Examining the Realities of DXPs
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According to CMSWire’s State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 report, more than 90% of surveyed respondents said delivering quality digital customer experiences was important for them. Amongst the tools that respondents use for delivering these experiences, “Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)” ranked a lowly 18th, with only 14% of respondents using those within their organizations.
Perhaps this poor showing indicates how hardly anyone knows what exactly a DXP is. At Real Story Group, we believe the phrase was originated by failing portal platform vendors looking for a fresher label, and then adopted by Web Content Management (WCM) vendors looking to acquire their way to growth. Let’s assume in any case that respondents in the CMSWire survey assumed that DXPs represent single-solution offerings.
Clearly there’s a gap between what vendors think is a DXP and how enterprise digital managers look at this space. Let’s examine this further.
Vendors and their analyst industry shills claim that DXPs exist to provide a wide range of functionality. While the core is mostly around web content management, extended capabilities could include personalization, CRM, marketing automation, digital asset management, ecommerce, social media management and so forth. Some self-described vendors also want to provide capabilities such as customer data management and activation.
Some vendors claim they provide all these capabilities as part of a single, unified offering, but in reality a DXP will typically encompass a wide variety of tooling, with diverse architectures, usually cobbled together via acquisition. How did we get here?
Related Article: What Marketers Need for the Digital Experience Platforms Multivendor Reality
Portals tried to combine a broad range of functionality under a single umbrella. During their peak, you could find a “portlet” or “widget” for pretty much any functionality. You would then assemble them to create Portals that provided a variety of functionality ranging from discussion forums to employee intranets to process management portals.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors tried this, too. There were vendors providing Web Content Management (WCM), Document Management (DM), Business Process Management (BPM), Digital Asset Management (DAM), promising a unified repository and single source of truth for all your information needs.
We know what happened.
In both cases, there were two key reasons for failure of this “umbrellazation:”
I see a lot of similarities with the current crop of DXPs, and so we are witnessing similar phenomena. Several vendors are using DXP as the term to package broad functionality that enterprises increasingly want to purchase a’ la carte. While WCM still remains the core of most DXPs, vendors are bundling all kinds of extended capabilities ranging from ecommerce to customer data platforms (CDPs).
DXPs are attempting to repeat what ECM and Portal vendors tried earlier. They want to provide a broad range of functionality as part of a platform. Sure, they’ve added some modularity, some cloud-native services and other newer concepts to keep up with times. Many vendors will also tell you they provide an “end-to-end” solution or that they offer a single package.
But look under the hood carefully, and you'll see most "DXP" offerings actually consist of a panoply of disparate products and architectures. Many of the so-called DXP vendors have cobbled together their suites based on several acquisitions. As a result, their offering is not really a single tool in terms of user experience and architecture but often a badly cobbled together package of multiple products and tools.
DXPs are not topping any popularity charts, but they still get a disproportionate share of discussions in industry fora. If you’ve been considering DXPs, it’s time to rethink your strategy. An “end-to-end solution” or a single platform to do everything does not exist out-of-the-box.
Therefore, consider building or composing your own Digital Experience Stack (DXS), based on capabilities that you need, using tools that best meet those needs. The larger the enterprise, the more likely this will constitute a composable stack, with offerings from multiple vendors, with more modern, integration-friendly tools.
What you need for managing digital experiences is a composable stack that a modern WCM needs to live in. One irony is that this actually constrains — in a good way — what you need a WCM for. You don’t need your WCM platform to provide personalization, outbound email marketing, chat, DAM, or ecommerce or other services where it’s not going to excel.
Even in a composable stack environment like the one above, you will still see major vendors pitching you a multi-platform solution, all (or mostly) from them. Caveat emptor:
Best wishes as you compose an omnichannel stack of the future. Feel free to ping me with any questions or comments!
