What are your company's priorities for the next couple of years?
Do you want to focus on raising the quality of your products? Or perhaps embracing a more data-driven marketing strategy?
In fact, SuperOffice has recently asked almost 2k professionals about their top business priorities for the next five years. 45.9% of respondents singled out customer experience.
Why is CX so important for modern organizations? Simply speaking, it is likely to positively affect your company's bottom line. According to Forrester, brands that offer superior customer experiences report "5.7 times more revenue than their competitors that lag in such efforts".
However, even if you understand the potential of a great CX, you might feel that it's challenging to improve customer experiences across different channels you use to communicate with your clients. After all, these channels should all be relevant for their particular audiences and suited to different stages of the user journey. On top of that, all of these touchpoints should be integrated so that your employees can analyze data and optimize digital experiences.
It may seem impossible to achieve that with standard web content management. Fortunately, you can benefit from creating a digital experience platform that will help you enhance your customer service and gain loyal clients. Today, you'll find out more about the value of introducing such a platform to your organization's toolbox. Plus, we'll share our recipe for building a DXP with a headless CMS—TYPO3—as its core.
What is a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
Gartner defines digital experience platforms as an integrated set of technologies based on a common platform that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure, and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.
A DXP empowers you to offer relevant digital experiences suited to your customer's channel and where they are on the customer journey. As an organization, you gain a technological ecosystem that can be scaled, developed, and optimized based on the results you're seeing.
How is a DXP different from a CMS?
It's a question that you may be asking yourself when considering an investment in the DXP, especially when you have a CMS that your team is well-accustomed to. Is DXP going to provide that much of a difference? Let's see:
A Content Management System (CMS) allows you to control the content on your website and, for many companies, other channels as well—e.g., your brand's online magazine or customer portals. For many companies, it is the core of digital experiences they provide to different audiences. However, it also comes with some limitations. First of all, while you can use CMS to publish content for different channels, it is unlikely that you will be able to cover the entire customer journey. It also usually doesn't provide many options for contextualization and personalization, which is something that today's customers expect and appreciate.
Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), on the other hand, allow you to control not just your website but also other digital channels: social media, e-commerce, mobile apps, or even IoT devices. You can even plug in managing processes like customer onboarding or other custom services you offer to your customers. Thanks to a DXP it's possible to personalize your messaging and provide experiences that are relevant to a given user at a given moment. Obviously, that's a huge advantage from the client-facing perspective. However, your team members will also notice the benefits of implementing a robust digital experience platform. How so? It will empower them to manage the full user journey better and capture meaningful customer data. Additionally, they won't need to juggle multiple systems to manage different channels and services.
All in all, you could say that a DXP takes the capabilities of a CMS and extends them to delight your customers in new ways. Still, a CMS may as well keep being the basis of your digital experience ecosystem. Let's take a look at different options for building a DX platform.
Do you need dedicated DXP software?
When browsing the web trying to learn more about available DXP vendors, you'll likely notice that there are products that try to encompass different DXP capabilities in one tool (e.g., Adobe Experience Manager), but you can also build a hybrid DXP.
The second approach allows you to turn your headless CMS towards a DXP using well-designed API-driven architecture. Such a strategy enables you to stay flexible and plug new features into your offer when needed. At Macopedia, we help our clients take their customer experience to the next level by creating scalable digital experience platforms. In the next part of this blog post, we'll tell you a bit more about how we make it happen.
Our approach to building digital experience platforms with a headless CMS
We've already mentioned that a CMS may remain the core of your experience management activities, but it needs to be headless. This way, we have full control over how the content is displayed and where. At Macopedia, we use TYPO3—a CMS that combines enterprise-level security with a very flexible setup. By connecting this tool with a custom frontend app and integrating the whole DXP ecosystem with external APIs, we can create a powerful Digital Experience Platform.
Such a setup, based on the microservices architecture, works great for many organizations as it can be easily tailored to the particular needs of different brands. It's extremely important, as companies often have to quickly adapt to changing market conditions and customer expectations.
For instance, one of our clients needed to rapidly adapt their strategy to the new circumstances caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It's a company from the health and fitness industry, so they needed to find a way to engage their client base with experiences that were still accessible even during the nation-wide lockdown. Their idea was to roll out a series of virtual services like online workout sessions or consultations with dieticians and fitness experts. Thankfully, we were able to quickly plug these new digital experiences into their platform—all due to its flexible setup and API-driven architecture. You can read the full case study of implmenting TYPO3 Headless & PWA here and the blog post is here.
Yet another open source initiative that helps us to transform companies towards a better customer experience is TYPO3PWA. It's our strategy of harnessing the benefits of progressive web applications while keeping excellent content management capabilities for the company. Essentially, the organization can keep using the powerful TYPO3 CMS, but their customers get to enjoy the experience of browsing a native-like mobile app. At the same time, the DXP architecture makes it possible to easily enhance the company's offer with new experiences across channels and customer touchpoints.
As you can see, creating personalized experiences for your audience is possible by combining the power of a headless CMS with third-party APIs. Building such a digital experience platform could be a great way for your organization to offer personalized content and relevant experiences. You won't have to wait long to see how that affects the bottom line of your business.