Digital experience platform

A digital experience platform is software a company buys to create, manage and deliver content and interactions to customers across websites, apps and other channels. It joins content, data and delivery in one licensed product. You buy it; you do not practise it.

That is the line against digital experience design. Design is a craft practised by people, with research and testing — the platform is a purchase with a licence cost, a contract and an implementation partner.

It is also not a digital adoption platform. An adoption platform layers guidance over software your own staff already use and faces inward, while a digital experience platform faces your customers.

The category itself is loosely policed. Vendors badge content tools, commerce suites and marketing clouds as platforms, so the only useful question is which of the four layers below a given product actually covers.

Key takeaways

• A digital experience platform is bought and licensed; experience design is practised by people.
• It usually bundles content authoring, customer data, personalisation and multichannel delivery.
• The modern shape is headless: content is stored once and delivered anywhere.
• Integration and content operations cost more than the licence over a typical term.

How it works

A platform sits between your content and your channels. Editors work in one place, customer data informs what each visitor sees, and application programming interfaces (APIs) push the finished experience to a website, an app or a screen in a store.

At the base sits a content management system. A platform does everything CMS software does, then adds the data and decision layers a plain system never carried.

The data layer overlaps with customer relationship management (CRM), which holds the sales and service record. The platform reads from it to decide what a returning visitor sees first.

Content atomization is what makes the purchase pay back. Break a page into reusable pieces and one product description can serve a site, an app and a partner feed without a rewrite.

A document management system is a different animal — built for internal files, retention and approvals rather than for anything a customer will ever see.

Stock, pricing and order status usually live in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. A platform pulls those values in at render time rather than owning them.

The modern shape is headless. Amazon Web Services describes the pattern as one where content sits in a central repository and is delivered through APIs, so the same article serves a site and an app without duplication.

Composable is the other word you will hear. Rather than one suite, you assemble content, search, commerce and analytics from separate vendors and join them — which buys flexibility and costs an integration budget.

Governance is the part buyers underestimate. Someone has to own the content model, decide which fields exist, and stop a well meaning team adding a twelfth page template nobody will maintain.

Migration is the real project. Moving ten years of pages into a new content model takes longer than the software install, and it is usually where offshore content teams earn their place.

Microsoft’s Azure architecture guidance makes the matching case underneath, noting that cloud workloads benefit from applications decomposed into smaller, decentralised services that talk through APIs or asynchronous messaging.

Examples

Buying situations differ more than vendors admit: a retailer with many storefronts, a regulated bank with a review queue, a university with hundreds of editors. Each one has more channels than a single website can carry.

A retailer trading in several countries needs one product description rendered in six languages, on a site, in an app and on screens in store. Writing it six times is where the money goes — and where the errors start.

Regulated firms buy for the approval trail. Every published change carries an author, a reviewer and a timestamp, which matters more to a compliance team than the page layout does.

Universities are the quiet heavy users. Hundreds of departmental editors publish into one site, and much of the platform’s value is simply stopping them from breaking each other’s pages.

Insurers buy for the opposite reason. The content barely changes, but it must read identically on a website, in a posted letter and in a call centre script, and one source of truth beats three.

Media companies sit at the far end. Volume is the problem there, with thousands of items a week moving through a queue no single person can see from end to end.

Related terms

Platform vocabulary blurs quickly, because vendors sell overlapping products under similar names. These five terms cover the pieces a platform contains, connects to, or is routinely mistaken for.

• Application programming interface (API): the connection a platform uses to deliver content into each channel.
• Omni-channel: the operating goal of one consistent experience across every channel.
• CMS software: the content layer a platform contains and then extends.
• Customer relationship management (CRM): the sales and service record a platform reads to personalise.
• Content atomization: breaking content into reusable parts so one piece serves many channels.

FAQ

Is a digital experience platform just a content management system?

No. A content management system handles authoring and publishing, while a platform adds customer data, personalisation and multichannel delivery on top.

How is it different from digital experience design?

One is bought, the other is practised. The platform is a licensed product, and the design is the method and the people deciding what it should deliver.

Do you actually need one?

Only if you run several customer channels and more than a handful of editors. A single marketing site is usually better served by a content management system and a good designer. Buy for the channels you run today plus the one you can name.

What drives the cost?

Licences vary widely, but integration work, data cleanup and ongoing content operations normally outweigh the software line over a three year term.

Who runs it day to day?

A small platform team plus content operations staff, often offshore, handling publishing, tagging and quality checks. Many firms split the build from the running, keeping the implementation partner on a shorter contract.

Compare providers and outsourcing options across the Outsource Accelerator website before you commit to a platform build.