Due to the proliferation of digital channels and multi-experience modalities, enterprises are forced to redefine how they interact and engage with customers. Now, there is a desire and even a rush to deliver digital experiences that are natural, intuitive and spontaneous than ever before. But today’s digital experience platforms (DXPs) are monolithic in nature and slow to respond to market changes. And on the other hand, enterprises are eager to modernize their existing digital experience stack to future-proof the business and competitive differentiation. So, the question is how they should tread confidently in the composable business.
The Role of the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) Is Dual
According to Gartner, a digital experience platform (DXP) is an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery, and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.
A DXP provides optimal digital experiences to a variety of customers, including consumers, partners, employees, citizens and more. It provides the presentation orchestration that binds together capabilities from multiple applications to form seamless digital experiences. A DXP helps ensure continuity across the full customer lifetime journey.
1. DXP for B2C Experience
Enterprises to execute B2C initiatives face multitude of challenges. The majority of challenges occur due to changing customer behavior, exploding data across channel and inflexibility of tools and technology.
To solve B2C experience problems, digital experience platforms provide focused support and balance to the business ecosystem for smoothly executing initiatives around digital marketing, customer engagement, digital commerce, customer support, and self-service.
Due to DXP’s interoperable nature, enterprises can exploit a vast and growing ecosystem of third-party applications and resources for diverse customer-facing scenarios. This all work towards making the B2C experience more prolific and fruitful.
2. DXP for B2B Experience
Enterprises addressing partner and supplier initiatives to improve B2B experience require technical tools that support B2B interactions and processes. But architectural integrity and support for complex security requirements are particularly challenging.
DXPs come handy for enterprises to manage and optimize diverse type of information, and expanding digitized processes, such as customer onboarding, assisted sales, digital commerce and contract life cycles. In addition, a DXP platform helps suppliers, resellers, and distribution partners, with visibility into operational data such as product and inventory information, order status and tracking, and customer journey mapping.
But today, DXP offerings have evolved from simple horizontal portal and WCM systems. The interoperability and integration with head-to-head technologies, such as digital commerce platforms, marketing automation systems, DAM, CDP and CRM, is critical than ever before to support contextualized digital experiences across multi-experience customer journeys. This brings us to the question composability of DXP platforms.
The Future for Customers is Made up of Composable Experiences
Fragmented and siloed customer experiences have become a point of friction, with many enterprises are wrestling with question:
“How to unify all fragmented experiences into a seamless and frictionless customer experience?”
Employees, partners, vendors, consumers, suppliers, and other types of constituents are struggling with the current state of customer experience across digital channels. They suffer from inflexible, cumbersome, disconnected system and have to deal with age-old processes, resulting in inappropriate and retarded experiences.
Composable digital experience platforms (DXPs) aim to unify fragmented digital experiences of different datasets in an organization like the customer, users and employees.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that have adopted an intelligent composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.
The Rise of the Digital Experience Platforms
Why Do Organizations Need to Think About Composable DXP?
With changing market conditions and growing customer expectations, enterprises are burdened with directives to modernize or transform almost every aspect of their business process— especially customer-facing components. This is feasible when a DXP system is flexible enough so that digital experience components can be rapidly assembled and reassembled, and recomposed as per the business needs.
This is where a composable DXP comes into the picture. A composable DXP enables enterprisers to deliver business outcomes and adapts to the pace of business change through the assembly and composition of packaged business capabilities. Composable DXP applications can be easily built out of smaller, modular capabilities, unlike today’s mostly monolithic, all-in-one DXPs.
According to Gartner report, enterprises are beginning to adopt the principles of composable business. 7% of respondents in the 2022 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey indicated that they have already invested in composable enterprise, but another 60% expect to have done so by the end of three years.
The Digital Experience Platform (DXP): Trends and Developments
Difference between Monolithic DXP vs. Composable DXP
1. What is Monolithic DXP?
A monolithic DXP is slightly akin to a traditional web content management system in which the front-end and backend layers are coupled. Such systems are generally built for powering a single digital channel like a mobile application or a website.
Most SMEs businesses generally rely on monolithic DXPs as it is integrated into their existing technology stack. If it works, they never bother to replace it with a modern solution.
Enterprises face challenges with monolithic stacks when they observe friction across channels while implementing new changes. This fragmentation can exist because of various factors such as: time-to-implementation, cost factors, coordination gaps between development and QA teams, and many more factors.
2. What is Composable DXP?
A composable DXP follows the same principle as a composable business. It delivers business outcomes by bridging the gap among different datasets of an organization by assembling and composting packaged business applications. It eliminates the challenges posed by monolithic DXP and takes the customer experience to the next level.
Composable DXP provides you the liberty to link up diverse channels using the power of APIs. You can also leverage APIs to seamlessly connect other vital components or apps of your business. You can quickly assemble systems to deliver a personalized digital experience. You can bring content and data together to take your CX initiatives to the next level.
In the near future, the majority of DXP applications will be composable in order to stay flexible and relevant for delivering a high-quality customer experience as and when needed.
Capability and Benefits of Composable DXP
1. Technical Capabilities
- Deliver user-friendly and powerful experiences for multiple channels
- Leverage latest technology and tools to unlock new possibilities
- Integrate advanced features and tools with existing applications
- Prepare better to face and resolve any upshot
- Accelerate transformation towards a cloud-native or SaaS solution
- Prevent businesses from becoming locked-in to vendor solutions
2. Business Benefits
- Adapt and pivot faster than traditional approach especially with frequent implementation cycles
- Mix and match customer touchpoints as per customers’ needs and styles
- Unlock newer possibility by adopting best-of-breed solutions from multiple vendors
- Empower non-technical users to modify experiences and interfaces
- Infuse personalization at scale through atomized content management
- Experiment and innovate to continuously improve experience
How to Convert Your DXP Technology Stack Into Composable DXP
Converting DXPs into composable technology stack, both internally and externally, demands a proper planning across people, process, and technology. Due to tightly coupled architecture, integrations of DXPs with adjacent technologies are often cumbersome and time-consuming. Plus, it can also be expensive. It is also one of the reasons why a typical composable DXP implementation can take months and even cost you hefty amount.
1. Where to Start?
The existing bundled business capability in DXP can be a good starting point for planning and future-proofing your DXP. Composable DXPs should support the digital experience transformation using substantial assembly and composition of your existing bundled business capabilities.
For composable DXP to be successful, your bundled business capability should be:
- Modular: Give the capability to slice into a cohesive set of components, such as composable content and composable UX.
- Independent: Self-sufficient and nominal dependencies on other apps to ensure flexibility in composition.
- Orchestrated: Bundled in structure to assemble digital experiences through APIs, headless CaaS or other technical process.
- Discoverable: Designed with semantic clarity to be easily accessible to nontechnical business users as well as designers, developers and other stakeholders.
2. How to Execute?
Composable DXPs provide a target architecture to resolve CX challenges, but on the journey, you will need to pay special attention to interfaces such as APIs, webhooks and events. APIs are widely recognized as key connecting nerve in DXP projects.
In addition, applications must modularize features into encapsulated bundled business capabilities to allow for independent deployment to become composable. The journey to composable DXPs and the future of applications will be incremental and modular.
In the future, the organization’s composable DXP capabilities will be orchestrated on the fly (often using AI/ML techniques) to contextualize and personalize the digital experience for that particular person, at that particular moment. Packaged business capabilities are the software components underlying this that represent well-defined business capabilities recognizable by a nontechnical business user, and are assembled into application experiences for them.
An Executive's Guide to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
Pimcore DXP: Future-proof Your DXP with a Flexible Microservices-based Architecture
Currently, most DXP products are too large and not task-oriented. This prevents organizations from managing them easily, or changing them quickly. DXP capabilities are not easily decomposable or replaceable. However, several DXPs do have extensibility built in, via robust APIs, extension frameworks. These can be the starting point on the journey toward composability.
Pimcore DXP using the combined effect in the MACHO-based (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless, and Open Source) architecture helps you deliver truly composable DXPs.
With the help of pre-built data and experience management building blocks, your teams can easily create a custom infrastructure. Furthermore, they can agilely scale and evolve the IT-framework as needed using a low-code approach. You can extend the platform as you need it - regardless of the front end on your customers' devices. It gives companies the flexibility and freedom to create and collaborate on content in a central location and provide consistent, predictable data to multiple online and offline output channels.
Explore Features of Pimcore DXP
Pimcore DXP also allows direct GitHub access and Docker images for your preferred deployment on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or other leading on-demand cloud hosting providers.
Discover our Customers Success Story using Pimcore DXP
The Conclusion
To build composable DXP, digital experiences are assembled from packaged business capabilities that are delivered by application vendors or internal application projects. We all know the future objective is low-code or no-code. But today, DXP composition and assembly remains largely a development-oriented. While we are not yet at the point of composable DXPs being widely implemented, we are seeing early antecedents towards this trend. Organizations should start investigating these antecedents as they prepare for the future of applications.
