Key Criteria for Evaluating Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)v2.0

1. Summary

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are systems for building engaging, personalized customer experiences, often for delivery on websites but also on any digital channel. DXPs should be intuitive and easy to use, allowing both creative teams and marketers to create and publish content.

DXPs are becoming increasingly important as more retailers move online and close physical stores. Companies need to showcase goods and services in the best possible way, and they need to target potential customers with content that will interest them and result in sales. Competition is stiff with the ever-increasing number of online retailers, and presenting engaging, highly personalized content through the recipient’s preferred channel can mean the difference between the success and failure of a business. Thus it is vital to select a DXP that supports multiple types of content and digital assets; delivery through multiple channels, including signage, kiosks, internet of things (IoT) devices, advertising boards, and video screens across a wide variety of devices (such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs); and out-of-the-box connectors with an array of complementary and back-end technologies, including customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), and enterprise relationship planning (ERP).

DXPs are evolving, and they’ve now superseded web content management (WCM) platforms as the go-to systems for building appealing customer experiences for delivery on websites and digital channels. The types of assets supported by the platforms are expanding as retailers use technologies such as virtual and augmented reality for content delivery, which requires support for digital assets such as 3D. Moving forward, DXPs will also need to support the metaverse, as some innovative organizations are considering how they can use that technology to improve the customer experience. Generative AI will also have a big impact on DXPs as marketers use it to generate images and content without the need for input from the creative team.

This is the second year that GigaOm has reported on the DXP space in the context of our Key Criteria and Radar reports. This report builds on our previous analysis and considers how the market has evolved over the last year.

New key criteria this year are the number of prebuilt connectors to common applications, which help to speed up implementation and deployment; text summarization, which generates an automated summary of a piece of text that is often used in place of a longer piece to make it easier to read on a small form factor device; social support, which allows organizations to publish content on social media sites, monitor brand mentions, and create their own social sites; and chatbots, which can reduce reliance on human contact.

This GigaOm Key Criteria report highlights the capabilities (table stakes, key criteria, and emerging technologies) and non-functional requirements (evaluation metrics) for selecting an effective DXP. The companion GigaOm Radar report identifies vendors and products that excel in those capabilities and metrics. Together, these reports provide an overview of the category and its underlying technology, identify leading DXP offerings, and help decision-makers evaluate these solutions so they can make a more informed investment decision.