Forrester analysts have been doing a great job of summarizing, categorizing and evaluating what’s going on in the world of digital customer experience management. Forrester defines the digital experience platform as, “Software to manage, deliver, and optimize experiences consistently across every digital touchpoint,” and that will address six key themes:

Our customers have told us that they want and need customer communications management (CCM) software that allows line-of-business users to create or modify layouts and document templates without help from technologists... and without having to learn HTML5 or CSS3. They want an intuitive, visual interface like what is now available from user-friendly web design tools, such as Squarespace and Wix. We set out to solve this problem in the development of our new CCM solution. We needed a framework that would allow users to stay in a visual interface, rather than “write code.” But because omni-channel communications require digital-first, responsive design, we needed something that could generate HTML and CSS code on users’ behalf. We found what we needed with Bootstrap.

When building out a customer experience management (CXM) software architecture, organizations have to choose solutions from more than one vendor and stitch them together into a platform. In terms of digital experience (DX) delivery, this means different applications that facilitate the customer experience at different touchpoints must be able to share content and data so that the brand’s look and feel, its voice, and its message remain consistent throughout the customer journey.

Ideally, users would have a seamless experience among digital experience (DX) delivery solutions in their organizations’ customer experience management (CXM) software portfolios. However, we’ve established that there is no single end-to-end DX delivery solution on the market, and there isn’t likely to be for some time to come (if ever). So enterprises must still stitch together best-in-class solutions from multiple vendors to build their own custom DX platforms to cover Marketing, Commerce and Service functions.

I came across an interesting take on customer experience (CX) improvement in an article by David Gee in CIO called “The Customer Experience Algorithm.” After reiterating that CX is the “holy grail” for most enterprises, the acknowledged key to customer loyalty and increased revenues over time, Gee explores the idea of approaching CX as a math problem to be solved – something that can be broken down into its core elements, wrangled into a formula, and repeated reliably for long-term results.

In customer experience management, there’s little dispute that the customer comes first. Everything you do should serve the customer’s needs and improve his or her experience with your brand, products and services in some way. Why? Because satisfied customers are loyal customers who buy again and spread positive word of mouth about your brand, which is the most valuable kind of marketing in our modern connected marketplace. Those of us who make tools to connect you with your customers must keep ourselves focused on this philosophy as well – but in our case, the customer is you, the enterprise software user. At Topdown, our development strategy is built around the idea of putting the business user first. Here’s what we mean by that.