The modern age of digital business has arrived, bringing both new possibilities and new challenges when it comes to effective IT management, which is how a company manages its technological resources in accordance with its needs and priorities. As such, companies today are looking for an effective solution that can meet the new needs of both customers and workforces.

As highlighted by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms, businesses are turning to modern technologies to solve complex problems within the digital age. With customer expectations regarding experiences higher than ever and businesses working to leverage large amounts of data in less time than ever, companies depend on software that can support a wide variety of needs. Today, this can be found in digital experience platforms (DXP). Because of its broad capabilities, a DXP can help businesses solve both front-end and back-end issues to better empower companies.

The following five common IT management problems, which can impact both everyday business functions and customer experiences, can find solutions in the implementation of digital experience platforms.

1. Customer Targeting

According to Forrester research, 72% of companies selected improving customer experiences as their top priority when it came to business strategies. With customer experiences becoming a more integral part of both new customer marketing and audience retention, creating a great experience is more highly valued than ever. Today, these experiences depend on effectively targeting customers based on their past interactions and current interests.

Properly understanding target audiences on a customer-by-customer basis takes well-integrated systems and a wealth of strongly managed data. A DXP is designed to effectively collect this data and apply it directly to the customer experiences being formed through the software, which can help businesses across industries effectively tackle this common concern.

2. Content Management

Businesses of all sizes can quickly build up a large amount of content that can become difficult to manage and locate when not consolidated with the right software. Through the use of a digital experience platform, redundant and contradicting documents can be eliminated, including tracking past changes so that employees can be kept up to date and coordinated. With a company’s online presence built on a DXP, businesses have greater control over their content strategy, ensuring that there is consistency across experiences and that audiences avoid confusion caused by contradictory information.

As discussed by Enginess.io, content management through digital experience platforms also vastly improves content discovery for both employees and customers. These platforms make it easier for businesses to publish important content and make it easily discoverable by those who need it.

3. Administration Costs

Business expenses can steadily increase over time due to many small factors, such as wasted time and resources, adding up and becoming a disruption within the larger scope of IT management. However, while some companies may consider decreasing the size of their workforce or making major overhauls to business operations, the streamlining of work processes and an increase in return on investment through the reduction of waste can make a noticeable difference in administration costs. Additionally, by moving documentation online, companies can reduce the amount of paper waste that results from doing business.

These cost decreases are possible through a more efficient workforce, helping to increase the ROI of each worker, which can quickly add up in a large business. In addition, eliminating physical paperwork can decrease the amount of money spent on documents when they have been digitized. Other changes, including automating financial processes and streamlining accounting services, allow a company to work smarter and with less wasted time and energy.

4. Remote Working and Task Workflow

The modern worker depends on online tools and communications in order to perform his or her duties, with portals and intranets assisting employees across industries in ways not previously possible. Benedict Evans highlights that today’s applications are providing newer and better alternatives to the common usage of software like Excel and PowerPoint, which are often used to calculate, collect and present data in ways they were never meant to do. In using new technology available in DXPs, businesses are not only finding better tools within their preexisting workflows, but also changing and improving the fundamental ways that they do business.

But it’s not only workflows that depend on great modern technology. According to a 2017 Gallup survey reported by The New York Times, 43 percent of U.S. workers spend at least some time working remotely, showing a four percentage point increase from 2012. This steadily growing remote workforce means that a well-built digital workplace will only continue to play a more important role in the lives of workers for years to come.

5. Omnichannel Experiences

The modern customer journey takes place across many platforms and devices, with individual audience members most often interacting with a company multiple times and via multiple avenues before deciding on a purchase. As defined by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Report, a DXP is designed with the ability to support multifaceted, multichannel and multisite initiatives instead of only a single website. By providing a user with unified and personalized access to a wide variety of systems, businesses have a greater ability to provide omnichannel experiences.

While customers may only see a front-end experience that shifts to meet their unique needs and suit the various devices being used across their journey, businesses will know that these omnichannel experiences depend on interconnected back-end systems. Because DXPs are designed to unify websites, portals, applications and more on a single platform, the alignment of back-end systems needed to provide true omnichannel experiences is within reach for companies.