The rise of the digital experience platform (DXP)

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) is defined as “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualised digital experiences.” 

It seems only fitting that technology has kept pace with necessity and that DXPs now serve as the backbone for customer experience. But how do they differ from content management systems (CMS) and what makes them more adept at designing and delivering a superior digital experience?

DXP vs. CMS 

Content management systems (CMS) help companies create, manage, and share digital content with their audiences. A CMS is the back end of a website, from which you can push content to the front end for your visitors to consume. Even today, smaller businesses can use a basic CMS to build and maintain a stand-alone website and mobile site because its core principles — multiple user access, asset management, version control, authoring workflows and content management — are still fundamental to the delivery of great digital experiences. 

However, today’s expectations of an exceptional customer experience require much more sophisticated capabilities, like content personalisation and multi experience marketing abilities and the basic CMS cannot address such sky-high demands. 

Web content management systems (WCMS) were designed to fulfil these needs, bringing the ability to collect data on user behaviour and to define personas in order to target specific customers with tailored messages using rules-based personalisation. They also enabled companies to test out their new content tailoring prowess across multiple channels. 

But while WCMS empowered marketers to manage customer experiences themselves (with pre-built templates, forms, pages, and drag-and-drop widgets), they were notoriously difficult to connect and integrate with other essential tools. And the need for even more sophisticated digital marketing capabilities like stronger content personalisation, better collaboration support, A/B testing, and deeper analytics meant that more and more third-party tools were being tagged on. This resulted in a bloated, complex, and difficult-to-maintain technology stack, where processes were clunky and data was buried in silos. So even if organisations had all the data and all the right tools, they might still not be able to deliver good digital experiences. 

The need for a digital experience platform (DXP) was made clear. With a focus on cross-channel consistency and interoperability, this solution connects the entire data architecture and technology to enable the creation, management, and delivery of contextualised digital experiences on a large scale across all channels and touchpoints, as well as the seamless integration of analytics tools that enable an ongoing loop of customer experience optimisation.