Elements of Digital Customer Experience
The newest acronym buzzing around technology is DXP or Digital Experience Platform. What does it mean? Why should you care? In this article we’ll breakdown the origins of the digital experience platform, its various components and why it matters. Lastly, we’ll help you understand how the WP Engine Digital Experience Platform can help you win online.
Key Elements the Digital Customer Experience
Gartner defines a digital experience platform (DXP), as “an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.”
Essentially, the DXP exists to facilitate a customer experience that is highly intuitive, reasonably entertaining, unquestionably performant, and personalized for each user.
Startups and Fortune 500 companies alike are competing for relevance online. To do that, they must maintain a digital presence that both informs and entertains. It’s extremely challenging for today’s digital experience creators to stay cutting edge and keep pace with new technology, while also staying on top of management and maintenance.
WordPress and WP Engine help alleviate the burden of management and maintenance, allowing large and small companies to focus on more important things.
Multiple Touchpoints
In the age of endlessly accessible information and comparitivity, the customer journey is convoluted and drawn out. A study by Episerver showed that 63% of people online shop at least once a month but shopping doesn’t always lead to purchase.
Because online shopping is always accessible, many customers are doing more than just shopping for a product; 29% are visiting an eCommerce site to compare prices and 9 percent are visiting the site for inspiration.
The customer journey, the path someone takes to becoming a full-blown paying customer, is full of touch points that are make or break. These touchpoints are both offline and online and can often include lengthy periods of inactivity.
The digital experience is more than just getting people to your site. It’s more than awareness; digital experiences are essential for building loyalty and customer satisfaction post-purchase. Customer journey mapping, the process of documenting this customer journey, is important for understanding your audience and adapting to the future.
A Digital Experience Platform helps you create a suitable and engaging customer experience across your various online touchpoints. A DXP will help you meet your customer or prospect across various platforms, make it personalized, and integrate it with the most relevant technologies in your customer’s life.
Lastly, a DXP will help you analyze and uncover at which touchpoints you are succeeding and where your customers are dropping off. DXPs are equipped with powerful analytics technology that allow you to access and comprehend powerful data.
While the DXP operates differently for different brands because of their various needs, you can basically understand it as one service that uses integrated technologies to facilitate experiences across multiple touchpoints. This all stems from one central platform. In this case, that central platform is WordPress.
Emotions
Part of using a digital experience platform to build your site is establishing your brand and company identity. People no longer only care about price and product when deciding what to buy and what services to use.
This is especially true about young people. A study conducted by WP Engine and The Center for Generational Kinetics found that 65% of Gen Z, the generation born after 1996, are more likely to buy from a company that contributes to social causes, while 30% have stopped buying from a company that contributes to a social cause they disagree with.
Trust is important. A DXP equips you with the agility to build a brand identity that is rooted in authenticity and reliability. Not only will customers feel comforted by the performance of your site, they’ll be inspired by the unique and dynamic way you present yourself.
Understanding What Customers Want
You have multiple touchpoints, data is flowing in from various places, and your brand is continuing to evolve. How does a DXP help you understand what your customers want?
DXP’s integrate technology so that everything is connected. You won’t have to outsource the desire to know what is resonating with customers and what isn’t. Powerful intelligence technologies are embedded into the DXP itself and compile the information so that it is understandable and actionable.
Have you ever wanted to reap the benefits of artificial intelligence on your site but are weary of the way it’ll interact with technology your already using? With a DXP, those technologies come together seamlessly, consistently perform well, and are maintained regularly.
WP Engine’s Pillars for the Digital Customer Experience
DXP’s provide various interactive capabilities to customers, partners and employees. A DXP allows for maintainable management giving companies control over their plethora of touchpoints. Finally, a DXP is built using flexible, top-notch architecture that works together seamlessly.
Most importantly, a DXP must be open. A open infrastructure empowers companies to grow, pivot, and adapt without sacrificing time spent on creative endeavors. The combination of open source WordPress CMS with WP Engine’s Digital Experience Platform for WordPress delivers five key outcomes: agility, performance, integration, and intelligence.
Agility
When it comes to digital transformation and progress, speed is undeniably valuable. For creative technologist, IT director, and developers speed means increased productivity, enhanced workflows, and accelerated project completion. WP Engine helps enable this via top-of-the-line tech tools that help you build faster and manage easier. Tools like SSH Gateway and Launch Readiness Assessments allow developers to build with agility.
For marketers, agility means having access to tools that allow for the creation of personalized experiences, quick and easy ways to collaborate, and the ability to produce content at scale. The usability of WordPress combined with WP Engine features like GeoTarget help marketers remain relevant and competitive.
Performance
Performance is the framework for success. Without Enterprise-level performance and reliable security, there is no use adding swanky design or dynamic aspects to your site. The WP Engine infrastructure delivers on speed, availability, scalability, security, and infrastructure so that you can deliver amazing digital experiences without being bogged down by maintenance and DevOps.
Worrying about infrastructure upkeep is expensive, WP Engine has top-notch technical partnerships in the form of Google Cloud and AWS to maintain high availability and multi-zone redundancy. Global Data Centers also ensure that customers all over the world enable quick data management and reduced latency.
WP Engine also helps ensure speed and scalability via our proprietary caching system and fully managed global CDN. Finally, our in-house security team is working around the clock to ensure that you and your customer’s sites are protected. Our threat detection and blocking system leverages WordPress-specific custom rules to provide protection at app and server levels; on average, we block over 150 million attacks a month.
Integration
We believe that the future is open and the best of the breed really is the best. WP Engine extends the digital and marketing hub with open integrations using best-of-breed solutions. Our platform combines proprietary technology and expert service with integrated partner technology to extend innovation
We work with best-in-class innovators like Cloudflare and provide the expertise on how the technology works with WordPress. Our support team is consistently recognized for its excellency and our customers appreciate that WordPress experts are accessible when they need them.
Intelligence
Digital experiences should be constantly evolving; stagnation usually means you aren’t improving. The WP Engine platform provides developers and marketers with intelligence tools that will help them get insight on the performance of their site and their content.
Tools like Page Performance and Application Performance Monitoring ensure that developers are getting visibility into their website speed and server response time.
Work With WP Engine To Improve the Digital Customer Experience
Specializing exclusively in WordPress, WP Engine sets the standard for building, launching, and maintaining enterprise-grade digital experiences. Our platform helps ensure creative agility, enterprise-grade performance, best-in-the-game integration, and actionable intelligence. Our motive is to help you win online with WordPress and we will support you, innovate for you, and guide you at every step in the progress
It’s no wonder that 5% of the Internet visits a WP Engine powered site everyday. Check out our plans and get started today.
