Organisations today have an incredible opportunity to grow their business and cut costs if they can provide a seamless digital experience for their customers. For many organisations, though, the legacy systems in place, and the costs to update those systems, keep companies from making the changes necessary to remove data and system silos and improve the customer experience. However, there is a way for companies to maintain existing systems while unifying and improving the customer experience; integration platforms.

An excellent, modern customer experience is crucial

According to Gartner, over 80% of companies today are competing primarily on customer experience. The seamless user experience delivered by the likes of Amazon, AirBnb, Netflix and Uber, demonstrate that digital experience is increasingly where the battle for customers is won or lost. Businesses and even entire industries are thriving-or dying- based on the kind of online experience they can deliver to their customers and employees. As a result, companies across industries are recognising that their customer experience must be exceptional  to compete.

What can an integration platform offer?

Decision-makers realise that data and system integration is essential however the challenge is a big one, with a survey on digital transformation challenges revealing 45% of decision-makers identify integration as the biggest challenge they face.

As companies grow over time, their investments into existing content, marketing, accounts and customer management technologies make it increasingly difficult to connect those systems in the future. The result is often a siloed, disjointed customer experience.

While some businesses are willing and able to make the investment into full-scale legacy system replacement, other organisations are increasingly implementing a digital experience platform to solve the integration challenge and to provide the modern experience their users need without having to eat the massive costs of starting development from scratch.

A digital experience platform (DXP) is “an integrated set of core technologies that support the composition, management, delivery and optimization of contextualized digital experiences.” These platforms are designed to allow for a robust, modern seamless customer experience right out-of-the-box while allowing you to tie together any number of existing legacy solutions in the background and deliver the flexibility to accelerate future development needs.

With a DXP it’s possible to modernise your digital presence without having to leave behind past infrastructure investments. These platforms make it possible to unify any number of disparate systems through a host of built-in APIs and web services while at the same time bringing these systems together into a single, easy-to-use modern interface.

To that end, a digital experience platform should provide modern UI frameworks (allowing for single page applications for example) to not only tie all of the systems together, but also to provide the dynamic and responsive web experiences that today’s users have come to expect. Each year, more and more companies are turning to digital experience platforms to simplify the process of updating their user experience and put themselves into a position to evolve in the future.

Case Study: Grants.gov unified 17 legacy systems with a DXP

Grants.gov is one example of a site composed of older, difficult-to-change systems that were able to be transformed into a modern, vastly improved customer experience. Using  a DXP as an integration platform Grants.gov was able to unify 17 siloed legacy solutions into a fresh, connected experience for their 4million+ weekly site visitors. They chose Liferay DXP due to its unique combination of mature out-of-the-box business applications along with its flexibility to accommodate a whole host of pre-existing legacy systems.

A prime example of this in their implementation was the ability to leverage DXP’s search integration to create a federated search across all 17 of their legacy platforms.

Because of a DXP’s flexible nature, they were able to pick and choose which existing technologies would be transitioned to Liferay’s out-of-the-box solutions and which would be easier to stay in the existing government legacy systems.

For Grants.gov, the move paid off quickly, after a six month implementation, search usage doubled, catapulting Grants.gov to the fourth most visited government site on the internet. At the same time, they realised substantial ongoing cost savings due to their drastically simplified IT.

Case Study: Britam built an integrated, future-proof strategic digital platform

Britam, a Financial Services company based in Nairobi with business across Africa, is another example of an established organisation that was able to dramatically improve the customer experience with an integration platform. Before their digital transformation, Britam had multiple homegrown systems that were ill-equipped to share data. In addition, various existing business systems struggled to keep pace with the changing business environment. 

Britam decided to use Liferay DXP to bring together a wide variety of existing legacy systems, creating a set of intuitive, unified, experiences for customers, partners, and employees. Crucial for Britam’s implementation was Liferay’s ability to:

• Pull all of their existing systems together under one platform
• Get these systems sharing data and working together
• Create and manage multiple experiences for a variety of use cases 

As a result, Britam was able to revolutionise their business. They not only cut costs by simplifying the experience for customers, partners, and employees. The company was also able to grow profits by taking their new, improved customer experience into several new countries using Liferay’s built-in support for multiple languages.

Are you ready for an integration platform?

If you’re trying to overcome the challenge of creating a better experience for your customers without having to break the bank or your existing systems, then an integration platform delivered via DXP is likely what you need.

A great DXP designed for integration can take what’s already working in your organisation and streamline the creation of an effective, modern customer experience that stands out in all the right ways. Whether your business is just trying to catch up or you’re preparing for the road ahead, digital experience platforms can ensure you have the right tools to succeed.

To find out more download the Liferay Integration Platform Features whitepaper.