How Does Digital Experience Platforms Bridge Silos to Deliver Omnichannel Experiences?

In today’s business scenario, an organization’s biggest asset is its brand value. To that end, one of the essential parts of establishing a strong brand value is frictionless user experience. And, of all the elements involved in creating a frictionless user experience, organizations have paid extensive attention to management systems such as content management system, product information system, and customer relationship management. However, owing to the lack of connection between these, there is a severe inconsistency in the user experience across different systems.

From the end-user perspective, their growing exposure to technology and media has raised the demands and expectations from the chosen brands. According to a research, 93% of customers are likely to make a repeat purchase from brands that provide great customer service, and the flip side of that is anybody’s guess. Against this backdrop, it is inevitable for brands to take the user experience game a notch higher by adopting more relevant solutions. These implementations come with their own set of challenges and shortcomings, such as obstructed capability enhancements, lack of customer behavior insights, and rigidly coupled applications. Consequently, organizations are falling short on their efforts to streamline efforts toward user experience. They need to look beyond conventional CMS and other web management solutions.

Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) to the Rescue

The answer to this is Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), which acts as an interaction and experience layer in a complex, extensive, and interconnected technology landscape. While DXPs have existed for a while now, they are often misunderstood to be restricted to websites and mobile applications. However, they reach far and beyond. Through the power of application programming interface (API), DXPs address modalities ranging from chatbots to voice assistants on devices ranging from mobile and laptop to kiosks and IoT smart devices across varying channels. With this unified approach, the user gets an ensured omnichannel experience.

A digital experience platform can help in providing your customers with a consistent omnichannel experience in many ways. Let’s have a look at a few of these.

1. Break down functional silos: One of the most important aspects to deliver a consistent and relevant user experience is seamless interoperability between the various technological pieces within an organization. This is crucial to allow customers to search, navigate, and discover what they are looking for while getting consistent information along the journey. This factor, however, is decelerated by the incompatibility between the different pieces of technology and systems in the organization. Having an efficient DXP enables the coupling of different systems and information sources, driving product, and digital asset information transfer effectively between different channels.
   
   On accomplishing this, information coming from disparate sources can be classified automatically. Furthermore, most DXP solutions in the market provide federated search and dynamically generate navigation based on metadata and information graphs. Besides, the users get access to personalized navigation based on their roles, while availing natural language query and conversational interfaces.
    
2.  Single-layer experience orchestration: Implementing DXPs involves having platform-wide support for different methodologies such as user-centered design, persona-based modeling, and journey mapping across the customer life cycle. A digital experience platform allows the organization to harmonize the content to promote reusability in different channels and devices through a single interaction layer.
   
   This is done by decoupling the customer-facing layer from the content and metadata. As a result, customers get an enhanced experience leading to better customer retention, acquisition, and satisfaction.
    
3. Cross-departmental collaboration: What drives a team that is a common mission or goal. To achieve this, it is important to give the teams standardized portals and forums for effective communication. This is where DXP plays a substantial role. The digital experience platform provide a conducive environment for users to work in groups toward specific goals. In the virtual workplace, users can communicate effectively and exchange information. The information and data that is shared on these portals are not only available for cross-departmental collaboration but also help in providing consistent user experience. Cross-departmental collaboration helps the organization fulfill its business objectives holistically.
    
4. Seamless integration: When it comes to implementation, speed, and effectiveness of integration is key. Considering the constantly expanding arsenal of data, organizations cannot afford to lose time in the integration process. A typical DXP stack provides the users with pre-integrated components, expediting the deployment. With the prime focus being on building digital experience effectiveness, DXPs offer prebuilt integration with third-party vendors provided in-house applications, CMS, and other applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and HR systems.
   
   In addition, DXPs can easily integrate with legacy platforms and enterprise systems. With an open platform that organizations can integrate across systems and departments with ease, there is an enhanced ability to create personalized customer experiences.
    
5. Multi-channel support: With the rapid increase in the number of endpoints that users are subjected to, organizations face a surge in handling these endpoints effectively. DXPs serve to be the perfect fit for these requirements by ensuring digital experiences that are contextualized. DXPs not only focus on the quality and fidelity to the various devices and channels but also deliver information that meets the channel and user requirements. Going beyond providing interactive templates and APIs geared toward making clients self-sufficient, digital experience platform assist in creating alternative user interfaces.

In today’s digital revolution, organizations everywhere are embracing the need for a digital overhaul for not merely better productivity, but also for cohesive and consistent customer experience. From this standpoint, organizations must stack the right tools in place to make a decision and reach out to newer opportunities. One of the most essential tools that one needs to have in the arsenal is a stronger and more efficient DXP to allow you to retain the consistency of customer experience across a wide gamut of modalities, channels, and devices. Executed with the right tact and intent, DXPs can help you monitor, manage, and maneuver your CX while meeting customer expectations.

Digital expreience platforms (DXPs) have the potential to help your business craft the perfect customer journey and aggregate content organization-wide by allowing different departments to share knowledge. Through this, you can connect the most important dots in your business—employees, clients, and vendors.

That being said, it is vital to understand the various solutions and providers in the market before going ahead to choose the one that works best for your organization. In conclusion, DXPs are the key to creating a seamless customer life cycle while centralizing and sharing the content virtually with different departments and teams. It is not about merely having a multi-channel customer journey, but to have a frictionless omnichannel customer experience to establish a stronger brand value for your business.

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