Break down the silos hurting your business and leverage a DXP for seamless UX strategies

As we embrace a multitude of digital platforms and the demand for remote experiences grows, organizations are struggling to provide a tailored, context-aware user experience (UX). We’d like to address that and explore the transition from one-size-fits-all models to composable digital experience platforms (DXPs).

According to the Global Digital Platform Power Index, there are 370 top 'digital platforms' globally, representing an estimated annual revenue of $1.87 trillion and 371 billion average monthly users. USA-based global digital platforms (like Google, Twitter/X, Facebook, and others) “take” 90% of the users. One important demographic that is setting the baseline for digital experiences and expectations from brands is Gen Z, the first generation of true digital natives.

Guiding principles by Gartner®, systematized in their Customer Experience CORE model, can serve as a roadmap to navigate this transformation.

Discover how a composable DXP can resolve the issues Gartner raises and empower your organization to meet the dynamic expectations of today’s digital users and build a competitive advantage.

Years ago, we occasionally checked in on one or two online platforms, so optimizing UX for specialized tasks within each made perfect sense. However, these days, we’re using various platforms more frequently. According to Statista, an internet user accesses at least 11 digital platforms daily.

It’s only natural that this development results in clunky experiences that either don’t respect the platform’s context or fail to tailor their messaging to the target audiences they’re trying to reach. The manual process that worked well for a handful of platforms just breaks down under the volume of platforms and audiences that now need to be considered.

The one-size-fits-all business model is quickly dying out, and many companies are starting to notice how exchanges with different stakeholders shift, whether that’s consumers, employees, or business partners.

According to Gartner®, “[o]rganizations providing services have often been caught unaware and unresponsive to their customers' needs. Customers want more empathy and flexibility from the organizations with which they do business.”

Many organizations have been unable to respond to their customers’ needs because most are trapped in the “Customer Management Industrial Complex” – a persistent network of technology providers, service providers, and customer end-user organizations involved in the management of customer relationships.

That could be a good sign. However, this network often emphasizes operational efficiency while claiming to prioritize customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, this focus on short-term profits tends to overshadow and undermine the importance of nurturing long-term customer relationships.

So, we can see that traditional channel-centric thinking doesn’t result from stubbornness. But we can also observe why it leads to siloed UX strategies. For most businesses, this equates to monolithic platforms undermining a persona-driven experience for customers and employees.

Whether you’re dealing with employees, customers, partners, citizens, or students, it’s crucial to understand the reason behind their expectations before you can develop a suitable UX strategy. The last five years probably brought along more changes for each one of us than the decade before them. That’s because the pandemic and the economic crisis have had a long-lasting impact on our consumer behavior.

The impact of COVID-19 on short- and medium-term consumer behavior has been researched by analysts. People were asked whether they had bought a category more often during the COVID-19 crisis, split by whether they had bought it online before or not.

The consumer data clearly shows that 25% to 45% of individuals who shopped online in a particular category before COVID-19 significantly increased their online shopping during the pandemic and have continued to do so at levels higher than before.

Many of us have grown accustomed to working fully remotely or increasingly shopping online, which means we’ve all come to expect streamlined user experiences, be that in an office app or an online store.

While it was important to align your customer data management strategy with the digital world before, it’s now an absolute imperative. Not only that, it’s essential that every customer journey is individually optimized. This requires the ability to systematically translate customer status intelligence into personalized experiences reflecting the person’s relationship with your organization.

The answer lies in composable DXPs. However, according to Gartner®, there’s a caveat:

“Technology vendors are progressing slowly toward composable DXPs and are unlikely to reach a composable UX in the next five years. Multiexperience platforms (MXDPs) and some low-code application platforms (LCAPs) provide a degree of composable UX across digital channels, but typically at the expense of lock-in to their tools and runtime platforms. Technology vendors are mostly only starting down the path of composability. Modularity of products, pricing, low-code approaches and headless content delivery are all precursors. Application leaders in charge of CX (customer experience) must start architecting a composable UX strategy now, and urge their software vendors to provide that capability too.”

To implement a successful organization-wide composable UX strategy, Gartner® recommends the following guiding principles: modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery. These correspond to customized and yet streamlined experiences across different platforms.

One example to illustrate this in the report references how different digital experiences are tailored to various job roles.

If a localization manager and a digital marketing manager log in to the same platform, they shouldn’t be greeted with the same data, requiring them to sift through documents irrelevant to their roles. Instead, one should only access translation workflows packaged business capabilities for content delivery, whereas the other should engage in campaign optimization and customer segmentation.

Both may work on the content repository and presentation, but they view it based on their respective roles and permission rights. Unfortunately, the most mainstream solutions still prevent this level of collaboration and individualization.

Gartner® recommends: “Apply the Principles of Total Experience to Bridge the Digital Experience Gap by Linking CX, UX, EX and MX. (...) Experiences are ultimately determined by the feelings, emotions, and memories accumulated through observation and interaction. Digital experiences usually start with an interaction that leads to participation, then to engagement, and on to satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy. These outcomes are the goals of the CX discipline, as well as the EX discipline, which improves productivity, retention, monetization, and market share. The four pillars of TX are inextricably interlinked.”

For Gartner®, the answer to those challenges lies within the Customer Experience CORE model, and the tailored views for your team described above serve as its foundation. Under an uncoordinated setup, where everyone is overwhelmed because they have access to assets irrelevant to their roles, your team may struggle to act on insights about a client’s status and preferences. Maybe Sales keeps sending an offer they already acted on, or Marketing still sends emails in Spanish, although the customer has informed Data Processing they speak French.

To adequately document a client’s interactions with your company, we understand why Gartner® developed a model flexible enough to respect that, despite comparable demographics, every customer is different. This is where the four guiding principles of composability, your internal processes, and customer profiles meet. The synergy between all four allows for informed analytics strategies, product lines, and technology choices underlying your points of interaction.

There’s no doubt that a DXP directly reflects the needs arising from our expanding use of digital platforms. Still, a composable DXP will address the shifting expectations more adequately than a monolithic one.

Using a composable DXP allows you to still rely on a centralized content management system for cross-channel consistency in your branding while also enabling enhanced personalization, both for team efficiency and marketing. Because of its composability, it’s better suited to adapt included tools, thus future-proofing your business for any future challenges.

Customers don’t just expect a personalized experience; they deserve it. And with a composable DXP, you can deliver this with less work than your traditional setup ever did. So, if you’re thinking about innovative strategies to respond to tough market conditions, a fine-tuned strategy that makes every client feel seen might be it.

Curious to learn more? Download the full Gartner® report here.