How to wow your customers with better online experiences

Consumers today have higher expectations for their experiences with brands – across dozens of touchpoints. According to a 2021 McKinsey study, '71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalised interactions. And 76% get frustrated when this doesn't happen.' Further, organisations risk an estimated 6.7% of their revenue when they lose customers due to poor experiences.

So… is it happening? Not often enough. Thanks to outdated tech stacks that create silos — or significant backend configuration for developers – businesses are struggling to keep up with what customers expect. This leads to difficulty in both winning and retaining business.

IT leaders are aware of this problem, but the challenge lies in selecting the right tech to address it while reducing technical debt (and costs in general). With these issues in mind, the best solution is to look to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

Here's how architecting the right DXP can help your organisation deliver content at scale – and let you wow your customers with cutting-edge online experiences.

Essentially, a DXP is a set of core technologies that allow you to manage and integrate your content across all the places that customers interact with your brand online. (Think of DXPs as individual lego pieces that you can stack together to build online experiences.)

Because they centralise content management and streamline workflows, DXPs reduce silos. This allows businesses to reuse and deliver content across multiple different digital platforms. Further, with a composable DXP, businesses can choose best-in-breed technologies that integrate seamlessly with their current tech stack. All of this helps you build more quickly and deliver better customer experiences at scale.

The right DXP should help teams strike a balance between a composable, API-first approach and leveraging pre-built configurations for digital experiences. This all allows for reduced complexity, better ease-of-use and significantly faster time to market.

With the attributes above, it's fairly easy to see how a DXP might help your organisation. But here's a more detailed look at why a DXP is key to meeting your customers' needs for immediacy and personalisation across multiple channels.

DXPs help you meet the expectations of consumers online by enabling you to deliver:

• Personalisation: Customers in today's digital environment expect brands to deliver content that's specific to their wants and needs. DXPs play a crucial role in enabling personalisation by providing tools and capabilities that let businesses tailor specific pieces of content to each individual user.

• Rich information: Customers want to see all information that's relevant when they search for an important product or service. Whether that's measurement details for a piece of furniture, services that a financial advisor offers or treatments at a healthcare facility, customers crave rich information. DXPs allow you to not only create engaging experiences but also to come up with new and innovative ways to deliver them to consumers.

• Content that's easily accessible across channels: Research shows that a majority of people want to self-serve, solve their own issues and find information their way. That means you need to make content easily accessible, no matter where or how the customer tries to seek it. For example, someone might look up your business's reputation on Yelp or engage with your mobile app to ask a question – rather than going to your website. This means your FAQ have to be structured and presented in the format of a direct answer. The content that powers your website should also be used to power your search and chatbot experiences – which is exactly what a DXP (like Yext) makes possible. We offer a centralised content management system that can seamlessly integrate with both first- (website) and third-party (listings on Google, for example) experiences.

Assembling the right DXP is the best way to "get it right" when it comes to the growing expectations of customers online. You want a platform that allows you to use best-of-breed vendors so that it's flexible and scales as your company grows (and new touchpoints emerge).

That said, not all DXPs are created equal. That's where Yext comes in: unlike legacy systems, the Yext platform provides built-in support for AI-generated content and understands robust entity relationships. This provides the foundation to deliver better customer experiences – across both first and third-party channels – with unprecedented speed and scale, while minimizing costs.