Why Tech Leaders Are Embracing Custom-Built DXPs

As the customer journey evolves to include more points of interaction, your tech stack needs to evolve with it. (Did you know the average digital journey today involves anywhere from 20-500 touchpoints?)

To serve your customers across all of them, you need a tech stack that is flexible and resilient: one where you can plug-and-play different solutions depending on evolving business needs; one that can adapt to changing consumer expectations and journeys.

In other words, you need a digital experience platform (DXP). Here's why — and how you can build the right one for your organization.

Forrester recently released The Digital Experience Platforms Landscape, Q2 2023 in which they define a DXP as:

The portfolio of core components of a platform that provides the architectural foundation and modular services for developers and practitioners to create, orchestrate, and optimize digital journeys at scale — driving loyalty and new commerce outcomes across owned and third-party channels.

Essentially, a DXP is just a platform that helps you manage your digital experience more effectively across a wide range of touchpoints. But when we used the phrase "build the right one," that wasn't an accident: according to the Forrester report, "DXPs exist, but they're built by enterprises, not bought (in their entirety) from vendors." You can think about use cases specific to your industry and customize when necessary — all in the name of a custom (and more scalable) approach.

The Forrester report illustrates this well: "You need ordinary components of a DXP like the content… and experience frontend," the Forrester report states. "But you likely also need extraordinary components, specific to your industry, like a travel booking engine instead of a retail cart, an electronic medical record system instead of an order history, and interactive conference streams instead of static videos."

Building your digital experience with a composable architecture in this way solves a lot of business pain points. In addition to managing diverse touchpoints more seamlessly, it also accelerates the development of new experiences and apps. A composable DXP can help you get to market faster.

Organizations are adopting DXPs to deliver customer experiences more quickly and accommodate rapid shifts in consumer digital preferences. From the rise of generative AI to the proliferation of interfaces, it's a time of massive evolution in the digital realm — but it's one that we at Yext have been steadily preparing for.

That's why we're excited to be listed in Forrester's DXP report among large (>$100 million in product revenue) DXP vendors.

As a composable DXP — a platform assembled from a variety of best-of-breed solutions that work together via APIs — we offer businesses the flexibility to build their tech stack their way, and to adapt it over time. It's about your entire tech architecture, not just one product: supporting the connections between various business capabilities so that they can work together and operate independently, across both company owned and third-party channels.

We're proud to be part of the MACH Alliance, and we're excited to both evangelize and embody this evolving approach to thinking about digital experiences. Yext is here to help businesses and organizations build their tech stack, serve their users, and get to market faster.

Ready to read more? Learn about the five trends shaping the future of digital experience platforms.