We’ve mentioned that organizations still need to have more than one digital experience platform and/or adopt additional solutions to address weaknesses and gaps in their existing platforms. Many companies are opting to tack on SaaS solutions to fill their DX gaps. This can be a great approach, with a couple of caveats.

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.