Meet Modern Digital Demands With a Digital Experience Platform

Customers have higher expectations than ever, including proactive service, personalized interactions and cross-channel connected experiences. A Digital Experience Platform can help you meet those expectations. Here’s how to get started.

Customer loyalty has always taken hard work, but in our digital world it hangs by a thread. Consider these statistics, according to various industry sources:

• 80% of consumers want more personalized services, online and offline
• 70% of buyers want to learn about products through content
• 63% of retail customers expect an immersive technology to enhance their shopping experience
• 65% of B2B customers want to raise the bar on experience
• 72% of customers will share a bad experience with their peers

That means that experience impacts the bottom line—for better or for worse—and modernizing your customer engagement strategy can yield positive benefits. For instance, according to a survey conducted by Salesforce, 67% of respondents said they’d spend more money just to stay with a good experience. Conversely and most concerning, 57% would switch to a competitor who offered a better experience.

Defining the Digital Experience

Your customer’s experience with your company through digital channels includes website, social media, mobile device, chat, finding goods and services and purchasing—virtually every touchpoint makes up the “digital experience.”  The underlying technology that produces the digital experience is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Today, the digital experience needs to encompass the entire business, expanding beyond the customer journey to include employee engagement and partner optimization as well.

Again, the metrics tell the story. According to IDC, a DXP can lead to:

A 24% revenue increase	19% faster time to market
An 18% reduction in costs	19% better brand consistency

Strengthening Your Digital Engagement—the Five Competencies for Success

Five competencies drive digital experience “maturity”—Structure, Strategy, Governance, Process and Technology.

According to Forrester, here’s how you need to focus your efforts:

• Organizational structure – commitment from the business to make digital experience a priority in skills, resources and partners
• You cannot build the perfect digital engagement technology at one time. You need to identify where you influence the greatest number of customers and develop your strategy from a centralized point, typically a CMS that has content distribution capabilities.
• There must be a process with established and agreed to governance and change management to continuously evolve and adapt to changes in customer expectations
• Adopt an agile methodology in a constant feedback loop in order to Build, Design and Test
• Your cloud-first, API-first technology must be nimble accommodate the ongoing evolution of customer expectations plus connect to new sources of data

Notice technology is the last competency. You must change your organization first in order to have a successful technology deployment.

The DXP Transition is Led by CMS Vendors

Content is still king. People are constantly seeking information to help them in day-to-day tasks, serve as the basis for impactful decisions, to help achieve their work goals and much more. The fundamental source for that information is the web—an infinite pool of information. Today, web content is an adaptive response to user needs for information and the desire of businesses to be the central source.

The place to start is with a digital front-end Content Management System, like Sitefinity. Fresh, relevant content delivered via a CMS can:

• Generate leads and conversions. Delivering useful and relevant content makes visitors organically move from the research stage to the decision stage, and then convert from a prospect to a customer.
• Deliver personalized information to the destination/device of choice at just the right time without IT involvement. Historically, organizations struggled with customer engagement initiatives, needing IT for day-to-day tasks while competing with other mission-critical business needs. With the right CMS, marketers can market and IT can focus on tasks where their expertise is truly needed.

Next Steps

Web Content Management systems are only the start of an enterprise DXP.  As your CMS strategy matures, you will be able to distribute content to destinations outside of your front-end website, add more components of a DXP—mobile devices, web apps, back office integrations, automated business processes, social networks—all under the protection of governance and compliance.

Progress Sitefinity makes it easy for marketers and developers to deliver compelling, multichannel user experiences. Talk to us about DXP.  We’re ready to help accelerate your journey.

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