Composable DX Stacks Build Around the Customer Not the System

The Gist

• No single center. In a composable digital experience (DX) stack, there’s no monolith—just a unified focus on the moving customer across all touchpoints.
• Customer-centric by design. The most effective DX stacks are intentionally built around the customer journey, with key pillars like content, data, APIs, feedback, and AI.
• Composable is the future. Rigid DX platforms are giving way to flexible, composable architectures that allow brands to adapt quickly and personalize deeply.

Customers move between locations and experiences fluidly. A different combination of systems drives each of these. There is no one monolith for digital experience (DX) because no single system can meet the customer in all the places the customer expects your organization to appear.

To build a strong and durable DX, organizations must engineer a system with no center, or, said another way, a system that focuses on the customer as they move and the organization moves through time.

Digital experience is so woven through all interactions that DX almost feels synonymous with customer experience (CX) in the modern customer journey. As the line between DX and CX blurs further, businesses are creating new ways to integrate several technologies to deliver frictionless end-to-end digital experiences to their customers consistently.

This group of technologies is commonly referred to as the digital experience stack. But, as far as building a DX stack goes, there is no one way to do it. The only constant is that the beating heart of the DX stack must be customer-centric.

This customer-centrism is constantly evolving and combines technology and strategy. Among these technologies and strategies, there are some absolute must-haves:

• Omnichannel content
• Organized customer data
• API connectivity
• Customer feedback loops
• AI integration

Let’s explore how creating a constantly improving customer-centric experience across your brand’s digital touchpoints should drive how you build, manage and shape your digital experience stack.

Related Article: Digital Experience 2024: Insights From Frontlines of AI, CMS and DXPs

Table of Contents

Key Technologies in a Digital Experience Stack

Each element of the DX stack plays a distinct role in delivering consistent and customer-centric digital experiences.

Let’s explore each of these in more detail as it applies to the ideal, customer-focused DX stack.

Omnichannel Content Is the Future of Digital Experience

While there might be one or two main digital touchpoints for customers to engage your brand, the present and future of digital experience is omnichannel. This means meeting customers wherever they interact with your digital presence. Whether it’s websites, mobile apps, IoT, digital kiosks, voice assistants and beyond, serving a cohesive content experience is crucial to omnichannel delivery.

Achieving that requires a few practical facets:

Collecting and Using Customer Feedback

Customer satisfaction in the digital world will never be 100%. The simplest way to improve customer experience is to listen to what customers say and use feedback to build better digital experiences.

Every customer interaction tells a story. And when customers take the time to tell you what’s working and what isn’t, that feedback is gold. An effective DX stack builds feedback loops directly into digital experiences. Whether via surveys, feedback forms, embedded chatbots, heatmaps, time on page, help desk queries, or classic customer reviews, these insights help identify where customers are having a tough time and where to prioritize changes.

The best place to start with feedback is anywhere. A little bit can go a long way. A simple feedback widget on a knowledge base can provide amazing insights into the effectiveness of your content. Be intentional as you scale up feedback, but don’t overthink it when going from zero to one.

Connecting AI to Your DX Stack the Right Way

You can’t have a complete modern DX stack without LLMs. But, LLMs are only as good as the data they have access to and the integrations between systems. Like APIs connect technologies across your DX stack, LLMs have the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which allows LLMs to communicate with whatever data sources you provide access to. However, MCP goes further by allowing your AI agent to take action.

Now that your AI agent can access your data sources, you can connect the LLM with whatever tools you use across your organization and prompt it to use them. If your AI agent is connected to your project management tool and customer support system, you can instruct the agent to create tasks based on support ticket information as soon as those tickets come in.

The power of MCP to harness AI to supercharge your DX stack is unprecedented, bringing helpful interactions to customers quicker than ever. Still, if the foundation of data and content isn’t there, an LLM can only be so helpful.

Related Article: Tactics to Build Customer Trust With Personalized Experiences

Forming a Customer-Centered DX Stack

Formerly, a digital experience platform (DXP) was often a pre-packaged bundle of technologies you were forced to use together. The DX stack you paid for was the one you received, with its functionality and limitations.

With omnichannel digital experiences being the gold standard, the inflexibility of many monolithic DXPs has given rise to the composable DXP. The veritable choose-your-own-adventure of a DX stack, a composable DXP is not a predetermined suite of technologies. It lets you choose the best tools for your business goals and handcraft a DX stack accordingly.

Here’s an example using the sections of this article:

Core Technologies in a Composable DX Stack

Each component in a composable digital experience architecture plays a distinct role. Here are key functional areas and the technologies commonly used to support them.

The flexibility of a composable DX stack allows organizations to prioritize, build, and orchestrate digital experiences that match customer expectations and business goals. Additionally, composability is built to be dynamic, making it easier for you to adapt to evolving technologies and customer demands. 

The Better the Customer Experience, the Better the DX Stack

For all the technical ins and outs of building a digital experience stack tailored to your business and customers, you can tell pretty quickly if it’s working. If your bottom funnel prospect moves from your website to your mobile app and is treated like a brand new arrival, red flag. Conversely, if your customer data is tailored to the omnichannel customer journey and that user barely notices they’ve switched digital touchpoints, green flag.

There’s always a chance that getting the DX stack right will not be a first-try success. Being attentive to what’s working and what can be improved, and listening to what your customers are saying and feeling are crucial to bringing meaningful changes to a tech stack with far-reaching responsibilities.