Connect with Customers Better through a Digital Experience Platform

It’s crucial to create a meaningful and unified brand experience for your customers, one that delivers meaningful insights and measurable results. The good news: you can build it in tandem with the technologies you already use.

It’s no secret that every business wants—and needs—customers who are happy, satisfied, and loyal. Luckily, technology makes it possible. For years, organizations of all sizes have relied on solutions such as customer relationship management (CRM) software to connect with and track their customer bases. In today’s connected world, customer experience (CX) products of all kinds have made the business/customer relationship more of a two-way street, but now it’s time to level up.

A digital experience platform (DXP) lets businesses and brands build tailored cross-channel experiences for each individual customer by identifying opportunities for personalization and customer journey optimization. Managed well, these increasingly personal and customized customer experiences can deliver measurable, actionable insights that help maximize customer retention and ROI. When you’re able to measure performance across all your customer touchpoints, it’s easier to deploy innovative new offerings quickly, drive higher engagement, and earn more revenue. The unified brand experience and higher levels of customer satisfaction that a DXP delivers can have a direct and tangible impact on business performance.

Building an effective DXP requires expertise encompassing strategy, design, and engineering, especially when it comes to integrating this new technology with the CRM tools and other systems you may already have in place. Starting from square one is rarely an option for budget-minded CIOs and IT directors who are much more inclined to leverage what they already have in place and ensure that any new platform they adopt is suitably customizable.

What Customers Want, What a DXP Provides

More than two decades' worth of online shopping and eerily prescient online ads have taught customers to expect customized online experiences. Ideally, you’d know so much about each customer that no two customer experiences would ever be exactly alike, and those unique targeted experiences would be nothing short of delightful.

The idea of a DXP is relatively new, but simply put, it’s a centralized system that feeds apps, websites, or e-commerce systems with customized content for customers across multiple touchpoints. A key concept is relevancy. It’s not just about customization for its own sake. It’s about pushing the right content to the right place at the right time while the customer is on a research/buying journey or is simply asking for help. In the other direction, it’s about clearing regulatory hurdles and making sure that customers offer up information about their interests and habits in a way that’s both comfortable for them and legal.

For businesses that are already reliant on CRM technology such as Salesforce or SAP, the question is how to add the features of a DXP to the legacy systems in which they have already invested so much. How do you eliminate silos rather than create new ones, and even if you produce a plan, how do you actually implement it?

In some cases, it turns out that even when businesses have plenty of data in hand, they really don’t know all that much about what their customers want or how they behave, especially if they’ve relied on somewhat vague persona-based marketing in the past.

Businesses may be curious about a DXP, but they will want to see results quickly, something that may not be possible if they don’t already have the content and the roadmap in place to get up and running effectively. That’s why it’s sometimes wise to start with small steps, looking at the analytics programs, content management systems, or customer data platforms already in place and seeing how an agnostic DXP might tie in smoothly to deliver new measurable insights with minimal disruption right away. Even if the ultimate goal is full digital transformation, getting there through a steady and sensible roadmap with good KPIs that help you tie everything together intelligently is the right way to go. There’s something to be said for building on existing investments and momentum.

What the Ideal DXP Looks Like

A good DXP helps businesses differentiate themselves from their competitors, driving high levels of customer satisfaction even as those customers’ expectations continue to evolve. Think of a DXP as a next-generation content management system, tracking the customer’s journey through the entire lifecycle of a purchase to create meaningful experiences that inspire loyalty. What should you be looking for?

Getting Started with a DXP

Your path to a successful DXP implementation begins with questions. How can you:

·        Keep your business at the forefront of evolving consumer expectations?
·        Harness your organization's customer data to understand your customers better and interact with them more productively?
·        Launch a customer experience transformation that eliminates silos, increases speed, and nets a positive ROI, all while keeping a sharp eye on security and compliance?
·        Embrace new kinds of KPIs and measurements that are crucial to understanding and improving the customer experience?

CI&T’s DXP Strategy 

CI&T strives to create DXP solutions that measure and optimize unified multi-channel customer experiences. Our core DXP expertise in strategy, design, and engineering help businesses optimize their customer journeys across three key areas:

·        Experience optimization: You create opportunities to optimize the customer experience to maximize acquisition or retention.
·        E-commerce: You increase conversion rates with content-driven e-commerce and personalized shopping experiences.
·        Data-Driven Personalization: You build greater brand engagement with personalization across the entire customer journey.

CI&T can work hand-in-hand with your team to create a unique DXP platform that sets you apart from your competitors, drives higher customer engagement, and positively impacts revenue. Your goals can include:  

·        Improved customer service performance
·        Higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
·        Enhanced employee productivity
·        Improved marketing effectiveness
·        Increase conversion rates and lifetime customer value

CI&T takes a measurability-first approach to customer experience and digital experience platforms. We offer a robust set of practices and frameworks to deliver the best customer experience possible:

·        CX measurement framework
·        Human-centered design
·        User testing
·        SEO and content strategy
·        Headless CMS design and implementation
·        Modular and flexible architecture
·        Low code
·        DAM/digital properties
·        ADA compliance for accessibility
·        Privacy and regulatory compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA)
·        Vertical DXP expertise in industries such as retail, financial services, and healthcare

A well-designed and successfully implemented DXP will help you better understand and interact with customers and keep them coming back. You can easily deploy it across any platform and connect to applications you already use, letting you take measure of your customer base in astonishing new ways. Your customers expect you to know what they want—even before they know it themselves. With a DXP, you can gain that insight and act on it to target your customers more precisely, improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, and ultimately increase your revenue.

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