What do your customers actually want from you? And what defines your customer experience? It boils down to 5 things:
- Control: Can customers help themselves or select their experiences?
- Friction: Do physical and digital interactions feel natural and seamless?
- Consistency: Is the experience consistent across every touchpoint?
- Transparency: Where are the points of agitation in the customer journey?
- Personalization: How well do you adapt to customers and their needs?
From the customer's standpoint, there's a strong demand for more control, less friction, greater consistency and transparency and higher levels of personalization. However:
- Nearly all companies (91%) use more than one channel.
- More than half use 8+ channels.
- Across these channels, there can be hundreds of touchpoints.
- The customer journey is non-linear.
If you're wondering, "How on Earth can I deliver an experience that meets those demands with all this complexity?" the answer is simple: digital experience platforms (DXPs).
The role of DXPs in improving customer experience
A DXP is an integrated set of tools (built on one common platform) that allows businesses to deliver a unified, personalized and consistent customer experience across all their marketing channels.
- Websites
- Portals
- Social media profiles
- Ecommerce
- Mobile apps
- PoS systems
- Kiosks
It provides a central hub for managing, delivering and optimizing digital experiences. You can use it to create a personalized experience for each and every customer or prospect, give them more control over their interactions with your brand, and deliver consistency across every touchpoint.
How does it achieve this?
It all comes down to a DXP's key features.
Content management
At the very core of every digital experience platform sits a content management system, and the two are notably different.
The CMS provides a single source of truth for all your content, making it easy to create, manage and distribute content and experiences across every channel—websites, apps, wearables, smartphones and more.
Data integration
A composable DXP is made up of several modules (called microservices) you can arrange, combine and build upon to create the ideal DXP for your organization.
With an open architecture, it's also easy to integrate third-party systems like customer data platforms (CDPs), ecommerce platforms and marketing automation tools.
Your CMS ensures a consistent experience for each customer at the individual level. And your marketing team can use its data internally to improve their understanding of each customer's needs, interests and behaviors.
Personalization
Centralizing omnichannel content management within a DXP does more than just break down data silos. Thanks to integration between your DXP's native systems and customer data from external software, you can trigger personalized content based on...
- Behavioral triggers
- Progression through the customer journey
- Contextual clues (location, time of day, device type)
- Anonymous interaction data
- Profile-based segmentation (demographics, personas)
...across devices, in real-time, with multilingual variants.
With automation, each customer can find the specific information they're looking for and form an individual, differentiated relationship with your brand.
Analytics and optimization
Creating, publishing and managing content is pointless without a way to manage a continuously growing library. Analytics tell you which content gains traction and resonates with your audience and which platforms work best to reach specific customers.
You can then use that data to optimize your marketing channels, eliminate friction throughout the customer journey and make the information your customers are looking for more readily available.
Some platforms (ahem, Brightspot) have built-in analytics capabilities. Normally, they also integrate with third-party sources like Google Analytics.
Digital asset management
Digital asset management (DAM) software uses AI and machine learning to tag, categorize and manage every digital asset in your content library (images, videos, audio files).
Most modern DXPs include DAM features, which makes it easy to search for and use your brand's assets across every channel.
Personalization and customer journey mapping in DXPs
The DXP can only do so much work on its own. Getting it to work to its full potential requires some oversight. And that starts with mapping the customer journey.
The software helps you execute your omnichannel strategy by identifying the who, what, when, where, why and how of your customers' interactions, from the first touchpoint to the last.
- Who are your customers? (personas)
- What do they do at each touchpoint? (actions)
- When, and how often, do they move from one point to the next? (timeline)
- Where are they when they interact with a particular marketing asset? (channel)
- Why do they act a particular way at each touchpoint? (intention)
- How do they feel at each given point? (feelings, expectations and questions)
Since the customer journey is non-linear (that is, they can start anywhere and don't follow a set path from A to Z), the DXP uses individual customer data to map out a more detailed, individualized journey before quantifying it on a macro level.
Integrating customer feedback and analytics
Your customer journey maps are 100% unique—they reflect your brand, offerings and customer base. Once you've mapped them, the next step is interpreting the insights.
A few key areas to zero in on:
- Needless interactions. How hard do you make it for someone to do business with you? If tons of customers are dropping off at a certain point in the journey, you're probably creating unnecessary friction.
- Successes and failures. Creating a positive emotional connection with a customer will drive them toward a purchase. After the fact, it'll enhance their loyalty and, by extension, your net promoter score. Focus on the channels and types of content that lead to positive experiences. Eliminate the ones that don't.
- Time spent at each stage. You can reduce the amount of effort customers have to put in at each point by focusing on their individual needs and preferences. If you notice customers take exceedingly long to perform certain activities or find specific information, optimize those areas to make the process more seamless.
- Content gaps. You're missing something, guaranteed. Knowing where customers are looking for information and what types of content they engage with (or look for) most gives you a better understanding of what to produce in the future.
Building a customer-centric digital presence
In this day and age, there's quite literally no excuse for not understanding your customers' needs.
The DXP does most of the heavy lifting, but you'll still want to focus on continually optimizing the customer journey by integrating feedback from various sources (surveys, social media channels, customer service inquiries) and analyzing data on a regular basis.
By doing so, your DXP can become the ultimate tool for building a truly customer-centric digital presence.
