What is a CRO audit?
When you’re starting an eCommerce business, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what
Ecommerce Consultant and Growth Strategist for small businesses
07592 629885 | Dominic Smith - Ecommerce Consultant
13 Feb 2024 Dominic Comments Off on The rise of the DXP platform
Many businesses are now looking to invest in a DXP (Digital Experience Platform) to supercharge their ability to grow using their assets and mapping out improved user journeys to support that growth.
To support this, CX has been integral to enhance customer loyalty, drive revenue growth, and increase lifetime value. In the competitive landscape, CX has surpassed price and product as the key driver for success.
With the proliferation of connected devices and the shift towards remote working, interactions between health-focused brands and their customers have predominantly become digital.
These organizations are now looking beyond CX and embracing a Total Experience (TX) mindset. This approach acknowledges that all stakeholders, including employees, customers, prospective customers, and vendors, desire seamless interactions with organizations. Merely focusing on education or acquisition is no longer sufficient; loyalty is fostered through both internal and external efforts.
Customer Experience (CX) refers to the overall interactions a customer has with a company across various touchpoints and phases of the customer lifecycle. It encompasses how customers perceive the value of these interactions.
Total Experience (TX) is a strategy that aims to create superior shared experiences by integrating the disciplines of user experience (UX), customer experience (CX), multi-experience (MX), and employee experience (EX).
To digitally showcase their brand to their target audiences, organizations utilize a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). This technical platform manages, delivers, and optimizes digital experiences consistently across all interactions and devices.
A Customer Journey Map is an essential component of the CX to TX strategy. It is a visual representation that illustrates the various interactions a person has with a company, including information gathering, buying stages, touchpoints, goals, motivations, and emotions. To achieve these goals, it is crucial to gain a deeper understanding of your consumers.
Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are specifically designed to help deliver connected experiences that differentiate brands from their competitors. However, if you are.
A significant portion, 44%, of organizations find it challenging to achieve a unified experience. This is understandable, as there are numerous factors to consider. These include defining the implementation and governance team, determining their responsibilities, and effectively utilizing social listening technology. The digital experience platform chosen plays a central role in this process.
Acquia, Sitecore, Adobe Experience Manager, and Optimizely are some of the leading DXPs available in the market. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the selection should be based on the specific needs of the organization. Ensuring a successful DXP implementation is crucial for delivering exceptional experiences to consumers. Once the platform is in place, it is essential to consolidate all known usage data to create personalized experiences for all customers.
Personalized paths lead to higher acquisition, retention, and employee engagement. By utilizing an implementation checklist, organizations can identify any gaps in their strategy and resources. This will help guide investment decisions. At the very least, the checklist should cover the three main areas necessary for a successful DXP implementation: the customer journey, organizational alignment, and technology infrastructure.
A customer journey map is a valuable tool for leading organizations to comprehend how different audiences interact with their brand, as well as their goals, motivations, and emotions. This map serves as a dynamic guide to identify and prioritize interactions that enable customers to achieve their objectives. By truly understanding the path each audience takes towards their desired outcome, organizations can make adjustments and enhancements to the DXP, ensuring seamless experiences and faster goal attainment for consumers. The user experience across all digital channels and touchpoints is a direct reflection of your brand's TX. To enhance brand loyalty and the value of your business, customer journey maps and the overall user experience are of utmost importance.
Once the journeys are mapped and you understand what each of the audience segments are looking to accomplish digitally, it’s time to decide which areas to tackle first. Examine each touchpoint or interaction, along with all of its supporting data, to identify areas where you can help consumers get what they need while helping your business meet its own goals. In looking at the digital experience from all angles, the value for consumers, employees, and partners/vendors becomes clear (TX).
The choice of DXP can help connect the dots and determine which additions or streamlining opportunities will provide the highest value to the business and speed the progress toward total experience.
When you have addressed steps 1 to 3, your should be in a position where you have a raft of use cases fully developed and ready to start testing out. These may take the form of full AB tests within your CRO team or may rely on integration with your data engineers for example to fully support the data required to support testing. The DXP is a powerful platform but can only be fully utilized if the information architecture is there to support the use cases.
Below is a graphic from the Bloomreach site which clearly illustrtes the ideal architecture needed for a fully effective DXP - in this case with Shopify.
Premier Farnell are a leading distributor of electronics parts globally and, as part of their Digital Transformation, they recognized that the ability to trade and merchandise both product and content was severely hampered by the lack of any CMS, poor support for content and a typically laborious management of assets.
Moving into a world where the business wanted to invest more in Ecommerce as part of that Digital Transformation, I led a small project team to go off and research (alongside McKinsey) the best and most relevant DXPs out in the market. After building a set of Use Cases which we then used to go through a fairly rigorous selection procedure to onboard the selected DXP - which was Bloomreach.
Bloomreach provided the platform for Premier Farnell to really supercharge their ability to personalize audience segments, use more of their assets for campaigns. develop personalized user journeys, improve their product recommendations and ultimately use more insights to identify trading opportunities to deliver growth.
I have added a few videos below specifically summing up the opportunities we saw with Bloomreach for both Personalization and AI - these will also be completely relevant for other DXP platfoms but give you an idea of the power of a DXP.
If you need any help in choosing, onboarding or mapping out the use cases to be able to fully utilize the power of these platforms then please get in touch.
When you’re starting an eCommerce business, it’s important to have a clear understanding of what
What is a DXP and what opportunities does it provide a business? This post gives
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