Digital experience platform: five effective tactics for producing perfect results in terms of customer centricity

A word on the customer experience, the digital experience platform and simplifying work steps.

The latest adesso Customer Experience Study (CX Study) reveals that the topic of professional customer centricity has finally caught on in most companies. Seventy-two per cent of the respondents from companies rank customer experience management as being of considerable to key importance. Among managers, the rate is even higher, at 83 per cent.

Winning 45 per cent of the votes casts for which success driver is key for a successful customer experience, ‘consistent focus on customer needs’ is clearly in first place, making it a prime time to use a powerful digital experience platform (DXP). Companies are now becoming increasingly skilled at designing positive customer experiences. The new German customer experience has long since morphed into a digital customer experience or digital experience. For a long time now, it has no longer been a question of whether professional customer experience management is provided, but rather it’s a question of which strategies and tools are used to repeatedly place customers at the centre of every business dealing and to do so more and more. Consultants have answers to all the questions along the customer journey, and software manufacturers are fine-tuning product features concerning digital experience management.

Editing, design, management – what’s the DXP all about?

adesso’s long-standing partner Ibexa provides the best possible demonstration of the current possibilities in terms of functions for supporting companies in their daily business dealings with customers – namely, their newly released DXP version 4.0 – on behalf of the leading providers in the field of digital experience platforms. But it’s about more than just presentation, user guidance or a personalised approach. I will provide you with five tactics for significantly improving the editing process in a digital experience platform.

Tactic 1: Using an integrated PIM for more efficient product data management

Many companies are familiar with the suffering editors and product managers sometimes have to endure: dealing with hundreds of thousands of articles. A sophisticated product catalogue function can help with this significantly by providing organisation for product management tasks via a dedicated PIM (Product Information Management) component that gives editors complete control over product data and prices, while simultaneously improving search and filter options for customers.

This enables users to store complex product information, edit product attributes and define product variations and bundles that can be used to appeal to buyers. The benefit here is that user-defined pricing strategies can be defined in different ways by designing prices based on market segments, the buyer’s organisation or the consumers’ individual characteristics.

The advantage of a product catalogue as a native component of the DXP is obvious: the redundancy of an external PIM system reduces costs related to integration, hosting and maintenance.

Tactic 2: Using an intuitive user interface for faster editing

Visually appealing websites and portals are one thing; unnecessary clicks and getting lost in web pages are something else. Some companies are all too familiar with this. That’s why, in the world of unique customer experiences, it’s also about providing user interfaces that use sophisticated graphics and navigation concepts that make it seemingly easy and straightforward to access content.

Because this type of optimised user interface is extremely intuitive, editors who use them can find their way around much more quickly, which allows them to carry out upcoming tasks more independently and save more time in the process.

Visual features such as darkening the background of the main navigation menu to make the tabs and tool icons stand out more and separate the navigation area from the content area can also be of assistance. Coordinated and thoroughly-tested colour concepts, icons, tabs and buttons make the editors’ job easier and stimulate workflow by significantly reducing the number of clicks or actions required to complete a task.

Tactic 3: Using internal and external data sources to improve content or product recommendations

As we’ve learned from personalisation giants such as Amazon, nothing beats perfectly tailored recommendations for products and content. However, many DXPs only offer this sort of recommendation management to customers who also store their data in the DXP’s own content repository. With the Ibexa DXP, content and products that are stored in external systems, such as PIMs or ERPs, can now also be recommended. Every recommendation setting can be managed via the DXP interface, regardless of where the content is stored.

However, a hybrid version can also be used in which part of the content is stored in the DXP’s own content repository and another part is stored in external systems. Additional cross-content recommendations make it even more perfect. This enables interested parties to be able to do things such as read a specific article (which is stored in the DXP’s own content repository) and then receive recommendations for an article that’s stored in a PIM system, for example – the same is true for defined user groups (segments), who can receive suggestions based on their interests, location or purchasing behaviour.

Tactic 4: Using a versatile pricing system to configure prices with a high degree of flexibility

Different countries means different prices – but that’s not all. Modern e-commerce inevitably requires customer-specific or group-specific pricing. Therefore, adding a highly flexible price management system directly to the DXP solution’s user interface can be a tactic that makes all the difference. In such a system, different user groups are created, individual customers are assigned to groups and general and specific pricing rules are created and managed.

Examples of different customer groups in B2B situations include resellers, retailers and franchise holders. The company that proves to be successful is the one that has a well-structured yet simple way to flexibly manage its e-commerce pricing rules for its various customer groups in real time and with a high degree of adaptability. General pricing rules, for example, those that apply discounts to a specific customer group, can be easily assigned when using a pricing system such as this. However, the pricing system can be adjusted to a much greater degree – down to the product category or individual product itself. This is a powerful tactic, as it ensures a high level of customer orientation and customer service on the supplier side via complex B2B pricing scenarios – and across multiple currencies.

Tactic 5: Using an online editor to improve formatting

Content marketing requires complex content to be processed quickly. Of course, this means that it often happens in practice that content is copied from other sources, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs. However, everyone knows that this results in either the original formatting being partially lost or errors occurring on the website. A contemporary JavaScript rich text editor with a WYSIWYG interface for creating links and managing images or tables can provide a very valuable remedy in such a situation.

The advantages are obvious: effortless insertion of copied texts, tables and images from various external programs as well as much simpler and clearer work in the online editor without making mistakes or losing formatting.

Conclusion

Creating digital experiences is a challenging job for companies and their respective editors every day. By using modern, powerful tools, such as the Ibexa DXP, certain tactics can be implemented in such a way that the employees in the marketing areas of the companies can also generate completely different effects in terms of ‘better’, ‘faster’ and ‘significantly more’ positive customer experience.

Are you already familiar with our current adesso CX study? Click here to download.

Would you like to learn more about exciting topics from the adesso world? Then take a look at our blog posts that have appeared so far.