Successfully implementing a DXP is a resource-consuming endeavor. This is why organizations must create a customer experience platform that sticks around for many years of support, enhancement, and extension.
To ensure your DXP is robust and scalable, you must ask many questions and ideate a platform that can last you for years.
But what are the right questions to ask?
Go through the checklist to discover the DXP needed before moving on to its implementation.
Before figuring out the specific channels and components you need to add to your DXP, you must get the basics right. Start by asking key questions like:
Some DXPs are better suited to a specific business mode. This is specifically true for ecommerce platforms.
A DXP should enable an organization to achieve its key success metrics. This is why it is a good idea to know what success looks like and work backward to find a DXP to help you meet those goals.
At this point, it’s quite easy to get lost in the number of requirements for the DXP. This is why you must scale back and focus on only a few critical requirements. This strategy will also help establish the core features and functionalities required within a DXP.
Figuring out whether an organization needs a monolithic or composable DXP is an important decision. Read more to understand the difference between monolithic vs. composable DXP and determine which DXP suits your business needs.
Evaluating your business's current and desired digital maturity based on key areas like reachability, personalization, flexibility, customer experience, simplicity, and ease of use is important to plan your DXP growth roadmap.
DXP can provide a single interface for creating and distributing content that is automatically optimized for each platform.
Organizations with multiple backend systems, which are not integrated, can gain the most from a DXP. Implementing a DXP will facilitate data sharing through custom APIs.
Ability to manage multiple input and output data streams, manage the marketing of multiple products or brands and manage thousands of sites with baselined security, governance, and best practices
Discover what you need to drive your customer and prospect interactions with your organization.
According to a report by Salesforce, customers expect all offers from organizations to be personalized. This is why if your organization doesn't have a personalization strategy, it needs one before finalizing any implementation strategy for a DXP. The good news is that organizations that opt for a composable DXP can easily add capabilities later.
The data flow will support organizational processes in numerous ways. This is why organizations must have a data warehouse and reporting strategy.
Discuss with stakeholders and understand their expectations before figuring out how to use data for analysis, reporting, and business planning.
Consolidate a list of tools that your organization needs for digital marketing. Figure out how these tools should work with the DXP.
Avoid purchasing a DAM unless your organization is willing to change its editorial workflow. If a DAM is required, figure out if it needs to integrate with any downstream systems.
CRM and ERP are vital repositories for a business. Before moving forward:
Data and Content are like the twin pillars of digital experience. CDP can help overcome traditional data capture and management approaches and can lead to the unification of digital data to deliver better business results.
A good editorial experience allows an editor to add content per an organization's goals. It should contribute to minimal frustration. Figure out what this means for your organization by answering questions like:
The complexity of the editorial workflow is usually indicated by the number of editors on the team. An organization with five or fewer editors is fine without a formal workflow imposed on the CMS. If there are more than five editors, a formal workflow is required.
Organizations in regulated industries like healthcare often need legal teams or product management to sign off on content changes. If that is required, the DXP must have strong editorial workflow capabilities.
Workflows around translations are required for organizations that publish content in multiple languages. This also heightens the complexity of the editorial requirements. Make sure to drill into how the DXP handles languages and locales.
It is essential to have clear expectations around caching and content publishing timelines at the start of the project. This makes it easier to align engineering’s caching strategy with the organization’s requirements.
Low-code site editing tools can be more inclusive for non-developers, collaborative, and agile, speeding up content publishing times by as much as 4x.
Laying out the required content types, taxonomy, and associated metadata and how the content should be structured for improved content discoverability and effectiveness. Also, identifying what content needs to be migrated, what needs to be archived/removed, and the new content that needs to be added.
Digital commerce enables customers to purchase goods and services. This experience must be optimized. And organizations should start that process by answering questions like:
Once commerce is thrown into the mix, the selection process becomes more complicated as every DXP has a different commerce strategy. One has to evaluate how well the DXP’s commerce strategy meets the organization’s requirements and how well the different commerce technology can suit other use cases.
Determine if the commerce requirements are browse-and-buy or something else. The specific commerce platform will be selected based on the requirements.
The choice between headless and side-by-side is critical as it greatly impacts an organization’s commerce platform support. While making this decision, be thoughtful about the implications of each approach, as there are drawbacks.
Poor architectural choice can make it challenging to adopt new 3rd party tools/software quickly and effectively. It can also lead to failure to properly integrate with legacy or in-house platforms and unable to modify commerce components for customized features.
Twenty years ago, monolithic systems were the only choice for organizations. But now, organizations can adopt more than a one-size-fits-all approach. Analyze what approach works best for your organization by answering the following questions.
If an organization wants to invest in a headless approach now or the next few years, it’s a good idea to opt for a composable DXP.
A decoupled or headless capability within the DXP is integral if a microservice strategy is required in the digital stack.
An organization might be ready for decoupled needs today or may not be ready for a few years. But one must consider if there are projects that will involve microcontent or sending content to other channels in the next few months. To evaluate the answer correctly, deep dive into the position of the DXP provider around headless.
Abandon the legacy theming layers of the most modern DXPs and go headless to address developer velocity. This allows organizations to embrace modern best practices. Composable DXPS are best suited for this.
Security is one of the key attributes for the success of a DXP. But defining and maintaining DXP security is a continuous process. And this process starts with discovering the security needs of an organization.
Getting caching right is an essential part of making any DXP implementation successful. Organizations need a clear plan to make sure that the DXP supports the specific caching requirements. Try having this discussion with a technical person on the call to ensure that all questions are answered.
As a safe practice, most mid-market and enterprise brands must act as though they are a target. DXPs need to offer organizations an edge protection service.
It is imperative to consider your business's attractiveness as a target to malicious users. Try answering questions like if your business operates in a controversial field and if a parent or subsidiary meets these criteria. Make sure that you implement a DXP that is committed to security.
SSO is a session and user authentication service that allows users to access multiple applications through a single login credential. Organizations should figure out if the DXP needs connectors or extensions for SSO.
With a DXP, organizations should build, manage, and deliver connected digital experiences that meet regulatory and industry-specific requirements.
Any new DXP implemented must have a section devoted to how it will comply with today's and tomorrow's regulatory requirements. Organizations in the US, Canada, and Europe must be ADA-compliant. And organizations that process the personal data of EU citizens need to be GDPR compliant.
Make sure that you ask the DXP provider about support for regulatory compliance.
Handling healthcare data comes with heavy obligations. And if your organization works within this industry, you must find a DXP provider that can ensure that the DXP is HIPPA compliant.
The last step in discovering a DXP requires hammering details like key stakeholders, organization goals, and what organizations might have missed.
Find out all the folks within your organization who will be the stakeholders when launching a Digital Experience Platform. The stakeholders must be representative of the people who will be using the DXP daily or whose employment performance will be measured by the success of the digital project.
By doing this exercise, businesses can quickly identify if there are any misalignments in the project success between stakeholders. These misalignments should be addressed before moving forward.
This is a brief but important exercise. Try to get in touch with somebody who has been a key stakeholder in a DXP implementation project. Ask questions and look for advice.
Discovering a DXP project is a daunting task. You need to consider several essential factors, which can be very confusing.
At Axelerant, we implemented this DXP discovery questionnaire to re-engineer an intuitive, accessible, personalized, and secure DXP for the University of East London (UEL). The discovery questionnaire was used to resolve the high-level challenge of making it easy to find information about courses, programs, careers, immigration, and research work in a single place.
The discovery of the required DXP took five weeks, during which a design strategy was developed before laying out a technical implementation roadmap. The Axelerant team went back to continuous discovery after every technical delivery.
As a final result, Axelerant helped UEL move its website from Sitecore to Drupal to achieve a platform that offers powerful search functionality, inclusive accessibility, data and content personalization, and scalability.
If you are stuck discovering a DXP, the experts at Axelerant can help. Schedule a call to learn how.