A Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a suite of tools designed for multi-channel customer engagement. It centralises the way businesses track, interact with, and personalise experiences for their customers across the customer lifecycle, on all channels. This lets you deliver a unified, personal experience for your users.
DXP’s typically have a Content Management System (CMS) at their core, and are accompanied by capabilities such as analytics, marketing automation, personalisation, media management, and e-commerce. These capabilities together make up the DXP.
DXPs are an essential bit of kit for organisations. They provide the infrastructure needed to unify customer interactions across multiple touchpoints and channels. This in turn enables the creation of seamless, personalised, and scalable customer experiences ensuring consistency in messaging, branding, and user experience.
DXPs come in two flavours: monolithic and composable
Monolithic DXPs
A monolithic DXP is a collection of pre-integrated tools, with a CMS at their core. Think of tools like HubSpot, Adobe Experience Cloud and Optimizely.
The tools in a monolithic DXP are built directly into the CMS by the vendor, and are designed to only work with that CMS. While set-up and maintenance is easy—as it’s all integrated out of the box—they often fall short in capabilities, and often focus exclusively on the web channel.
Monolithic DXPs are often all or nothing. Because these tools are fully integrated, your subscription typically covers them all—even if you’re not using them or don’t need them. Seeing all these pre-integrated tools feels like great value, but in reality organisations hardly ever up integrating more than the CMS, and find the extra features fall flat when they try to use them.
A monolithic DXP simplifies access control, as it’s typically one account per user with one control panel for managing permissions across the entire DXP. This could be further made easier with the integration of SSO and automatic role assignment.
This extends to user access, as user’s need to login to just one platform to access the entire monolithic DXP. They are able to jump between tools within the monolithic DXP without needing to remember what each part is called.
Organisations often find themselves changing their processes to fit the monolithic DXP, rather than the DXP adapting to their organisation. This stems from a “one-size-fits-all” approach, which can make using the monolithic DXP frustrating, or abandoning features that just don’t work.
Lastly, a monolithic DXP is a walled garden. While you’re in it it can be great, but if you try to leave you’re in for a lot of trouble. This can lock organisations into rising costs that they can’t afford, with the only other option being a full and costly migration out of the walled garden entirely. Depending on the org size, this could be impossible without significant impact on operations.
Composable DXPs
Next-generation DXPs are built from composable elements. This composability allows teams to select the best-in-class products to combine, producing a DXP specific to their business needs and processes.
For example, you might use Sanity as your Content Management System, Segment as your Customer Data Platform (CDP), Mixpanel for Analytics, MailChimp for marketing automation, and HubSpot for its Customer Relationship Manager (CRM).
You’ll likely see that this composability has an up-front cost: unlike a monolithic DXP, the elements of the DXP need to be integrated before they can be used. But this composability allows adding, removing, and swapping elements as your organisation grows and changes.
It means there’s no longer a walled garden. If you find a new platform for analytics that you like, swap your DXP to use that instead, integrating it into your stack and removing the old platform. If costs to use one of your elements is increasing and no longer worth it, you can just drop that element.
Building your DXP
Composable DXP’s aren’t bought, they’re built. This gives your organisation the chance to tailor your DXP stack to exactly what you need. The only requirement is that the composable elements are API-first so they can communicate.
While the next-generation of composable DXPs provide your organisation with long term flexibility and control, the up-front effort needs to be considered. You have to build your DXP right. This is where the real work comes in, and where you’re going to need a really good team to do it.
When choosing that team, here’s some questions to help:
- If we want to swap an element of our composable DXP, how would you manage that and what’s your migration process?
- What would you recommend for adding personalisation to our DXP, and how would you integrate that?
- How will we manage access control and user accounts for our DXP?
You’re looking for clear, detailed and specific answers—avoid anyone that’s vague or talks around the questions. These should be answered plainly and should give you confidence in the team.
You’re also looking for a team that will dig into how your organisation works, figure out what’s important to your team and lay it out plainly for you. You should have a much clearer picture of your own organisation after working with them.
AI can Enhance your DXP at Scale
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the capabilities of Digital Experience Platforms, making them smarter, more adaptive, and more personalised than ever before. By integrating AI, DXPs can analyse vast amounts of data in real time, enabling organisations to deliver highly tailored customer experiences at scale.
Improved Analytics and Insights
AI-powered analytics tools in DXPs go beyond standard metrics. They can identify patterns, forecast trends, and uncover actionable insights that help organisations optimise their digital strategies. Tools like Mixpanel with AI integrations enable predictive analytics, giving businesses a competitive edge.
Automation and Efficiency
AI automates repetitive tasks such as content tagging, media management, and customer segmentation, freeing up teams to focus on strategic initiatives. For example, AI can automatically categorise and optimise media assets or generate content recommendations based on user intent.
Conversational Interfaces
With AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants, DXPs can facilitate seamless customer interactions across platforms. These tools not only enhance user support but also drive engagement by responding to customer needs in real time.
Accessibility and Inclusivity
AI technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision enhance accessibility within DXPs. From auto-generating alt text for images to providing real-time translations, AI ensures digital experiences are inclusive and accessible to a global audience.
By incorporating AI into your DXP, you can achieve a level of sophistication and efficiency that transforms customer interactions, streamlines operations, and future-proofs your digital ecosystem. At Hex, we can guide you through leveraging AI in your DXP to unlock its full potential.
At Hex, we specialise in creating DXPs tailored to your organisation's needs. We're a certified agency partner of leading platforms like Sanity, Vercel, and Mixpanel, and have the expertise to help you design and implement a composable DXP that works seamlessly for your business. Get in touch to explore how we can make it work for you.