What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?

The Digital Experience Platform

Digital experience is an online user’s experience (UX) across one or more channels. An organization that uses a digital experience platform (DXP) wants to produce the best possible UX.

A DXP contains applications, integrations, and data to manage an organization’s digital user experiences. It also facilitates best practices and methodologies to produce the best UX.

This article describes the elements that make up a successful DXP.

What is a digital experience platform (DXP)?

Marketers, designers, and engineers use the tools and information in a DXP to build engaging interactive software and content. The tools can be content, design, and digital-building software that plug into the DSP, enabling non-technical and technical people to collaborate on all aspects of the build process. You can imagine a DXP linked to Oracle NetSuite for business data, Salesforce for sales and marketing, Figma for design, and a modern CMS for developing digital content, interfaces, and applications.

Integration tools, or complete solutions like IPaaS, can also plug into a DXP to centralize an organization’s data by combining, for example, customer information with sales and financial data.

In addition to centralizing business data, a DXP can also capture analytics and qualitative text-based data to feed LLM-based machine learning and eventually produce chatbots and other AI-driven functionality.

Let's look at these elements individually:

• Applications
• Integrations
• Data

DXP Applications

What applications do you need to build great UX?

A modern-day CMS is often at the center of a DXP. Companies need absolute control over their website to ensure that all their content adheres to branding and marketing and is of the highest quality. They need a developer-friendly API-first platform that allows developers to align business objectives and design systems with code. It must be supple and scalable to respond to urgent market changes, incorporate new and updated technologies, and achieve long-term strategies.

Other central applications can be mentioned. Online retailers need to integrate their e-commerce tools. Financial institutions need a platform to create intuitive mobile services and globally accessible online banking on any device.

Whatever the software, DXP is configured to manage the multiplicity of communication channels as diverse as social media and web landing pages. The goal is that what you build for the web should work with little or no engineering involvement on other devices and channels.

DXP Data

DXP not only combines the data that runs a business but also captures analytics and provides marketers with the tools to analyze user behavior. Combined with business data, analytics data can ultimately feed machine learning for AI-driven recommendations and personalization.

It can also enable A/B Testing, a key DXP feature. A/B testing, comparing different versions of the same website or digital experience in real-time, gives marketers and business executives insights into which software behaviors perform better. It helps them iterate with reliability and confidence.

Placing analytics within the same platform with web development tools enables an organization to iterate quickly on new software versions and customer expectations.

DXP Integrations

As can be imagined, with such a need for centralization of both data and functionality, DXP needs to contain a robust integration engine. Applications need to communicate with each other, and data feeds need to be merged sensibly. For this, most DXPs rely on a composable, API-first plug-and-play methodology: Applications and data feeds should be able to plug into the DXP with configuration and limited code.

Composable DXP

The number of digital touch points is rapidly increasing. Not only do you have to manage all those different channels, you have to provide a consistent experience. This is where composability comes in. You need a DXP that can connect to all sorts of functionality and data. Composable DXP relies on Application Programming Interface (API) connectivity.

APIs connect a DXP to its satellite applications’ data and their functionality. For example, a Salesforce API gives the DXP automated access to its customer data; a Google Analytics API gives automated access to customer behavior; and a CMS gives you an API to build websites and add content to all your digital channels. Linking all three (Salesforce, Google Analytics, and a CMS) enables a company to create a full customer digital journey founded on data.

Conclusion

DXP is an advance over previous ways of managing diverse tools and data. As with all technological advances, experience invented the idea. The idea behind DXP is to place all software and data onto one platform.

By merging resources, DXP enables organizations to scale and build digital assets for multiple devices and channels. It creates an environment that can best meet an organization's objectives — in a single place to ensure consistent branding, design, coding, and security.