Your options in the world of digital experience platforms (DXPs) are evolving quickly.
Selecting the technology to power your enterprise’s digital presence is not simple — that’s why clients working with us are best for the job.
With Forrester research by your side, you have insightful, easy-to-read evaluations of your options. You also have direct access to the analysts to help you make the right call for your circumstances.
Step 1: Form an evaluable definition: 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.
Step 2: Pay extra attention to reference customers:
- Could they have achieved the business outcome with other vendors just as easily?
- Did they use all parts of the vendor’s DXP?
- Did they talk about how well it supports generative AI?
Step 3: Imagine how a new entrant might replicate these testimonials and growth as a result.
The (new) supply is ahead of demand.
Welcome to what my colleague Ted Schadler calls “the intelligent century.”
Generative AI (genAI) is widely believed to be more significant than the steam engine. The ripple effects will be vast — will be.
The vendors in this evaluation have added, and are continuing to add, lots of genAI (which hasn’t been deployed en masse by their clients yet).
As you make your shortlist of strategic vendors with a portfolio of applications, look for those that:
- Have a strategy for harnessing generative AI. Look for more than a simple “generate content” button. Practically overnight, nearly all vendors released those. Look for providers that offer a credible vision (and incremental releases) of reimagined interactions such as a big fat prompt box on your home page for customers to start conversing, messaging conversations with rich media and links, or marketplaces that propose a bill of materials with assembly instructions.
- Built a platform to harmonize their applications (old and new). It’s no secret that vendors have a spotty history of attempts to unify their DXPs. The most effective approach to date has at its core high-scale data, services shared across applications, and consistent security, scaling, and mechanism for extension. You can observe this as a user interface based on a single design system, identical customer profiles available to all applications, and practitioner workflows that step between modules without you needing to log in to different modules.
- Orient around continuous optimization. You don’t know what your customers will respond to, nor what will be the most actionable cohorts for a particular campaign or product line. Experience experimentation capabilities enable you to find out. Leading vendors use content created by generative AI and propensity models that conclude what is most likely to drive engagement.
If you need help understanding how you’ll architect genAI into your DXP, give me a call.
Schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me to talk about how you can use this Wave to drive your selection of your AI-powered DXP providers. I can help you and your teams make sense of this as well as understand how to be adaptive as you (re-)align to your customers’ changing needs.
Forrester clients can read The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2023.
