Acquia Launches an Open Digital Experience Platform to Build Meaningful Customer Connections

Imagine you were on the way to an important job interview, and you missed your train. Do you give up and go home? Of course not. You order a Lyft, hail a cab, or rent a bike. The mode of transportation wouldn’t matter as long as it solved your problem and got you where you needed to be. This situation demonstrates two important principles: 1. Customers expect brands to provide them with the best course of action, not to push a specific product. 2. When people’s lives are disrupted, they seek out new, innovative solutions to meet their needs. 

At Acquia, we understand that abrupt industry shifts have left businesses in flux. People aren’t working, buying, or communicating in the ways they used to, and they rely more heavily on digital interactions. The one thing that’s stayed the same is the need to provide a convenient and valuable customer experience. That’s why we’re excited to unveil the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Find out how an open DXP solves challenges for consumers and helps organizations build more meaningful customer relationships through a holistic, seamless approach to digital experience.  

1. IT Needs to Catch Up to Consumer Expectations  

In the past, brands led the customer journey. Brick-and-mortar retailers had a set of store hours, new releases and products came out on a seasonal or quarterly basis and consumers turned to a few main television channels or magazines to tell them what they needed to buy. Digital transformation has completely turned this relationship on its head and put consumers in the driver’s seat of their own experiences. Today’s customers are accustomed to next-day online deliveries and always-on streaming services. The evolving landscape of digital channels and devices mean that people interact with brands on their own terms and will quickly move on to another option if their current experience doesn’t meet their expectations. 

While companies can’t predict the future, they need to be able to adapt to the present moment. This requires integrating with new technologies and being able to communicate and deploy content simultaneously across a myriad of touchpoints, channels, devices and modalities. Unlike closed vendors that limit your options to a predetermined set of capabilities, Acquia’s open DXP is API-first and offers the flexibility to integrate with both bought and homegrown tools. With the path to digital transformation evolving every day, an open DXP ensures you’re prepared to easily build and deliver the right experience without getting stuck in the past. 

Acquia’s roots are in open source and the Drupal community, which naturally encourages innovation driven by its users. Our open DXP gives IT teams the power to do more with less by providing enterprise functionality, easy-to-use web components and low-code site-building solutions that let teams re-assemble digital experiences as required without the burden of a total replatforming. Backed by an open source CMS, organizations can take the reins on the direction of their digital transformation. When a user discovers a need for a new feature or security improvement, they have the power to put that change into action rather than waiting for a single proprietary organization to catch up with the current state of the market. An open platform breaks down traditional monolithic tech stacks into moldable business capabilities that can act as a catalyst for digital transformation and open up opportunities to meet any unique situation in a fast, personal way. 

2. Content and Data Silos Lead to Disconnected Customers 

Customers provide brands with personal data every time they browse a website, leave a review, or fill out a form. Yet too many companies ignore this data history and force customers to re-introduce themselves or take additional steps to solve their problems. For example, a customer may submit a help ticket about their slow internet connection via a chatbot, be given a number to call and then be asked to restate their issue again once they reach a customer service rep. Without employees having the total prior context of a customer’s relationship, brands often introduce even more frustration and complexity into the journey. 

Our modern DXP gives marketers the ability and freedom to mobilize content and create new digital experiences that span channels and modalities across the customer lifecycle. An open content platform breaks down content silos through a flexible framework. Drupal’s modular approach to site creation is built upon a series of modular content components or “nodes” that can be arranged and deployed across a variety of displays, devices and channels. By breaking content down into customizable pieces, brands have more freedom to focus and adapt as new modalities and channels arrive on the scene because they can readjust the end message based on the context of the customer experience. 
 
Acquia’s DXP gives marketers the autonomy and freedom they need to better understand their customers through open access to data. Our DXP acts as a single pane of glass into the customer experience by building out from a foundation of customer intelligence. By leveraging a customer data platform (CDP), we give brands the ability to create unified customer profiles that can be used to orchestrate multichannel journeys and deliver personalized experiences on a one-to-one level.  

An open digital experience platform lets teams break down content and data silos that until now have prevented them from fully understanding and serving their customers. By democratizing this data and making it flow easily between marketing, sales and customer success departments, every member of your organization will be able to better provide the right content and service in the context of the full customer lifecycle. 

3. Brands Can’t Anticipate What Customers Want Next 

Customers are aware that brands today have access to more data than any other time in history, which makes it even worse when their experiences completely miss the mark. In exchange for the personal information they’re providing to companies, these customers expect to get value in return. However, on the other side, the more data and channels a brand has under its scope, the greater the challenge to mine through all of these unique data points and translate them into insightful messaging and campaigns.

Acquia’s DXP takes the guesswork and slow, manual processes out of the equation with a machine learning framework built on a unified data foundation that can be applied across all native and external tools. Our machine learning capabilities do more than just analyze customer behavior after the fact. By leveraging machine learning models across the customer journey, brands can use predictive analytics to analyze and anticipate customer value over time. Brands will be able to detect patterns and understand customer lifetime value so they can refine future campaign efforts and improve ROI. As businesses scale, machine learning allows enterprises to unify their data across every touchpoint and orchestrate the next best action to engage each customer with. This ensures the customer gets a personalized message at the right moment on the appropriate channel.  

4. Security is Treated Like an Afterthought 

Customers expect secure digital experiences, but they don’t want to think about security. Recent high-profile security breaches and data leaks have led customers today to be increasingly concerned with how brands are accessing and protecting their personal data. They want personalized brand experiences without having to worry that their information is being mishandled.  

However, far too often large organizations don’t have the centralized governance and infrastructure in place to keep pace with evolving digital threats and they let security and compliance best practices fall by the wayside. Once a breach has occurred, it’s too late. Customer trust has been damaged and the relationship they’ve built with your brand has eroded.  

Acquia’s DXP takes a proactive approach to security so that organizations can maintain their integrity in the customer’s eye and safeguard their systems from future threats. Our platform offers robust security across all digital properties without slowing down innovation or passing unwelcome complexity and regulations onto the customers themselves. We are secure by design, guarding brands against risks and upholding the necessary compliance standards and regulations needed to protect customer privacy as more customer data becomes available and flows throughout each touchpoint.

Businesses have the support they need to manage vulnerability, monitor events at scale, and mitigate future harm through layered firewall protection. Acquia also has a comprehensive compliance portfolio and additional layers of protection available. As businesses continue to scale, they can stay confident that they can maintain oversight of all their applications and ensure long-lasting customer trust.   

5. Monolithic Tech Stacks are Disconnected and Unresponsive 

Today’s customers don’t care about the particular tools or channels they engage on; they are focused only on accomplishing their end goal. Our open and connected approach to digital experience serves to make the total customer journey as easy-to-follow as possible.   

Achieving this requires a DXP with a modular architecture at the core that packages key business capabilities and services so that they can be rapidly assembled and applied across all interfaces to power multiple experiences. Legacy DXP vendors often lack true connectivity and stitch together a number of single-point solutions. For example, previously brands may have had a CRM, CMS and e-commerce tools gathering customer data and deploying it to different channels. This disjointed approach led to difficult-to-navigate customer journeys, duplicated data and an overall inconsistent, frustrating customer experience.

Acquia’s open platform makes it easier to manage complexity through an open framework and a composable approach to content. When all of an organization’s content can be repurposed and delivered in multiple contexts, it allows brands to place customer experience at the center of their business operations. No matter the application or interface where customers are interacting — whether that’s via voice assistant, chatbot or mobile application — an open DXP puts them in control of the interaction. They can self-direct the interaction toward accomplishing their goal and the technology provides the critical momentum, informed by data-driven insights, to move them forward to reach the desired result. 

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Meaningful customer relationships start with an open digital experience platform that gives enterprises the agility, intelligence and security they need to bring each customer their next best solution. With an open DXP, you’re always prepared to react and respond quickly to provide value on demand. 

Find out more about how the Acquia Open Digital Experience Platform can help you create ambitious digital experiences for today and tomorrow.