How Data & Content Make Your Digital Experience Platform (DXP) a Shining Star

There’s been a lot of buzz about experience, customer experience, digital experience... However, many companies are much focused on content composition and delivery, designed around personas in imaginary customer journeys. Sometimes, these representations are just shortcuts to overcome the inability to manage customer data. By shifting the thinking to a data-first approach, we might improve the experiences of real customers, with better business results.

As a fanatical about Innovation in Customer Experience, I am amazed with what Oracle is doing in this field, but the opinions in this article are my own. 

Introduction

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading the Gartner Magic Quadrant for DXP 2019[1] and this phrase captured my attention: “DXPs act as centers of gravity in a complex, extensive and interconnected technology landscape”.

Because I am fascinated about astronomy, I visualized immediately this complex landscape as our cosmos, with a shining DXP star at the center. All the larger bodies such as the planets, moons, asteroids, comets and the smaller stardust were the touchpoints and interactions that foster customer experience, attracted by the gravitational field of our shining star. But you know, the stars live in a balance between gravity pulling in and pressure pushing out. A balance of gravity and fusion. If a star runs out of nuclear fuel, it collapses under its own weight into a black hole. So, what about our DXP star? Can it live just with gravity or it needs fuel as well? Assuming that the content, the assets, the products are accountable for the mass and gravity of our star, then the nuclear fuel is the customer data. Our DXP star lives in a balance of content and data.

Is this too much imagination? Yes it is. But most of the the journey maps that support digital campaigns are fiction as well. If you are not convinced, let′s dive deeper on this subject.

What is exactly a Digital Experience Platform DXP?

Forrester produced its first DXP Wave in 2014[2] and it was probably the first research & advisory player to do it. Therefore, this is still a recent concept with different definitions and distinct approaches. There is a mindset that DXPs evolved from portals and web content management solutions and data is an addon - a sort of CMS with steroids, eventually enriched with commerce components. However, most of the definitions you can find mention somehow concepts such as “customer journey”, “contextual experience” or “personalization”. Even the Content Marketing Institute in a recent survey [3] found that, for those organizations that manage content strategically, the top five benefits identified included:

1. The ability to provide the right content to the right person at the right time (50%);
2. The enhanced customer experiences due to improved interactions (47%).

The CMI research team concluded that from all the benefits, the ability to deliver relevant content at the optimal time and provide better customer experiences may be the most advantageous over time. Thus, I have a few questions: can you personalize anything for someone you don′t know? How do you know your customer′s context? Can you really predict the customer journey? And how do you know who is the right person or what is the right time?

We can only find the answers to those questions if the DXP has a strong data foundation. Maybe you are not convinced yet. So let′s use an example.

Use Case: B2C in Banking

Now is your turn to imagine. You are responsible for a new campaign. let's say a campaign for mortgages or personal loans. You managed everything successfully with your agency. The search ads and digital display advertising are running fine. You are attracting the audiences to your site and apps that are being personalized and fed with great content from your CMS. You were advised of the importance of a journey builder and a remarketing strategy to increase conversion results. Fortunately, your DXP supports real-time insights into a continuous flow of visitor activity data on your site and apps. So, you were able to trigger remarketing actions from in-session, customer-level web data, using your marketing automation tools. You are happy and feel rewarded each time you check the reports on your DXP. The funnel analysis report reveal that campaign goals are being exceeded. Not only you are generating more leads to nurture, as you are initiating more loans applications that expected, collecting the data from online forms and calculators and sending the processes to sign in local branches.

(If you are able to do all this, congratulations because you are already part of an inner circle!)

But unfortunately, the use case doesn't end here. In the branches your colleagues are struggling with many applications that must be refused. leads that need to be disqualified and busy with rework due to poor targeting. Despite of what your digital marketing metrics tell you, your colleagues are missing their goals and customer′s expectations are being frustrated.

In fact, although you ran your campaign with digital assets, the results would′t be much different from a campaign air on the radio. So,what could you have done differently? You could be activating display and social campaigns just for those audiences you selected from your CRM. You could be personalizing your digital channels for customers vs non customers. You could be targeting different segments. You could be supporting pre-approved applications for your customers. You could do all that and much more... If you have how to manage customer data effectively in your DXP.

You can think in other use cases and industries. Should a DXP ignore customer′s outstanding service requests, customer surveys, order history, loyalty program promotions, profiling segments or customer′s preferences for instance?

Trends shaping Digital Experience Platforms

The times when brands could think just on websites, landing pages or emails as the interactions points are fading. The Chatbots, social networks, voice assistants or smartwatches are just a few examples that, experiences today are everywhere. I still remember the first time I saw a taxi driver using a voice assistant. I was impressed because he was so proficient at a time when we still associate voice assistants to the digital native generations. But clearly this was not the case of this taxi driver neither he held a PhD! What about today? Currently, just in the US, there are 77 million drivers using voice assistants regularly[4] and we see the use cases for voice assistants in cars, smartphones or smart home technology growing every day. This need to enable new channels and experiences is perhaps the main reason why headless architectures and hybrid headless are becoming so popular. That is using a platform such as eCommerce or Content Management System without a customer-facing front end, delivering functionality via APIs with the customer-facing being run by another system or application. Or maybe supporting just the web-based experiences and then use the APIs to enable new channels. The world is also becoming more pageless. It shifted from static CSS and HTML to real-time, assembly everywhere approaches, based on the API-first architectures and the headless content, using technologies such as Angular or React, empowered by machine learning to support the digital experiences.

Conclusion

A Digital Experience strategy should embrace all the challenges described above, mastering together content and data. As mentioned before, Forrester was one of the first research & advisory firm examining DXP. What is interesting in the first Forrester Wave in 2014[5] is that, there were no leaders at that time. According to Forrester, no vendor offered a truly end-to-end solution. “Unified platforms are more myth than reality" - they wrote. However, a lot has changed since then. Oracle is now at the forefront of digital experience. The latest Forrester Wave 2019[6] provides good insights for those of you interested in making your DXP a shining star.

Sources:

[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms (DXP), 2019

[2] , [5] The Forrester Wave?: Digital Experience Delivery Platforms, Q3 2014

[3] Content Marketing Institute 2018 Content Management & Strategy Survey

[4] voicebot.ai, Twice the Number of U.S. Adults Have Tried In-Car Voice Assistants as Smart Speakers, 2019

[6] The Forrester Wave?: Digital Experience Platforms, Q3 2019