customer loyalty in the digital age is customer experience. Studies show that while pricing and quality of products may play a part in why a customer chooses one company over another, customer experience (CX) is the most important aspect in his or her choice.

The term customer experience can be applied to any interaction that a potential client has with your company, but there are several specific areas that can have the largest impact on loyalty. Brands can fight back against the waning tide of customer loyalty and its impact on client retention by improving the following areas of customer experience.

Ease of Access

Existing and potential clients should have the ability to quickly and completely reach your company’s services whenever and wherever they want. Today, customers expect to find and receive the online services they want without complications or delays. Without true brand loyalty, making your services easily accessible can make a major difference during a potential customer’s split-second choice between your company or a competitor.

Pre-existing loyalty may cause an existing client to go to you first, but not being able to quickly find/receive the services they want will easily send them to your competitor. Companies should consider how to implement omnichannel experiences in their services. In doing so, target audiences can smoothly and quickly interact online in both desktop and mobile, as well as in person, for a seamless experience that pushes them consistently and naturally toward closing a sale.

Supply Helpful Customer Service

The field of customer service is one of the most memorable interactions between your business and its customers. Customer service can include free shipping on items, customer loyalty rewards programs, return policies, promotional offers and customer support with issues concerning a product. According to research from Harris Interactive, 62% of U.S. consumers have switched brands in the past year due to a poor customer service experience. Good customer service not only reinforces to clients that your company cares about them, but prevents one of the biggest reasons for customer drop-off.

No matter the industry, customer service plays a crucial role in representing your brand in what are often the most decision-influencing interactions in any customer journey. Successfully demonstrating your dependability during these times can have a major positive effect on customer loyalty.

Distinguishing Your Brand Identity

Customers will tie your brand to the customer experience you provide. Should you offer a great experience, customers will attach positive feelings to your brand, but provide poor experiences and these failings will be tied to the brand instead. As such, it’s crucial that customer experiences align with your company’s larger goals so that good experiences not only gives clients a positive memory, but improve your brand’s standing in the public consciousness. For example, Amazon Dash buttons, which allow customers to reorder a product with the single push of a button, distinctly feature the brand of the company. In doing so, customers tie the brand to the simple, successful and satisfying experience they have had in using the button.

Forrester’s Customer Experience Index has found that a customer’s emotional connection with a brand has some of the strongest influence on loyalty. Cultivating that emotional connection and making it a positive one will yield short- and long-term loyalty in an age that has more competitors than ever before. In a sea of products and services from more brands than ever, having a positive emotional tie will help your brand distinguish itself from the crowd and feel less replaceable to clients.

Loyalty in the Digital Age: 4 Strategies to Engage Existing Customers

Learn about more strategies for new digital technologies for data gathering and digital experience delivery in order to better understand your customer and continue building loyalty in the midst of massive digital strategy turmoil.

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Why Portals Are Becoming Digital Experience Platforms, According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals

2025-05-29T21:13:48Z

In a digital era in which the ability to provide superior customer experiences has become a competitive differentiator, portals and the things they’re really good at--personalizing experiences, drawing information from many sources across an enterprise, integrating existing systems – have gained new relevance. Portal technology has emerged as an effective way for businesses to take advantage of new ways of doing business and capturing the often slippery attention of today’s digitally savvy, self-educating customers.

Last year, Liferay took our flagship portal technology and the best parts of our portfolio and introduced Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The move was both a response to changing market demands and opportunities in the new digital landscape as well as a much-needed step to move our identity closer to the reality of what the Liferay platform had become for today’s businesses. Liferay had not been “just a portal” for quite some time, but rather a platform for creating and managing differentiated user experiences across channels, devices and types of users (e.g., customers, partners, employees).

A few months later, the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals published with what seemed to be news of an official market phenomenon – portals were becoming digital experience platforms. The authors write: “The primary catalyst for change in the horizontal portal market is the response to digital business transformation: the evolution of traditional portal into the digital experience platform.” The report predicts that portals will be more comprehensive in what they’re able to do for businesses than in the past due to the demands of digital transformation, and this will lead to a growth rate increase in portal and digital engagement tech by about 5 percent over the next five years.

With these factors in play, the MQ evaluated and positioned 16 vendors, which included largely a mix of CMS- and portal-heritage companies. For the seventh year in a row, Liferay is positioned as a Leader in the report, which the analysts determine through measurements on our completeness of vision and ability to execute. Other Leaders include IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. Liferay has had a long history of inclusion in the MQ for Horizontal Portals, first entering in 2008 as a Visionary (bottom, right of the quadrant). Since then, we’ve been able to surpass all vendors over the years in achieving the highest and furthest position in the quadrant, except IBM.

The following table of the 16 vendors included in the Magic Quadrant by their software primary origins underscores the blurring in distinction between traditional software categories as vendors expand their products’ capabilities to answer the needs of digital business. Portals of today are no longer just a portal (an aggregator of personalized content, data and processes through a single point of access) and a CMS is no longer just a CMS. Liferay, for example, offers a platform that is flexible, based on modern architecture, serves the needs of business and IT, and supports continuous, omnichannel experiences across mobile, web and smart devices. This is all in the name of equipping digital businesses with a single platform to glue together digital experiences across the enterprise.

Portal Heritage	CMS Heritage	CRM Heritage	ERP Heritage
Backbase CXP	Adobe Experience Manager	Salesforce Community Cloud	SAP
Episerver	Drupal
IBM WebSphere	Hippo CMS
Jahia	Kentico
Liferay DXP	Sitecore
Microsoft SharePoint	Squiz
OpenText
Oracle WebCenter

As portals gain new importance in today’s digital environment, sometimes in the form of DXPs, digital technologies and changing customer expectations are leading to fresh applications of long-standing portal platform strengths. Liferay has excelled in tying together multiple systems, such as a CRM or ERP, through back-end integration, and for today’s digital businesses, this integration is crucial to connect systems and the people using them to share customer data and work as one connected business to serve customers. As a flexible, modern development platform, Liferay DXP prepares businesses to take quick advantage of new digital opportunities born everyday and emerging in the not too distant future. And the Liferay platform’s strength in building personalized sites for customer self service and onboarding is an opportunity for digital businesses to create a seamless customer experience from anonymous user (public websites) to registered customer (customer self-service portal, customer onboarding site) to lifelong fan.

As a longtime leader in portal technology, and now in applying that technology for the benefit of digital businesses, we recommend companies planning and undergoing digital transformation to take a serious look at including a modern, portal-based platform such as Liferay DXP in their technology stacks to tie together digital experiences across their enterprises.

Why Gartner Named Liferay a Leader in Digital Experience Platforms in 2018

Liferay has been named a Leader in the first ever Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms. Take an in-depth look at the top vendors and core capabilities of successful DXPs.

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Why Back-End Integration Should Be Every Marketer’s Goal

2025-05-29T21:12:39Z

The marketing strategies of companies across all types of industries are often focused on front-end priorities, such as implementing campaigns, shaping brand awareness through public relations, pushing demand generation, improving customer interactions with websites and more. However, today’s most successful front-end marketing campaigns pivot and improve based on back-end data management and large amounts of collected information that measure success.

The modern age of digital transformation is changing how marketers successfully generate and manage leads, with back-end integration being a key component of campaigns that fully embrace transformation.

What is back-end integration? It is the process in which the front end of marketing strategies is fully connected to the technological infrastructure that stores a company’s information used by marketing, such as customer data management technology, campaign performance analytics, and interdepartmental data transfer. This allows for a flow of information between both sides of marketing that helps to continually strengthen campaigns by honing in on what works and eliminating what does not. While it may seem like keeping these two entities connected to one another is a natural part of modern marketing, countless companies are affected by massive shortcomings in the ways front-end and back-end marketing are integrated.

It may be that shortages on time, resources, and awareness have led your company to not fully embrace integration through digital transformation, but those who are integrating front-end and back-end systems have seen its true potential in evolving their marketing strategies.

Also See:

Why 70% of Digital Transformations Fail

A disconnected technology stack is a common challenge for companies undergoing digital transformation. Download our e-book to find out more about how to overcome this hurdle as well as other common mistakes.

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The Marketing Benefits of Back-End Integration

So what does digital transformation mean for marketers? Successful back-end integration has numerous benefits, including:

1. Usable Data - Back-end integration means much more data on customer interactions to collect and analyze when determining the effectiveness of an online digital marketing strategy, as each front-end interaction will be tracked.

2. Seamless Improvements for Users - In connecting front-end user experiences with back-end data collection, marketers can create a seamless system of evaluating online client interactions and turning them into measurable analytics that help empower a company's workforce. The process involves in-depth analysis and a constant commitment to improvement, but front-end interactions will seem effortless and organic to customers.

3. Focused Marketing Improvements - By improving back-end processes, businesses can find key takeaways on how potential clients are interacting with marketing material. Marketing teams that solely focus on front-end marketing and design or rely on outdated methods of client data analysis can lead to static websites that gain little valuable data from visitors, no matter how many may come to the site. In doing so, refocusing marketing efforts can be like trying to hit a target blindfolded. As discussed by Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, connecting a marketing organization's front-end with back-end data, technology and processes is integral in driving predictable demand generation and strategic customer acquisition.

4. Greater Marketing ROI - Through the use of back-end integration, marketing departments can create detailed cause-and-effect data concerning their interactions with potential clients. In doing so, companies can decrease their cost per opportunity while also increasing lead-to-customer velocity, according to reports by Integrate. Combined, these two forms of digital transformation have a substantial total impact on return on investment (ROI), as well as on optimizing a marketing department’s usage of client data.

Equally Improving Front-End and Back-End Marketing

In today's world of fast-paced online marketing and the need to keep pace with competitors, some businesses may see marketing as a matter of front-end versus back-end when it comes to matters of where to invest both time and money. But prioritizing one over the other means that neither front-end nor back-end can truly function to their greatest degree possible, as these systems truly rely on one another in order to make the most of their functions.

It is crucial for teams to understand that while not every individual marketer needs to work in both front-end and back-end integration, these two sides must be highly interconnected, as discussed by SorryforMarketing.com. While having both a front-end and back-end team means that they can tackle different goals in the day to day, the use of integrated systems and a cohesive team view means both sides of marketing can adapt to changing trends and make better use of the data they receive through customer insight.

When evaluating how to better integrate your company’s marketing efforts, take the time to see where your shortcomings lie. Integration is only successful when your back-end systems are collecting accurate data and front-end strategies properly understand what that data means for their marketing efforts. A skilled back-end integration manager will help to balance these two sides and oversee proper and consistent integration that creates dynamic digital marketing strategies, which adapt to new client data for more effective campaigns.

The road from first interaction with a visitor online to closing a sale with a lead can be a long and winding one. If a marketing team is unable to see what that road actually involves, then all manner of incorrect assumptions can be made. Take the guesswork out of your digital marketing. Know your customer. Know your campaign. Embrace back-end integration and begin seeing the full picture of your company’s audience.

Learn more by reading “Why Your Marketing Technology Isn’t Impacting the Bottom Line.”

How Can Liferay Help You Integrate More Fully?

Find out how Liferay Digital Experience Platform creates personalized experiences to make the most out of back-end integration marketing efforts.

Learn About Digital Transformation

Liferay Demos IoT Integration at Road to Reinvention

2025-05-29T20:40:05Z

A few months ago, the Liferay team held a Hackday, where we gave a bunch of programmers access to voice technology (like the Amazon Echo Dot) and a license for Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), then left them alone for six hours to see what they could come up with. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an increasingly important part of the digital transformation conversation, and we were excited to see how teams were able to use Liferay DXP to solve different problems with the automation and voice technology we provided.

Fast-forward to March 23, where part of the Liferay team attended the Road to Reinvention Conference at University of California, Irvine, Paul Merage School of Business. This year’s session focused heavily on how companies can transform their business strategy and culture to enable more innovative approaches to technology. Presenters and attendees included digital strategists from some of the biggest brands moving forward in digital transformation, such as Target, Lyft and Experian.

Integrating Liferay DXP with Alexa

We thought this was the perfect opportunity to try out the work our programmers had done during Hackday. Our sales engineer quickly pulled together a demo that lets users use Liferay DXP through Alexa commands. He taught Alexa how to respond to five commands with real-time data (not pre-programmed responses):

Alexa, ask Liferay to give me a health check (and you get back system info about your Liferay instance).
Add a user.
Tell me how many users I have.
Add a page (we had a monitor with a live Liferay DXP site, so you could see the page being added in real-time).
Alexa, define “cool.” (Okay, so this one was a pre-programmed response. Due to a persistent inside joke at Liferay, Alexa responds to this command with, “‘Cool’ is a California technical term spelled k-e-w-l.”)

Now, at first glance, this seems like a limited use case. Is there really that much business value in adding a page to your website with the Echo Dot? But what made this demo so interesting was how quickly we were able to integrate Liferay DXP with this new(er) technology. One of the challenges with the IoT is how quickly different kinds of devices are being created, all by different manufacturers on different platforms, with their own standards and development processes. The fact that we were able to onboard the Echo Dot so quickly was really exciting, and we ended the day with ideas for other things customers would want to see integrated, such as a Fitbit.

New Ways to Spur Digital Transformation

Unsurprisingly, both the Road to Reinvention attendees and the speakers were eager to discuss the business impact of new technology, including use cases for the Internet of Things (IoT). The idea of IoT can be traced as far back as 1932, but it’s only in the past few years that we’ve actually begun to implement it successfully. We’re getting much better at making our wildest sci-fi dreams come true, and businesses today are making IoT a significant part of their digital strategies.

Overall, we found three key digital transformation takeaways for those who want to get started with IoT:

Don’t think big, think small. Technology is only as good as the problem it solves. Companies are much more likely to find a viable IoT use case by answering the question, “Why does this need to be connected?” This will likely lead them to narrow point solutions.
Focus on the data. IoT’s most important business benefit is the data it provides. By viewing connected devices as services, rather than products, companies can pull significant data concerning their users’ actions in order to measure and tailor the effectiveness of their services and marketing.
Look for adjacent uses. Through savvy partnerships, companies can find new business channels that increase the value of both services. For instance, smart cars can be designed to ping dealers when a repair is needed, and even automatically schedule an appointment for the driver.

The promise of the Internet of Things is about much more than the things themselves. Companies that use connected devices strategically stand to dramatically increase the intelligence of their organizations, fueling innovation and new business opportunities that didn’t use to be possible.

Embrace Digital Transformation with Digital Experience Platforms

Digital experience platforms such as Liferay DXP can help companies fully embrace digital transformation. Find out how through our whitepaper, Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation.

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Key Lessons from One Healthcare Company's Brand New Customer Experience

2025-05-29T20:36:27Z

Delighting Customers Starts With Knowing Them

The advice for creating better customer experience seems endless these days, but there’s one thing everyone agrees on:

If you really want to please your customers, you have to know them.

Surprisingly, 90% of businesses have no idea what their customers want, which can make CX strategy a little like throwing a dart in the dark. Exceptional experiences, both digital and offline, are rooted in a comprehensive understanding of customers. The businesses that are able to turn customer experience into a differentiator are the ones who take the time to learn about the people buying their products.

One of Liferay’s partners, Dunn Solutions, recently sent us an incredible example of how much you can do when you know the audience you’re selling your products to. It’s an anonymous healthcare case study from a diagnostic lab, but there are still plenty of lessons to be gleaned about how to tailor experiences for a specific audience.

Customer Experience Is About Keeping Promises

One way to think of quality customer experience is delivering on a promise you made to a customer. In other words, a customer is willing to give up time or money to a business that offers something they want, and then actually delivers it.

In the case of this anonymous diagnostic lab, the team decided that it wanted to make the testing process easier for its patients with chronic gastrointestinal (GI) issues. The lab team already knew that this particular group of patients had to go through multiple rounds of tests, requiring repeated trips to doctors’ offices over long periods of time. The promise they made was simple: they would create a new testing process that would be easier and more comfortable for patients.

As it turned out, implementing this promise took much more than one solution.

Customer Experience Doesn’t Stop at Product Design

The lab started by creating a new kind of GI Diagnostic Testing Kit. This allowed patients to take the test at home and mail in the results. In addition, it combined multiple tests into one, saving time and effort for patients.

Their goal was to make testing easier, so problem solved, right? Not exactly.

When the team at the lab started figuring out the details of distributing this product, they realized something. Even after patients received their kits, they would need more information. Where were they supposed to drop off the kits? How long would it be until they received their results? How could they be sure their tests weren’t mixed up with someone else’s or lost in the mail?

Their GI patients would need a portal that let them track their test results and gave them other important information, like drop-off locations. Doctors and lab technicians would also need to access the portal to input all of this information, as well as review the test results for their own use.

Instead of settling for a minimal customer portal, the lab team decided to launch a one-stop site that everyone could access. This meant that they had to research the needs of three separate user groups and design a solution that balanced them all.

The lab team got the project done by doing three key things differently, things that every business has heard before, but may need to look at in a new way.

#1: They Solved a Real Problem

When you start with something that people are struggling with, you have the opportunity to really make their lives better. The new product and site experience significantly improve patients' lives and health. By focusing on eliminating struggles, businesses can ensure they’re creating valuable, positive experiences.

In this case, the lab gained an advantage by narrowing its focus to patients who were going through GI diagnostic testing. This group of patients has a specific set of needs, such as avoiding travel, that might not resonate with other groups. That’s okay. This is the point of tailoring experiences — you get to create something unique for one kind of person, something they’ll never get from a more general service.

#2: They Looked Past the Purchase Point

The lab didn’t stop at creating a product, or even at creating a portal for patients. A crucial part of the experience was ensuring that test results could be tracked and released to patients as quickly as possible. This meant giving access to doctors and lab technicians, in a way that encouraged them to use it.

Instead of making doctors create a new login, for instance, the team allowed them to sign in with their National Provider Identification number. This eliminated a potential barrier (doctors forgetting their login information) to delivering on the customer promise of improving the testing process for patients.

#3: They Considered Every Angle

Since doctors and lab staff had to access the site anyway, the lab team also looked for ways the site could improve their workload. They added a feature that allows doctors to send the tests to their patients without filling out any paper forms, and they created a way to tag every test with patient data so that lab technicians didn’t need to worry about mixing up results (which often happened with the old system). Not only were processes made faster, they were now more accurate, leading to improved performance all around.

By easing the experience for everyone, the new portal boosts business agility, as well as creates loyalty from all users. This is crucial for the success of the project, because if doctors or lab staff refused to use the new site, the diagnostic lab would be unable to follow through on the promise it made to its customers.

Conclusion

We often hear the same advice repeated for improving customer experience, but sometimes you need to look at it in a new way. When viewed from the perspective of keeping a promise, businesses can step away from focusing on a product or site, and think about what needs to change throughout the entire organization. There’s no point in marketing your great new product if you can’t consistently back it up with solid performance. For this project, the lab was able to focus intently on one key type of customer and turn that into a true competitive advantage.

Building a New Kind of Patient Testing Experience

Learn more about how a diagnostic lab used the Liferay platform to improve patient health, while increasing business agility and reducing testing errors.

Read How Patients Benefited

Why Your Marketing Technology is Not Impacting the Bottom Line

2025-05-29T21:14:22Z

What’s the Number One Priority for Marketers Today?

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? The number one priority for marketers today is to lead the company in finding new revenue and business opportunities.

The majority of business leaders would say they agree, according to a recent survey of CMOs from the CMO Council and Deloitte. Nearly 70% of those surveyed stated that they expect marketing’s primary role to be driving growth. This means that, in addition to attracting new customers and managing the brand story, CMOs are now tasked with opening new markets and optimizing the customer experience in ways that directly help the bottom line.

Given the explosion of MarTech products over the past few years, it’s fair to say that most CMOs see these technology stacks as a key part of their new roles. If CMOs can identify the best technology for their context and use it to constantly optimize customer experiences, they can find opportunities to improve customer service, make marketing processes more efficient, glean new insight from analytics, and ultimately use all of this as a foundation for customer experience strategies that contribute to new business growth.

Most CMOs Aren’t Taking Full Advantage of Their MarTech Stack

Unfortunately, when it comes to executing this vision for marketing technology, many companies are left disappointed. Even with the implementation of new products, brands aren’t seeing the impact they expect from MarTech. Other research has shown, for example, that technology is only marginally improving marketing performance at most companies. Even more concerning, as of 2015, only 9% of marketers believe that they are fully utilizing their MarTech stacks.

The insight from the CMO Council’s report suggests that much of this disconnect is due to the CMO’s struggle to translate their new role as business drivers into their daily work. Here is how CMOs say they currently spend their time:

Reviewing and approving marketing plans, budgets and campaigns (45%)
Defining and shaping the brand (44%)
Executing campaigns to attract customers (42%)
Evolving the brand narrative (37%)

Based on this list, it seems like CMOs are still focused on being brand ambassadors and managing campaigns, rather than optimizing the customer experience.

Part of the reason could be the normal momentum of their roles. Traditionally, marketing has focused on the promises it makes to customers early on in the sales funnel. This is reflected in the technology investments most CMOs make, such as campaign tracking and reporting software. What they need instead is marketing technology that improves customer experience, produces revenue and optimizes business solutions.

CMOs Need to Start Using MarTech to Impact the Entire Customer Journey

It seems like MarTech has impressive ROI around areas that have traditionally been part of marketing’s role (such as CRO), but isn’t necessarily impacting the bottom line in new ways, like business leaders expect.

With 63% of marketers today using some kind of journey mapping, we know that most CMOs have a customer journey map already created. Connecting marketing technology to different points in the journey can help CMOs identify opportunities for improvement.

One great example of this comes from Deborah Wahl, the CMO at McDonald’s. She staffed her team with 200 tech specialists and used the digital insights they gathered to assess pain points in the customer journey specifically for millennials. They found that millennials disliked that the breakfast menu ended at 10:30am and advised switching to an all-day menu. After the change, 78% of millennials said they visited McDonald’s at least once a month, which is the highest percentage McDonald’s has seen from this group in three years. This is the kind of impact CMOs can have when they use technology to improve performance, especially at moments in the customer journey that have typically been outside of marketing’s scope.

This change in scope is the difference between customer experience optimization and campaign optimization. While campaign optimization focuses on individual marketing plans in order to bring in new customers, customer experience optimization tracks and evaluates the performance of every single customer interaction. Those who excel at the latter spend their time tracking the performance of each channel, measuring customer satisfaction at each touchpoint and pulling data from later purchase and post-purchase stages.

Customer experience optimization is what CMOs need to start using their MarTech stacks for, ideally with the help of a smart analytics team that understands how to uncover meaningful, actionable data. This will have a higher impact on the bottom line than campaigns, and it will uncover gaps in the customer journey that CMOs are in the best position to see.

CMOs Have More Influence Than Ever

In the CMO Council's report, 27% of respondents said that the CMO is the primary chief revenue driver, trumping the CEO at 22%. This means that CMOs now have opportunities to act as trusted members of executive management and influence the decisions that make or break customer experience, provided they find ways to step out of the comfort zone of business-as-usual.

It's time for CMOs to shift focus away from pre-sale and discovery interactions, where marketing has been traditionally focused. If CMOs want to impact growth and revenue, they need to look at the full customer lifecycle and become experts at using technology to achieve their business goals.

Digital Experience Platforms: Designed for Digital Transformation

With the increasing number of systems that businesses have to manage today, having the right technology foundation is crucial to keeping digital initiatives profitable. Digital Experience Platforms are designed to meet the needs of digital transformation, uniting marketing products and bridging data silos for a comprehensive view of your business.

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Jumpstart Your Omnichannel Experience by Asking These Four Questions

2025-05-29T20:36:09Z

In the first part of this series, we discussed the importance of uniting the customer experience across touchpoints and building a cross-functional team to manage it. In part two of the series, we reviewed how financial institutions can learn valuable digital transformation lessons from others’ examples.

In this third and final part of the series, we will take a look at how in today’s digital environment, customer experience is a key differentiator, and the ways in which people have high expectations for how they will interact with businesses.

A key part of meeting these expectations is creating an omnichannel strategy for your customer experience.

Omnichannel customer experience is generally defined as offering consistent brand experiences across every channel, including both digital and physical. An exceptional omnichannel experience should have the following qualities:

Consistent branding/look and feel across every touchpoint
Unified customer data on the backend
Customer-centric products and services
Digital and physical touchpoints that work together
Personalization according to customer context, such as device, location and purchase history

When asked what the greatest barrier to achieving an omnichannel customer experience is, financial service leaders called out four key areas: Lack of back-end integration across systems; unclear or competing ownership of customer experience; too many channels and customer journeys to coordinate; and difficulty creating a single customer view across channels.

To break through these barriers, try asking the following questions about banking omnichannel experience within your customer experience team.

Barrier #1: Lack of Back-End Integration Across Systems

Which systems hold our most important customer data? It’s easy to say, “Integrate your systems on the backend,” but it takes more time, effort and investment than those outside of the process may realize. One way to prioritize is to focus on integrating the systems that hold the most important customer data, in order to create a more complete view of how customers interact with your company. This will contribute to a better omnichannel experience by giving you accurate information to base CX decisions on, as well as a starting point for the time-consuming task of integrating systems.

Barrier #2: Unclear or Competing Ownership of Customer Experience with Conflicting Goals for the Customer

How does our customer measure a good experience? The problem with different business units competing for ownership of the customer experience is that they are still thinking about CX from their viewpoint, not the customer's. Try asking one of those customers who in your company owns them; they're probably going to say they aren't "owned" by anyone. Instead, have your team discuss what would make your customer's experience better, then identify the department that is most capable of delivering that part of the journey. These are the kinds of questions well-suited to a cross-functional digital team. Everyone needs to be asking customer experience questions together, but once actionable steps are identified, team members need to trust each other to accomplish their part of the work.

Barrier #3: Too Many Channels and Customer Journeys to Coordinate

Where can processes be automated? An article on Harvard Business Review identified automation as one of four key capabilities companies need to manage customer journeys. If your organization feels overwhelmed by the amount of channels and journeys you're managing, automating back-end processes can ease the burden without sacrificing the quality of customer experience. This also ensures consistency across channels, as long as you coordinate your automation to align with your omnichannel strategy.

Barrier #4: Difficulty Creating a Single Customer View Across Channels

What information do your employees need? This barrier is closely related to the first, and integrating back-end systems is a good step toward developing a single view of the customer across channels. However, the purpose of this single view is to give your company actionable insights into where your customers are in their journey and what they need or expect next. To help with this challenge, companies can focus on what information will be most helpful to employees and prioritize pulling that into a common dashboard, hopefully supported by live data. This should help identify where gaps exist between channels and ease the transitions between them.

Final Takeaway

These are just starting points concerning how to create an omnichannel experience. Digital transformation is extensive and organizational culture change requires experimentation before companies can figure out what solutions are best suited to their unique situations. A final piece of advice may help stitch it all together: Manage customer journeys as you would any other product. Regardless of channel, customers judge their experiences based on what they get, versus what they were expecting to get from each interaction. Given this, companies should stay focused on the journey as a product, and view omnichannel experience as one of the essential components that keeps that product together and working the way it should.

Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions: How to Lead the Charge With People and Technology

This is the final post of our three-part series, based on insights found in the benchmark report Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions: How to Lead the Charge With People and Technology. It’s an exciting time for leaders in digital strategy at financial institutions to drive real change in enacting deeper, more personal customer experiences. Our findings revealed new insights on the current state of digital transformation and the role of technology in the process for financial institutions today.

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Read the 2016 Magic Quadrant report to learn how to quickly build exceptional omnichannel experiences that set your brand apart in today's age of digital business.

Three Digital Transformation Lessons Financial Services Can Learn From Other Industries

2025-05-29T21:02:54Z

This is part two of a three-part series, based on insights found in the benchmark report Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions: How to Lead the Charge With People and Technology.

Read Part One - Want Better Customer Experience? Create a Cross-Function Team - and Part Three - Jumpstart Your Omnichannel Experience by Asking These Four Questions - to learn more today.

It’s no secret that digital transformation is a necessity for long-term, traditional players in business, if they want to stay relevant to consumers. In a recent study of financial service leaders, 49% of respondents stated they were roughly halfway through digital transformation, and an additional 37% were in early stages. The fact that so many leaders are making inroads in digital innovation is a good sign for financial services. It means that they’re paying attention and preparing for any coming disruption.

However, being “roughly halfway” through digital transformation means that FSI still has a long way to go. The numbers around customer experience improvement efforts hint at some of the remaining obstacles in transformation. Of those surveyed, 55% are currently working on coordinating their customer experience across channels, and 36% are gearing up to begin this work.

This means that, except for a few leaders and laggards, financial services are in the middle of redesigning their customer experience or about to start. In order to sustain this great momentum and not get stuck, FSI should look to examples from other industries that are farther along in the digital transformation process.

Here are three lessons from the retail and food industries to help financial services carry digital innovation into customer experience.

Lesson One: Pay Attention to Micro-Moments

Google has identified different kinds of micro-moments, which it defines as “moments that decisions are made and preferences are shaped.” One fun example of this from the food industry is Taco Bell’s TacoBot. It integrates with Slack so that you can order food through an instant message. Since Slack is primarily used as a work tool, this is an innovative way to capture the moments when hunger is setting in during the work day.

Or take, for example, what Google calls I-want-to-know and I-want-to-go moments. Consumers are searching for information on their mobile phones the moment a question occurs to them, and searches that include “near me” have doubled in the past year. Banks could take advantage of this through mobile apps that use geo-location to let customers know that they are nearby and available to help with any financial questions they have.

Lesson Two: Find Technology That Makes Brick and Mortar Stand Out

With the rapid rise of IoT gadgets and VR technology, retail companies have to be brutal about which digital trends are worth pursuing and which will fade away. The point of coordinating customer experience across digital and physical environments is to “help the physical, brick and mortar, three-dimensional retail environment distinguish itself from an online experience,” according to a recent article on Forbes. Currently, consumers still depend on in-person interactions for many of their finance needs. Financial services companies need to establish processes for evaluating technology that enable them to both boost their digital channels, as well as redesign their physical locations so that all touchpoints are seamless, easy to use and valuable for their customers.

Lesson Three: Culture is Hard to Change

People don’t like it when things change. In 2011, JCPenney launched a digital initiative that failed spectacularly, leading some to conclude that its digital strategy was flawed. But when you look at the department store today, they’ve implemented many of the digital initiatives that were attempted five years ago. This suggests that the obstacles they faced were about people and culture, not technology or strategy. See this recent interview with Lance Thornswood, the Senior Director of JCPenney’s omnichannel digital platform. He states that, even when initiatives were successful, trying to create a new work culture “pushed people so outside their comfort zones that the natural tendency was to snap back to the old ways.” He goes on to say that seeking consensus within the company leads to risk-aversion and stops innovation in its tracks. Instead, executives should empower their employees to pursue new ideas that they really believe in. This creates a more optimistic culture that doesn’t condition employees to say “no” to risk. Financial service leaders need to be aware of the resistance to change within their own companies and find ways to guide their employees through the transition.

Final Takeaway

There’s one more thing that financial service leaders can take from the final JCPenney example: it’s not too late to change. Even if your company is stalled on digital transformation and customer experience improvement, it might not be too late to recover. It will take time and coordination across your organization, but hopefully, these lessons from those who’ve been there will inspire you to keep pressing forward.

Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions: How to Lead the Charge With People and Technology

It’s an exciting time for leaders in digital strategy at financial institutions to drive real change in enacting deeper, more personal customer experiences. Our findings revealed new insights on the current state of digital transformation and the role of technology in the process for financial institutions today.

Download the Full Report

See why Liferay is named a leader for the 7th consecutive year in Gartner's Magic Quadrant.

Want Better Customer Experience? Create a Cross-Functional Team

2025-05-29T21:08:41Z

In a recent study, 46% of financial institution executives stated that the number one obstacle to addressing the full customer lifecycle is allowing different business units to own different parts of the lifecycle.

That’s almost half of financial institutions surveyed. The next answer – lacking digital capabilities – was only chosen by 17% of participants. As digital transformation strategies continue to motivate financial services to deliver exceptional customer experiences, it will be increasingly important to ensure that those experiences are consistent across the full customer lifecycle. Rather than dividing ownership, financial institutions need to create and empower cross-functional digital teams to address a holistic customer lifecycle, from prospect to buyer to advocate.

Understanding the Customer Lifecycle Problem With Multiple Owners

You may look at the silos in customer lifecycle ownership and think, so what? Each department has its own specialized information and experience on how to help customers at different points in their journey. As long as the handoff to each department is smooth, what’s the problem?

When these departmental divides remain, it becomes easy to create data silos that negatively impact your digital customer experience. For example, a customer service rep may learn from a client that she hasn’t been able to use the mobile banking app to apply for the credit card she needs. If the customer service rep doesn’t share that information with the developers in charge of the mobile app, that part of the customer experience continues to fall short. It doesn’t matter how fantastic a job the customer service rep is doing if customers are leaving due to a bad experience on their smartphone. Likewise, the development team may not have access to this feedback if the customer service reps are the only ones receiving it. Financial institutions are better served by sharing information among departments and allowing a cross-functional team to lead the digital strategy.

What is a Cross-Functional Team?

A cross-functional digital team is one that brings together representatives from different departments, such as IT, marketing, product development and sales. When working on a strategy to improve financial institution customer experience across the entire lifecycle, having input from each department allows you to understand gaps, as well as understand how changing one part of the experience affects the rest of the business.

Unfortunately, cross-functional teams are difficult to manage because they bring together people who aren’t used to working with one another. An article on Harvard Business Review showed that 75% of cross-functional teams are dysfunctional, failing on at least three out of five of the following criteria: Staying on budget, staying on schedule, adhering to specifications, meeting digital customer expectations and maintaining alignment with company goals.

Despite the challenges, 41% of financial leaders believe that cross-functional digital teams should own the customer lifecycle. In addition to having specific knowledge, members of a cross-functional team are able to lead the charge within their departments, ensuring buy-in across the organization.

5 Strategies for Working Together as a Cross-Functional Team

Consider the following five strategies for your financial institution’s cross-functional team when planning how you may improve your digital customer experience. In doing so, you can make measurable and beneficial advancements in customer lifecycle improvement that work in tandem with one another across your company’s departmental silos.

Set objectives and scope. Each team member will have different priorities that will eventually conflict. By agreeing on goals and objectives for the team early on, you begin with an understanding of how each department’s priorities align with the team’s overall priorities.
Develop a process for collaboration. Identify specifically how the team will collaborate in order to set clear expectations from the beginning. Who contributes what? What does effective team communication look like? What does success look like?
Be prepared for different personalities. It’s something of a cliche, but different business units tend to attract different personality types. By spending time understanding the work styles in the room, teams can create norms, such as how little notice is acceptable before calling a meeting, how much communication between meetings to expect, whether team members can take part by phone, etc.
Give it time. It is normal to go through an adjustment process before the team begins to perform well. Spend some time learning about the different stages of team forming and discuss as a group.
Start small. McKinsey recommends starting with a small team that understands brand and business goal to design the initial strategy, then scaling with more technology folks as you progress. This is useful if you need time to conduct research on the current status of your customer experience.

Final Takeaway

Financial institution executives agree that cross-functional teams need to own the customer lifecycle if companies are to become digitally mature. Creating a seamless customer experience requires a unified view of the customer, one that takes into account their interactions at every part of the lifecycle. It’s difficult work, but ultimately worth the competitive advantages it creates.

Learn more about improving customer experience in Part 2: Three Digital Transformation Lessons Financial Services Can Learn From Other Industries and Part 3: Jumpstart Your Omnichannel Experience by Asking These Four Questions.

Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions: How to Lead the Charge With People and Technology

This is part one of a three-part series, based on insights found in the benchmark report Assessing the Digital Landscape for Financial Institutions: How to Lead the Charge With People and Technology. It’s an exciting time for leaders in digital strategy at financial institutions to drive real change in enacting deeper, more personal customer experiences. Our findings revealed new insights on the current state of digital transformation and the role of technology in the process for financial institutions today.

Download the Full Report

Why I Have No Idea if Other Coffee Shops are Good

2025-05-29T21:13:17Z

And Other Benefits of Excellent Customer Experience

I must admit, I'm a Starbucks loyalist.

The reason is that on top of having flavors that tickle my palette, I know that I’ll be treated with superb service—and that if anything goes wrong, it will be handled as if I were a premium customer.

I could get the cheapest drink on the menu and occupy space at the store for a few hours, but that doesn't change the way they serve me. I'm served based on my value rather than my worth.

As a result, whenever I'm thinking about where I should go to work or meet up with a friend, Starbucks is always first on my list.

When a customer is based on his or her worth, bigger clients will receive better service while smaller clients will be captive to the strict law of “policy.” However, this is shortsighted thinking. Customers should be regarded for their greater value rather than their worth because you never know where they will end up in the future.

Just think about this: if their small-scale, short-term customer experience with your company was positive, what might happen when those individuals move on to a bigger project or position? The same small-bit players can become your greatest promoters within their circles—without even the need to market to them.

3 Steps to Providing Great Customer Experiences

So, how do you deliver true value to your customers who are worth more than their worth? Here are three quick tips to deliver a stellar customer experience:

1. Anticipate their needs - If you can clearly define the customer journey from start to finish, you'll be a step ahead of the game. The idea is to sit down with key players within the organization and figure out the customer experience leading up to and after a purchase, common pain points, and other vital interactions with your brand. (A journey map is very helpful in this context.)

Where could your customers potentially experience the biggest roadblocks with your product or service? Where are the key opportunities or moments to delight them? This sort of thoughtful planning and open dialogue with your team will help you determine what's really essential, and what's really not.

2. Set the proper expectations - Your customers should be fully aware of what they should expect from you on a regular basis. If there are no clear boundaries defined, then this could be a cause for undue disappointment or unrealistic demands.

In as much as you value your customers and desire to give them everything they need for success, there's only so much you're capable of doing. Know your limits. You need to know how far you're able to go for customers, so that you can tell them early on what you will be able to do for them.

Customers that understand what to expect from you during a dire situation will be able to plan accordingly.

3. Respond quickly, no matter what - Time is considered the highest value to many people, and, often, time spent waiting on the phone or in long lines or on company feedback can lead to moments of frustration.

If customers are filing tickets or voicing complaints, are they simply sitting by the wayside? Or is your company actively trying to manage those concerns? Empower your team to engage with customers and listen to them, even if answers aren't always immediately available.

Having the ability to act quickly will not only prevent tension, but also create fans that will root for and become loyal to you. And once you have fans, you basically have walking advertisements.

Putting Customer Experience Principles into Practice

Certainly, it's not enough to just know about these principles; you also need to apply them in the real world. To illustrate this more clearly, here's a practical example.

Let's say you work at a software company. First, in the process of anticipating their needs, you might determine that your customers often run into issues with patch downloads and upgrades. The solution could be building a customer portal that provides an array of helpful information, resources or preferences. You can offer official documentation on clustering, upgrades, and other common issues that your customers might come across.

Perhaps users can also gain access to extra information that will help them set up their environment. It can become a one-stop shop that provides all necessary support content for any of your customers. By setting up a convenient way for them to receive the help they need, it would allow for better interactions with your company.

But what if your customers don't have support accounts? Your support engineers or customer experience managers should direct those customers to other available resources in the public. Here, most of them will be able to find their answers or ask the experts in your community.

By doing this, you would be setting the proper expectations and defining the scope of what non-paying (vs. paying) customers should expect in terms of service, yet still helping to meet and serve their needs.

And through it all, your team is responding in a timely and appropriate fashion. Your PR staff is driving the conversation with customers, letting them know about upcoming release dates and features. And when expected target dates aren't being met, they'll be the first to let customers know and help to realign proper expectations. So even when problems arise—and inevitably, they will—you're turning possible obstacles into opportunities for building friendships.

It is this sort of "extra-mile" attitude that can take organizations to the next level. You should be passionate about adding value to your customers by offering both relevant customer experiences and fantastic service. The efforts will go a long way in turning mere customers into loyalists.

Three Key Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences

Would you like to learn more about how to deliver a great customer experience? Our whitepaper talks about the shift towards omnichannel interactions and offers three strategies to successfully engaging your customers.

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Three Key Benefits of Digital Experience Platforms

2025-05-29T21:02:59Z

Business processes driven by customer needs are more than a popular trend; they are the driving factor behind successful digital transformation and company culture shifts.

Digital experience platforms are designed for companies that understand the importance of breaking down silos and bringing together data and channels in a way that can be shared among business units. Common features include analytics, customer context views, personalization and multichannel support.

Their goal is to enable companies to manage the elements of exceptional experiences with a clear view of business analytics, integration, comprehensive customer data and cost-effective implementation. Further benefits of digital experience platforms to digital businesses include the following:

1. Identify immediate needs in digital customer experience

As digital business becomes more personalized and unified across devices, it becomes increasingly important to interact with people at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Sophisticated data management streamlines the process of identifying customer pain points or gaps in communication, which can then be leveraged to improve digital experiences through digital transformation. This prioritizes what customers want without locking companies down to any specific technology or type of interaction.

Once companies identify immediate needs in digital customer experience, they can act on them from a place of knowledge, rather than trying to build digital transformation strategies off of incomplete data. A digital experience platform will then be able to provide tools or integrate with the correct external products to address these needs.

2. Improve the accuracy of your marketing and customer engagement through holistic customer data and information

The first step to improving experiences is to offer omnichannel interaction, and the second step is to constantly track, measure and analyze so that customer engagement can grow and evolve.

Digital experience platforms allow companies to track customer behavior at each digital touchpoint. As the Internet of Things (IoT) grows, companies will have access to more channels of customer data, enabling them to draw new insights. The goal is to discover patterns in customer behavior and constantly improve customers’ experiences, even before they ask for it.

Customer data can include basic contact information, demographic snapshots, psychographic data points such as details about personalities or lifestyles, transactional data, communications history with the brand, account preferences, responses to marketing campaigns, and site engagement tracked through clicks, browsing time and social media shares.

A digital experience platform will pull this data into one place that each department can access as needed through customized views. This ensures that the entire company is working with consistent, updated information and basing digital transformation decisions on accurate, holistic insights.

3. Use integration and flexible architecture to stay on the cutting-edge of digital trends

A common burden of technology upgrades is the unforeseen costs when development takes longer or is more complex than planned. If a digital experience platform achieves an effective level of integration and flexibility, then it will be cost-effective over time.

Veterans of digital transformation know that a technology upgrade can take months or even years. Sometimes, by the time you get the technology and strategy right, the trend is in its last days and the industry leaders are already gearing up for the next change. This makes it risky to pursue any new digital trend, because it may have evaporated by the time your company finally gets the fancy new software configured for your needs.

In today’s quickly changing digital environment, vendor lock-in is a handicap, and any digital experience platform should also make it easy to integrate with outside products, not just the vendor’s own offerings.

Because a digital experience platform starts with the core components in one place and product, it would be a cost-effective, long-term investment that mitigates the risk in acting on a digital trend. This could potentially level the playing field for companies that don’t have the largest budget, provided they have the foresight and agility to respond to the shifting sands of the market.

Final Thoughts

A digital experience platform provides the capabilities that you need to produce a variety of user-facing experiences. The exact tools offered will differ by vendor, and it is up to companies to assess their goals and determine which components are required for their strategy. However, the unifying principle for digital experience platforms will remain the same: architecture that integrates core business tools and provides a foundation for future digital innovation.

DXP: Designed for Digital Transformation

Read more about the digital transformation and how you can create customer-first digital experiences. Download our Digital Experience Platform whitepaper below.

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How Open Data is Changing the Government

2025-05-29T20:31:44Z

The move toward a stronger, more transparent government might be happening sooner than you think. In March of 2016, President Barack Obama announced the launch of "The Opportunity Project," a new initiative which seeks to improve economic mobility for all citizens with the use of digital tools and data sets.

This project aims to capitalize on the trend of open data and making public information available to the public. Its goal is to leverage the latest technology and trends to provide data points across various fields of study such as employment, housing, schools and transportation.

Why Does Open Data Matter?

The key to any change first begins with observation. The data we collect allows us to analyze complex human patterns and behavior. Without data, there’s nothing to be observed.

For some time, the government has been gathering large amounts of data. But now, they’re officially making that data accessible to the citizen. In a real sense, the citizen is enabled to participate in policymaking and effect the changes they want to see within the civic structure. In a symbolic sense, it is a tacit acknowledgment of the public's vital role in shaping our nation and spreads a sense of empowerment and privilege to the masses.

Moreover, open data is crucial because it’s a step toward transparency within our local and federal institutions that has traditionally been lacking. The administration vowed to publish information in a manner that the public can easily find and use, which also translates into greater accountability from the public.

Benefits of Open Data

According to Govtech, the benefits of government open data include “improved measurement of policies, better government efficiency, deeper analytical insights, greater citizen participation, and a boost to local companies by way of products and services that use government data.” In terms of numbers, there's a report of the UK public sector data being valued at £6.8 billion, with McKinsey predicting an open-data centric global market to drive anywhere from $3 to $5 trillion annually.

In principle, open data should enable both the citizen and government to more easily collaborate. It allows citizens to play a more active role in getting involved and making changes. (Of course, this presumes a certain level of willingness and commitment from the citizen.) With data readily available, citizens are better equipped to identify issues and tackle them without solely relying on government authority.

For developers, armed with a combination of open data and proper digital tools, they’re enabled to build apps that can address inefficiencies and improve the community. Already, we're seeing a torrent of apps and projects being developed in both public and private sectors.

Successful Open Data Examples & Projects

Thanks to open data, many ideas once considered inconvenient or improbable have turned into reality. The following are some highly successful projects centered around open data, spanning all types and industries.

Citymapper - A popular real-time public transport app that helps you navigate a city. It includes features like A to B trip planning with ETA, real-time departures, bike routing, transit maps, line status and real-time disruption alerts, and even Uber integration. Citymapper uses data from Apple, Cyclestreets, Google, OpenStreetMaps and other sources, and it works on iOS, Android and the web.
Dataverse Project - Developed at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS), Dataverse Project aims to share, explore and analyze research data. As quoted on their site: "It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others' work."
Liveplasma - With this interactive search engine, you can listen to music see a web-like visualization of similar music/artists and how the artists are related. It streams content from YouTube into the data visualizations.
Provenance - An online platform based in England that allows users to trace the origins and history of a product, including where the item was manufactured and who manufactured it. Their mission is to encourage corporations and brands to be more transparent about their practices.

These are a few examples of open data's extensive reach and its potential impact far beyond just the government sector. This not only results in incremental improvements to civic infrastructures, but will provide a boon to the economy with increased jobs and reduction in wasteful spending.

Final Thoughts

Though open data is a great step, it's not the ultimate solution to public or government inefficiencies. The power to solve problems begins with people. This policy by the administration will equip those who are under-resourced, but if people aren't willing to participate, the data won't be useful. Hopefully, citizens will see this as a "call to arms" to engage our systems and make change for a better world.

Resources for Understanding Open Data

Here’s a list of resources that should be helpful for anyone exploring the world of open data. These links offer several references, from definitions and explanations to advice and best practices:

Code for America - A national non-profit that organizes people who build technology to connect on projects that promote "healthy, safe, and prosperous" communities.
Data Coalition - A lobbying group working with legislators to advocate for data publication of government information.
Open Definition - This site offers many examples of open licenses for reference and use.
Open Data Institute - Find helpful definitions, tools, tips and classes on data use.
Sunlight Foundation - Another national non-profit that uses various tools to enable transparency in government and politics. Their work spans the local, state, federal and international levels.

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How Micro-Engagements Will Forever Change Customer Experience

2025-05-29T20:31:41Z

In my last post, I introduced the idea of customer experience micro-engagements—targeted, highly personalized interactions—and how persona-driven strategies would soon evolve to those that reflect person-based actions, as users continue to demand the information most relevant to their own needs.

To recap, I had recently signed up for United’s frequent flyer Status Match program and was surprised at the seeming lack of effort to engage me—which indicated a surprising lack of awareness. The three-month period that followed enrollment would've been the ideal time to deliver a targeted message and capitalize on a significant opportunity to win my business, yet there was nothing perceptively different from my everyday travel. That post ended with a promise to offer some thoughts about what United Airlines could have done differently for me, using this more personalized approach.

So, I’m back with some suggestions on how an airline could improve customer experience through personalized micro-engagements.

What if …

They sent an email before my first flight with travel and traffic information from my house to the airport. I probably have an idea about this, but saying “we want to do everything we can to make your travel go smoothly”—and doing something to prove it—helps me believe they mean it. (Bonus: A pre-filled Uber link, with a $10 discount.)

The flight attendants knew my name and welcomed me to flying on United. (Bonus: Offering a complimentary beverage or snack selection on my first flight under the match.)

The loyalty experience was gamified with an online dashboard tallying up points for my different activities/milestones, promoting a program completion "You Did It!" reward. (Bonus: In-game bonuses like a Starbucks coffee voucher for flying before 6am.)

Encourage my feedback and ask questions by providing at least one channel, ideally a phone number with a live operator, dedicated to fielding my concerns and helping me navigate the new landscape. (Bonus: Earning 500 miles by filling out a post-call survey.)

An easy to understand, side-by-side comparison of the points and benefits I accrued last year on American versus what they would have been on United. (Bonus: Identifying ways to maximize my earnings on United.)

Granted, these hypotheticals might seem ambitious. But keep in mind, this is The Age of the Customer. It only took one company (Zappos) to change how an entire industry feels about free return shipping.

Disney's MagicBand

If you want to see an existing comprehensive customer journey built on personalized micro-engagements, check out what Disney World is doing with their MagicBand. Disney’s MagicBand is a wristband any guest can use to customize and streamline their Disney World experience. From the most basic functions (e.g., walletless purchasing, keyless hotel entry) to the most complex (e.g., managing VIP access to preselected rides, unlocking personalized surprises such as speaking pictures), it all happens via a playful, colorful wristband. In this way, the park attendees’ entire journey is interwoven with specific micro-engagements that could allow Disney to offer a personalized experience for each of its 52,000 daily visitors. It’s even more incredible when you consider how many different systems need to interact in order to make this work.

There's no doubt that realizing this kind of goal anytime soon, if ever, is a daunting proposition. But that's not to say we shouldn’t start—and as always, start small. Find meaningful opportunities to deliver customer experiences that stand out on an individual level. Is every email addressed personally? Do serious issues automatically trigger a phone call to follow-up? Is there a viable avenue to solicit individual feedback from your audience?

Even if those goals seem daunting, think of Baskin-Robbins and their Birthday Club. As a child, I’d eagerly await my card from Baskin-Robbins every March, as they would celebrate my birthday with a coupon for a free scoop of ice cream. More than simply free ice cream, the whole experience felt personal. It isn't complex, and it's been working for over 40 years.

Where are you seeing signs of personalized engagements? What are some of the challenges you face, and what are some solutions you’re working on? I hope these ideas resonate with you, and I’d love to hear your comments. Thanks for reading!

Three Key Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences

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How Financial Technology is Impacting Emerging Markets

2025-05-29T20:31:07Z

For many of us, the advent of mobile technology has profoundly changed our lives. It has rewired the way we socialize, shop, and do business. But in other parts of the world, especially in emerging markets, people are just starting to feel the ripple effects.

Sub-Saharan Africa is a prime example of this major shift. As projected by GSMA Intelligence, there will be 525 million smartphone users by 2020, up from 72 million in 2013. Data activity is also expected to grow by 20 times during that span. The substantial adoption in mobile platform technology will result in higher employment opportunities and domestic revenues for several countries.

Certainly, much of this movement is bred out of necessity. If you’re in Africa, with a dearth of actual banks across the continent, you’ll need to gain access by other means. Mobile appears to be the best way to connect with people who are remote and don’t have access to a physical location.

Mobile Banking in the Developing World

Where location and convenience were once major limiting factors, users in Africa can now receive services at the touch of a device. "There are no ATMs and branches, and the cost to put in that kind of infrastructure is quite challenging,” says John Owens, senior policy advisor at Alliance for Financial Inclusion. “Mobile gets around that. Electronic money is an important channel and opportunity for basic transfers and payments.

The good news is that customers in these territories are willing and open to adopting new technology and innovation. Already, there is news in Uganda that Barclays is partnering with the UN to distribute salary payments through mobile. In Kenya, there is the case study of M-Pesa, a mobile micro-financing service that opened 7 million new accounts in less than a year. It is perhaps the greatest success story of financial services in the developing world.

Meanwhile, in places like Brazil, the mobile market is large and still growing—at an annual rate of about 22% every year. More than a third of all mobile users in Latin America and the Caribbean reside in Brazil. According to the most recent MEF Global Consumer Survey, the number of Brazilians making any kind of purchase with a mobile phone jumped from 49% in 2013 to 61% in 2014. This was the highest growth recorded among all the countries in the survey.

Even with the saturation of mobile users, the number of mobile transactions remains relatively low. That will soon change. Already there are reports of several initiatives between Brazilian mobile networks and financial institutions to target segments of the population without bank accounts. Further research indicates that more than half of smartphone owners in Brazil regularly access their bank accounts from their devices.

This points to great potential for financial service providers to capture a big segment of the emerging markets. As smartphone users increase around the world, web banking services will be more crucial and needed than ever. Financial institutions will have to empower the customer through innovative online services and self-service capabilities. They will need to implement a mobile financial services strategy that can meet immediate customer needs while providing flexibility for a long-term digital experience.

Delivering an Omnichannel Experience

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What is Personalized Marketing?

2025-05-29T21:12:05Z

Personalization is and has always been effective. Dale Carnegie once said, "a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language." In a sense, he was making a case for adding a personal touch to our products and services. Personalization works because on some base human level, everyone looks for that personal attention.

Thanks to technology, personalization is more accessible than ever before. Now, any organization can implement personalization from digital printing to variable data and direct mailers. There's the ability to produce thousands of mailers addressed to unique individuals with their first names on each one of them. That type of experience is available on the web at any digital touchpoint, which means organizations have the ability to provide unique customer experiences that weren't previously possible.

What is Personalized Marketing?

To apply a specific analogy, personalized marketing is like a shopping experience at Nordstrom. When a shopper is looking for a specific pair of shoes, she's usually approached by a sales rep who will try to assist her in getting the exact pair. She can talk with the rep, tell him what she prefers in terms of style and color and have a real interaction. Information is exchanged in the context of getting to know someone, and both parties would benefit: the shopper receives a product she wants while Nordstrom wins new business.

In the same manner, personalized marketing is the ability to create content that specifically caters to each individual consumer. It involves an understanding of who your audience is, having captured certain pieces of information about them and leveraging that data to provide each visitor a unique user experience. Oftentimes, web personalization will necessitate using automation and integrated channels to help with the process.

What Does Web Personalization Promise?

The appeal of personalized marketing is three-fold:

Increase conversions - Websites that employ web personalization tend to see a bump in conversions (whether that's a basic form submission or an actual closed deal/purchase). Higher conversion rates are often tied to the fact that offers take into consideration factors such as age, gender, job role and buyer stage.
Lift sales figures - Companies that excel in personalized marketing tend to spend less time focusing on the quantity of leads, and more time on targeting the right leads at the right times. This invariably leads to an increase in sales.
Keep more customers (retention) - Arguably as important as winning new customers and conversions, personalized marketing allows brands to keep their current customers happy and loyal. Devoting attention to a customer's preferences builds up familiarity and comfort, which in turn translates into customer satisfaction.

The State of Personalized Online Marketing

Even though many companies acknowledge the necessity of personalized marketing, not many of them are pulling it off successfully. Seventy-seven percent of marketers believe that real-time personalization is crucial to their success, but only 29% of marketers are actually delivering dynamic content on their websites.

There seems to be a gap between what they're doing and what they want to be doing. “It is quite clear that personalization is seen as mission critical to the success of online business, but too many organizations have yet to implement a well thought-out and tested approach,” said Linus Gregoriadis, Research Director at Econsultancy.

There are various reasons for this disparity. One major reason is the roadblocks encountered when it comes to adopting new technology. According to a report by Monetate, almost half of all companies surveyed report IT roadblocks and legacy technology as major barriers to web personalization. Moreover, many organizations lack the proper resources to run tests and leverage data into personalized customer experiences. While many departments are making a push for advanced marketing, there is clear indication that some companies (in particular, big enterprises) would rather settle than shift their entire marketing strategy.

A Web Personalization Maturity Model

When it comes to creating content for customers, every company deals with web personalization to a varying degree. Some companies might have advanced orchestration in place, while most tend to be implementing certain rules-based methods. In short, there are generally five types of personalized marketing:

One-to-All: Campaigns are static with no personalization. The content is created on a broad level and pushed out to everyone uniformly. There is no segmentation or optimization.
One-to-Many: Rules-based campaigns in which rules are developed and then applied to personalization. Mostly batch campaigns with various levels of A/B testing. Rules determine the next interaction.
One-to-Some: Models are developed for how to think about segments and audience, then used to personalize content to users. Some channels are starting to integrate personalized messaging.
One-to-Few: Multiple channels are integrated and moving toward a single view of customer. There is some level of continuity between online and offline messaging. Interactive marketing elements go hand-in-hand with automated segmentation.
One-to-One: No longer based on just models, but technology like machine learning and algorithms to make precise personalization. Communications are specifically defined by interest, interactions and auto-decisions which are delivered at the right time.

For most companies, the hardest challenge tends to be migrating from one-to-some to one-to-few. This involves moving from single offers and campaign flows to technical solutions that can handle true interactive marketing. It also means having to ensure alignment across the entire company, which could often mean a reformation of legacy systems, processes and/or staff.

As a whole, the market seems to be moving towards one-to-one personalization. This would include a knowledge of the visitor as defined by his or her preferences and interactions on the site. On a broader scale, it means adapting the overall customer experience to become more technologically enhanced and data-driven.

However, organizations shouldn't feel pressured to implement one-to-one immediately. Teams may not always have the proper resources or channels in place to effectively carry out some of these advanced marketing tactics. In fact, a bad personalization experience is much worse than having no personalization. Instead, the goal should be trying to incrementally improve personalization deliverability and eventually moving up the maturity model. (In other words, progress.)

Final Thoughts on Personalized Marketing

All enterprises should know that web personalization is an imperative. It's no longer good enough to send or blast messages to entire groups of people. Regardless of personalization stage, every organization should make it a point to move towards more interactive channels of marketing. The more people feel comfortable and familiar with a brand, the more they will give their loyalty and respect.

Web Personalization at Scale

With Liferay Digital Experience Platform (DXP), anyone can create personalized experiences with the click of a button.

See How

The Future of Customer Experience? Think Small

2025-05-29T21:01:22Z

How Micro-Engagements are About to Change the Loyalty Landscape

I'm sitting at airport terminal gate C74 waiting to board my United flight to San Francisco, and I have a weird thought: I might be the most valuable person on this flight, and they don't even seem to know it.

But they should.

Let me explain. Almost all of my travel in the last four years has been on American Airlines, where I have Platinum status. But today I’m flying United under a "Status Match" program, which gives people with other airline affiliations a chance to check them out—and the airline a chance to win new business. Because of that (and because I'm a Customer Experience Manager), I'm taking mental notes on every interaction we have. And so far, it’s nothing special.

There's the problem. It should be special—at least if they care about locking down the 80,000-plus miles I travel annually (which are clearly up for grabs). Even so, since I received a confirmation email of this status match six weeks ago, there’s been absolutely nothing unique about my experience. In short, United’s window of opportunity is closing, and they’re not the only company in such a position. In the near future, customer experiences based on individualized micro-engagements will be the critical difference in which companies triumph in the loyalty game.

Part of the reality is that customer expectations are constantly evolving. Tactics that recently delighted your users can now seem utterly unremarkable (free return shipping anybody?). Whether you call these policies “customer-centric,” “holistic,” “360” or something else, they all still tend to rely on segmentation into “personas” rather than true individualization.

Does this look familiar?

"Ken, Regional Head of Sales, 64: Team player, family man, white minivan, loves his weekend BBQs"
"Dolores, Software Engineer, 41: Highly motivated professional, camps in spare time"
"Raj, UCLA Pre-Med, 24: Green-energy fanatic, blogs about customer experiences constantly"

Here’s the problem: Creating these sub-segments does achieve overall satisfaction improvements as needs are better defined, but it’s still grouping audiences into potentially massive categories. We position these personas as real people (heck, we even use head shots). But it’s easy to forget that they are just templates established to represent broad consumer types.

Predictive analytics promise to deliver personalized customer experiences. We’ll see. Most everything that exists today are generic customer journeys punctuated by one-off interactions, such as a free upgrade, targeted discounts, or a unique response to a select customer. Any of those examples may highlight a company service culture, but not a process.

Look at the Ritz-Carlton, a hotel chain that is legendary for delivering truly superlative service for its customers. One story recounts how a worker’s mother-in-law took a 2.5 hour flight to deliver food for a family whose son had food allergies. But hold on. When you take into account that the average Ritz-Carlton customer spends about $250,000 over his or her lifetime, the story becomes a bit less astonishing. And to reiterate my point, it’s simply a one-off for that family, based on a model that doesn’t anticipate needs, and is probably unrealistic for the other 99%. The question is, how would customer micro-engagements help, if you’re selling anything more pedestrian, like, say, coffee?

Personalizing Everyday Customer Experiences

Consider a trip to your neighborhood Dunkin Donuts. Let’s say you go in every day around 7am. You’re pleasantly greeted by name and, as you reach the counter, a coffee—cream, two sugars—is already waiting, ready to go. Perhaps even more than the Ritz-Carlton, the interaction is designed just for you, built upon multiple learned micro-engagements. The problem is that it’s not implemented across every outlet and every channel.

What happens if you go to that same Dunkin’ Donuts in the evening and are greeted by a different server? Or, what if you go to a different location? Heck, what if you’re at a different location, along with your kids, and in addition to hot chocolate they want a snack—but don’t forget Aiden’s nut allergy! (Oh, and by the way, you’re out of whole bean hazelnut coffee at home.) You go to Dunkin' Donuts almost every day, yet now you’re just another anonymous face waiting to be served. Just like me at gate C74. That’s what’s going to change. The future of customer experience lies in business systems that can tap into the many disparate systems relating to those touch points and deliver actionable analytics on an individual level: Digital Experience Platforms.

The next generation of web-based portals, Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), have the power to integrate web-based user habits with stored personal information, public records, social media activity, preferences, and relationships to customize user-specific experiences—all in real time. The potential dividends of such actionable data are on display in the latest IBM Watson ads, which promise consumer insight that approaches “Minority Report” levels. True, Watson is not quite positioned as a DXP, but it highlights the potential for insight—if you ask the right questions. Also, that’s where these platforms will make their entrances: through business intelligence and marketing. If used for … let’s call it the opposite of evil, just consider the possibilities.

OK, back to the airlines. What could United have done to try and win me over? I detail all that in my next post - “How Micro-Engagements Will Forever Change Customer Experience.”

Just keep in mind that micro-engagements are coming. Now I've got a flight to catch!

Three Key Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences

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The 3 Key Digital Strategies Every Bank Must Improve

2025-05-29T21:00:40Z

The banking industry is trending up. With greater accountability and transparency in our institutions, customers are finally coming around to their banks. Confidence is being restored and their trust is growing. For once, the future of banking looks quite bright.

But competition is also on the rise. Customer loyalty can't be taken for granted. Things like security and convenience, once tokens of a great and stable bank, are now merely assumed. New expectations include fewer fees, more personal insight and better online banking features. Bank customers want more, and they are putting a greater burden on financial service providers to step up their game.

How can financial institutions earn complete trust from their customers? According to Ernst & Young (chart below), it means providing stability as well as an excellent customer experience. (Though, of course, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the need for transparency in fees/costs).

With this in mind, how can banks look to improve their digital strategies as they plan ahead? Three key strategies appear to be of the most immediate concern.

1. Focusing on the Omnichannel Experience

Let's start by thinking about some of your major channels—mobile, online, in-person/branch—and how you can improve customer satisfaction in each one.

Traditionally, branches were where people performed most financial transactions. The staff, branch locations and resource management all played a big part in why a customer might open an account. But times have changed. With costly overhead, human resources, and the shift to mobile self-service, it makes sense to invest in the virtual banking.

Think about how you can deliver some of these branch services via online or mobile channels. Find a way to create easy-to-use digital channels for day-to-day transactions. Streamline ways to sell products through the web. When you've developed a seamless omnichannel banking experience, you'll be able to gain deeper product penetration and expand your portfolio.

2. Providing Personal Insight and Wisdom for Financial Needs

Use all the data you have available about your customers to their advantage. Help them customize financial plans and long-term goals. Mint.com is a good example of a digital finance manager. It keeps track of a person's spending history and recommends certain products or online banking services based on that information. It can also track when bills are due and when a credit limit or budget is reached. This functionality will not only help your customers draft clearer financial plans, but it will also show your personal investment in their future.

Keep in mind, this point is applicable even if your technology is not quite in place. When it comes to financial advice, many people still enjoy speaking to someone at a branch or call center. So it's important to equip your advisors with the right skills and a customer-first attitude; look to demonstrate your expertise and concern while building customer trust in the process.

3. Finding Ways to Improve Margins and Productivity

This idea might not sound revolutionary, but the principle remains when applied to a bank’s digital strategy. How do you trim the fat from current operations or processes? Given the lack of loan and revenue growth, are there any back office costs you can eliminate in order to improve margins and productivity? As McKinsey & Company notes in their report, Global Corporate and Investment Banking: An Agenda for Change, "Corporate banks should consider ways to make their models 'capital-lite'. Banks can often switch to products that offer similar economics, but require less capital." Think of it as pruning: reducing capital waste and tightening your operations will prepare you for growth of new branches (no pun intended).

If your financial institution is able to execute on these digital strategy action items, you'll be on the right track to earning genuine loyalty. Your customers will be happier and more confident in your ability to solve their problems. And you'll have less to worry about the competition.

Building for Today's Customer: 6 Essential Web Strategies for Financial Services

Would you like to learn more about how to execute your web strategies? This whitepaper gives a basic overview of major trends in the financial services environment and highlights digital strategies for keeping up with the market.

Read the Whitepaper

The Age of the Customer: The Unstoppable Rise of Customer Experience Management

2025-05-29T21:00:42Z

We have entered a defining moment in customer experience—and most people are barely aware it's happening. The convergence of three very different factors is completely redefining how customers are engaged, and the landscape is shifting quickly.

To begin, the most recent financial crisis has resulted in wholesale organizational focus on cost cutting. Customer expectations have plummeted as programs overseeing customer satisfaction have lost priority. At the same time, customers have never been savvier or better informed and their loyalties have practically dissolved. Finally, access to customer information and new technological possibilities (read: big data) is providing insight and engagement opportunities like never before.

With customer expectations significantly lowered, organizations that embrace and invest in paradigm-shifting customer experience management strategies will have the power to disrupt markets, redefine industries, and most significantly, make laggards obsolete.

Until recently, consumers have resigned themselves to companies behaving like companies. That is to say, companies were focused on making the most money they can, even at the expense of their own customers. In such an environment, it's easy to see why airlines give peanuts instead of meals, why checkout lines are longer, or why the DMV no longer even bothers to perforate my auto registration card before mailing it out. We bemoan the loss of mom-and-pop shops for exactly this unqualified and extensive personal attention.

There was a time when it didn't matter whether you bought a hex nut or a riding mower—you’d likely get a follow-up call to see if you were satisfied. No longer. Unless explicitly tied to improving sales, customers have been long overlooked.

Consider These Two Customer Experience Examples

Amazon has a solid track record of customer satisfaction, but their predictive shopping feature, which uses an algorithm pairing an item search with their massive database of shopping habits to offer other items, highlights a flaw in their CX strategy. It's helpful, but let's face it, the intention is mainly to encourage additional consumer purchases. An optional hotlink would be visually more appealing and improve the overall shopping experience.

Contrast that with Verizon Wireless's phone plan comparison tool. This intuitive, easy-to-use feature helps customers review their monthly usage history and then suggests a phone plan best suited to their habits, even if the plan costs less. On top of that, customers can change plans as many times as they like all without incurring a fee. The difference in those approaches is subtle, but clear.

Understanding these differences is important because the impacts of varying approaches to customer experience management will be far-reaching and immediate. Home Depot now has a policy that allows me to return items without the receipt. Any returns on credit card purchases go straight back to my card, which makes perfect sense, since they already have the information. Saving receipts, worrying about expirations, finding the right scrap of paper for the right return: it's all a massive pain, and Home Depot just made that pain go away.

I didn’t have to join a club, didn’t need to use their credit card, or jump through any special hoops. Without even having had to ask, I’m afforded the pleasure of no longer needing their receipts, and honestly, that makes me really happy. Then consider the broader result: I now expect all stores to provide that same service. I know they all have the same payment information, and I'm now annoyed if they don’t offer the service. That's right: I'm annoyed by a company that hasn't even had a chance to win my loyalty! If you are an executive running an operation, that statement should be terrifying. If Lowes didn't offer the same service (they do), I'd likely change my behavior and only shop at Home Depot.

That is your disrupter, and that’s what is starting to happen in small pockets all around us. The visionaries recognize we have entered the Age of the Customer, and that customers now determine our engagement with them, not the other way around. Uber emailing maps of your ride to ensure you were satisfied with the route; supermarkets texting discounts when you're nearby; USAA representatives recognizing your phone number, and asking if you're calling about a topic you recently searched on their website—these things are happening TODAY. These are the game changers borne out of programs focused on customer satisfaction, not bottom lines.

Three years ago, I joined Liferay as their first Customer Experience Manager and got to work creating a role for myself based on these standards. Since then I’ve been tasked with building our company's Customer Experience Department. From journey mapping and engagement strategies, to building a reference program, hiring other CXMs (and everything else in-between), it’s been an ever-evolving challenge—but a great one.

In subsequent posts, I'll be sharing what I've learned, where I’ve failed, and even a few success stories. I hope you'll share your customer experiences with me in return!

Want to Learn More About Customer Experience?

There are various steps to consider in ramping up your customer experience management in the digital era. We've written a whitepaper to walk you through four important strategies to ensure better engagement with your brand.

Read the Whitepaper

What is the Shift Toward Digital Experience?

2025-05-29T21:12:24Z

Today I Learned: The homepage of your website does not count as your digital presence.

If you think about the way people interact with companies today, it’s not just through one website or one page. Even if you are talking about web presence, people will find pages that are three levels down through Google search or from email links that send them to specific pages.

More than that, the Internet of Things (IoT) makes it so that you don’t have to go far in search of information. If you’re flying somewhere, you can use mobile devices and kiosks to help you check in. In Germany, you can actually order a meal on a touch screen. This is how people are interacting with your company in the modern era.

What this points to is something called the digital experience. It means having a real life customer experience or interaction that is enhanced or facilitated by technology. The focus here isn’t so much the technology—which makes the interaction possible—but the experience.

One of the companies that is already doing this is Disney. Disney at some point figured out that people hated waiting in lines, so they got this thing called FastPass. You also know that when you're riding Splash Mountain, they try to take your picture. You can have this and many other digital experiences while you're visiting their theme parks.

Disney is now consolidating all of that into a single system called "MyMagic+," which provides you with many of these services. They’ve created a RFID-wristband known as a “MagicBand” that you can use to get into your hotel room, pay for items, retrieve photos and use as a FastPass. It’s all at the convenient touch of your wrist.

How to Enrich Your Customers’ Digital Experience

When you're talking about this experience on a technical front, you can say that Disney is able to build great websites, devices and mobile apps. But their goal isn't just to build these components. Their goal is to help customers understand that having this sort of digital experience is important, and that it would lead to a greater appreciation of their brand and product.

Many companies are already creating useful tools to build good content. But the key difference in this conversation is context.

Companies will need to come up with better strategies to creating good context. How does what you know about people, like their history and preferences, change the way you interact with them?

As Gartner would say: "The role of content in the digital world may not be described as a 'place,' in the sense of a destination, at all. Rather, digital content must make itself available to a user when and where it's needed."

In order to create your own version of the wristband, you need the right technology. But creating helpful content and providing it in the right context are what really make an interaction rich. Discover a way to do all three and you’ll find yourself one step ahead of the competition.

Three Strategies for Consistent Customer Experiences

What are the strategies you should prioritize for a better customer experience? We've written a whitepaper with three important steps to ensure a better experience with your brand.

Read the Whitepaper

*****

This post was originally published on Business 2 Community.

Liferay DXP

Partner Pulse: TCS Interactive on AI, Headless CMS, and Personalization

Key Takeaways

1. Trending Drivers: AI & Data Insights

2. Busting AI Myths

3. Commerce & Beyond

4. Headless CMS Freedom

5. Personalization at Scale

Who Is TCS Interactive?

Conquering Technical Debt & Legacy Systems: A Roadmap to Modernizing Your Digital Foundation

Understanding the Core Challenges

Liferay's Architectural Approach to Modernization

Veriday's Methodologies for Identifying and Prioritizing Technical Debt

Strategies for a Unified Digital Foundation

Justifying ROI: The Stakeholder Perspective

Conclusion: The Path Forward

Partner Pulse: How Technopolis Embraces Digital Transformation with Liferay

Key Takeaways

What Downtime Actually Costs and How to Avoid It

Key Takeaways

What Does Downtime Cost?

How to Keep Your Solutions Up and Running

Is "Four Nines" Availability Really Achievable?

Higher CloudSQL Tier

Dual-Region Setup for Cloud Storage

Ensuring Performance with Liferay HA+

Partner Pulse: From Brazil to North America – Objective Group’s Journey to Rising Star

Navigating the Digital Experience Landscape: Liferay's Position in the 2025 Voice of the Customer for DXPs

Liferay's Placement in the 2025 Report

Understanding the Metrics

Our Commitment to You

About Gartner Voice of the Customer:

How a DXP Can Help You Ensure Compliance With the European Accessibility Act

Key Takeaways

What is the EAA?

How to Ensure Compliance with the EAA

How to Create More Inclusive Website Experiences

Build Accessible Websites with Liferay DXP

Partner Pulse: How Aggity Breaks Down Silos and Builds Smarter Experiences

6 Steps to Bridge Cultures and Code: How DXPs Smooth Post-M&A Integration

1. Kick Off with an M&A Integration Playbook

2. Unify Technology and Teams with a Composable Platform

3. Map Culture with Customer Experience Tools

4. Streamline M&A IT Integration

5. Use Digital Marketing for Internal Adoption

6. Measure, Iterate, and Celebrate Wins

Partner Pulse: Protiviti on Digital Transformation in the Middle East

6 Pillars for a Successful Citizen Relationship Management Platform

1. A Unified, Rock-Solid Digital Identity

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2. Interoperability That Actually Works

3. Data Hygiene: The Single Source of Truth

4. Proactivity and Personalization: Going Beyond “Just Reply”

5. Accessibility and Inclusion: Digital Services for All

6. Artificial Intelligence and Automation: Smart Service, Human Heart

The Role of a DXP-Powered Customer Portal

Partner Pulse: Solteq on Digital Growth and DXP Strategy

How to Achieve Digital Agility for Your Website

Key Takeaways

Why Modernizing Your Website Can’t Wait

Introduction to Digital Agility

Benefits of Digital Agility

First Step to Digital Agility

Creating a Digital Agility Strategy

Using AI to Improve Digital Experiences and Boost Enterprise Efficiency

Empowering Business Users with Low-Code

Navigating Website Complexity with Multi-Site Management

Simplify Your Multisite Environment with a DXP

Delivering Seamless Omnichannel Experiences with Hybrid Headless Technology

Implementing Digital Agility

Bringing Everything Together: Synergy for the Win!

Prioritize Digital Agility for Your Solutions

Ready to choose the right website technology for your business?

What Is an Enterprise Website? Don’t Neglect These Essential Elements

Key Takeaways

Everybody Needs a Website

What Is a Content Management System (CMS)?

Common Features of a Content Management System

What Is an Enterprise Website?

Important Elements of an Enterprise Website

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