Diffusion of Digital Experience Platforms — Eric Jan C. van Putten // Dynamicweb

Quotes

• “DXP has no very well agreed upon definition. If we take the analyst leaders on that one, it comes down to it being a technology that allows you to manage digital touchpoints to offer the best possible customer experience.” - Eric Jan“Digital touchpoints to offer the best possible customer experience, to me this sounds similar to CDP, CRM where you’re understanding what your customers behaviors are and then you’re building triggers to be able to communicate with them effectively. It’s like a word-salad of three acronyms.” - Ben “You’re right. Customer data is often at the center. You need to be able to put a user database in there so that you are able to trigger based on all kinds of different sources to make sure that you can offer the best possible customer experience.” - Eric Jan“So it seems like a DXP is not only a platform that understands the user behavior but also has the capability of triggering experiences for external communication and also iterating your internal tools, modifying your websites, changing what your product offers are and then also communicating that.” - Ben“Often the basis can be found in content management solutions. That seems to be the agreed upon base. From here it gets a little bit foggy, there are CMS pure players that refer to themselves as well as an experience platform. Personally, I think you need to do a bit better. You need at least digital marketing campaigning, email marketing solution, and a form of user management.” - Eric Jan“It doesn’t have to be a full-blown customer data platform but you do need to have some of these elements in there before you can start referencing to yourself as a DXP. And here you also have the vendors that go based on pure integrations as they are basically a few miss. You have the Frankensteins that have bought every piece of technology out there and bolted it together in an unhinged manner just to be able to cover the enterprise needs.” - Eric Jan“Luckily, there are many DynamicWeb customers that are able to use a solution to drive better customer experiences, and to drive e-commerce success. What we see is, what is possible of course, with our platform and/or with a DXP in general. It doesn’t really mean that it gets used to its full potential.” - Eric Jan“Personally, I believe that for example personalization, although Gartner is chairing that it’s on its way back. I think it was never really out there enough. I think it’s a missed opportunity. If you are able to showcase in a B2B environment that you are able to really understand the visitor on their first visit, on the first page load, that you understand what industry they are, that you can adjust the titles, the images and all that, imagine how much better effect that has instead of pushing your same static website to everyone.” - Eric Jan“And that can also be applied, in a recent study by Gartner, into commerce and e-commerce. If you are able to personalize the homepage, a return visitor is able to see a different kind of product they might have been browsing before that has a bottom line effect. So DXP can actually be used in exciting ways but there are relatively little brands out there that really maximize this.” - Eric Jan “I would say there are three most recognized DXP companies. We have Adobe, Episerver, Sitewards. These are the big guys out there with venture capitalists behind it so they have the so-called market share. But there’s also a question of course of what products are they offering and how much of that is really used.” - Eric Jan“I think we need to double check what a platform really is because if a platform is not built from the ground up, then it’s basically a potential of best of breed solutions. It might still be sold as a platform. Is it really a platform, I think it can be up for discussion.” - Eric Jan“Now, if you really have a platform usually after initial set up costs and get-go, your cost can be lower than having multiple solutions out there. It’s also about reusing content, having all the data deeply integrated into each other.” - Eric Jan “If you have an e-commerce solution that is in the same platform as your content in the same platform as your let’s say, email marketing, whatever happens wherever, all these systems with quite simple rules can try to make a better experience.” - Eric Jan“If you’re talking true integration and some of these heavier experience platforms are a combination of integrations with best of breed, now you need to actually really, deeply integrate and that actually brings complexity and cost.” - Eric Jan“Going back to our conversation yesterday about the value of point solutions as opposed to platforms, I’m thinking about the same thing as DXP. There is some parallel here where when you are thinking about choosing a platform, it is not just a question of feature set.” - Ben “The problem is, are those tools have to have the connectors to be able to communicate with each other, is your data going to flow seamlessly, and do you have the resources and team to be able to manage that process as opposed to moving towards a digital experience platform, you’re getting all-in-one but you’re stuck with their feature set.” - Ben “Then the last thing is, you also have to look at costs. Maybe there’s variable cost for the number of emails that you’re sending through your point solutions where it might not be the case with the all-in-one DXP. So these are long-term decisions that you really need to evaluate the marketplace and think about how you want to operate your organization. Are you willing to go through the pain of iterating and building your stack? Or do you want one solution that you’re going to really, deeply integrate into your operations.” - Ben “It all comes down to where you are in the digital maturity slider as a company. Where do you want to go? What are the goals that you want to achieve? And based on that, you can go pure platform, you can go pure best of breed, but you can also go with a hybrid model. You will use 80% of what the platform has to offer and then for the last part, you actually do go best of breed, adding integration, complexity and cost.” - Eric Jan