Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) are technologies built to support and digitize your business processes in an effort to improve the customer experiences you provide, with core capabilities ranging from content management, data and analytics, personalization opportunities, artificial intelligence capabilities (AI), customer insights and journey mapping, and more. With dozens of platforms and integration methods to choose from, it can be overwhelming to understand which are truly best-in-breed and fulfill the critical requirements of a DXP.

Technological research and consulting firm Gartner, Inc. has released its 2022 Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms to uncover which competing players are leading the charge through market research and uniform evaluation criteria, and how to select the best fit based on your business goals.

This year’s report highlights sixteen providers that it considers to be the most significant in the DXP space, as well as each vendors’ strengths and weaknesses, to divide them into four quadrants:

• Leaders: Execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.
• Visionaries: Understand where the market is going or have a vision for changing market rules, but do not yet execute well.
• Niche Players: Focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.
• Challengers: Execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

This year, Perficient is proud to have strong partnerships with all four of the Leaders listed in the Magic Quadrant, including Adobe, Optimizely, Acquia, and Sitecore, under our Customer Experience (CX) Platforms practice.

Now that you have a narrowed list of options to choose from, you need to evaluate which is the best fit for you and your unique business goals. But evaluating multiple DXPs can be lengthy, expensive, and biased due to:

• Costly and time-consuming RFPs
• Depletion of internal resources
• Lacking objectivity internally

We can help you overcome these problems with our tool, DXP Select, by:

• Streamlining the process with pre-identified requirements and strong partnerships with major vendors
• The practice of relying on our industry knowledge and system expertise, rather than just the vendors, to showcase how the systems really perform, as well as their strengths and weaknesses as they relate to your specific business
• By prioritizing your unique requirements, timeline, budget, and business goals, we can remove the headache of a lengthy RFP process with our curated vendor recommendations and the business case for each

Visit our website to learn more about the timeline and what’s included in a DXP Select, as well as for more information on CX Platforms.

We are excited to announce that one of our clients, Sally Beauty Holdings, credited us for our work to implement commerce solutions to build an omnichannel experience for their customers.

How We Made a Difference

With the pandemic sending in-store shopping to a grinding halt, Sally Beauty was faced with a surge in demand, with a skyrocketing number of online orders. It was then that the company recognized the need to shift completely to online commerce and alternative fulfillment processes such as Buy Online Pickup In-Store (BOPIS), curbside pickup and ship-from-store e-commerce capabilities at Sally Beauty and Same Day Delivery at Cosmo Prof.

The solution to enabling these capabilities was in the technology, and more specifically, IBM’s Sterling Order Management System (OMS). Implementations like these don’t happen overnight, and Sally Beauty needed a quick turnaround to keep up with the changes COVID-19 kept bringing. With a timeline of only three weeks, our team helped create more agile and seamless processes for implementation within the technology stack, and ultimately launched the ship-from-store functionality on time and as promised at the end of March 2020.

“The pandemic quickly shifted our focus to online commerce and alternative fulfillment processes,” said Joe Condomina, Chief Technology Officer, Sally Beauty Holdings. “We knew it would be a tough process, but it hasn’t been difficult. We deployed the technology cloud-first, using the plumbing we already had in place. As a result of the structure of our team and a rock-solid implementation from Perficient, we’ve been able to deploy very quickly.”

We then took it a step further by helping Sally Beauty enable BOPIS, as well as stabilize its tech environment to better handle real-time inventory data across the distribution network. Overall, we’re proud to be part of Sally Beauty’s journey to build true omnichannel commerce experiences, grow its digital business, and continue to exceed customer expectations.

After a fun day on the greens, we’re excited to learn that Learning Care Group (LCG) iCare’s Annual Golf Outing raised $143,551 in proceeds! This year marks Perficient’s 4th anniversary as a proud sponsor of the event benefiting childcare providers at Learning Care Group in times of need.  

The LCG iCare Foundation was established to assist Learning Care Group childcare providers in instances of unexpected crisis such as natural disaster, fire, domestic abuse, and funeral costs. Maintaining the philosophy that early childhood education is a foundation for growth and can yield profound, long-term results, LCG childcare professionals dedicate their lives to the care and education of children, often making personal sacrifices to do so. That’s why LCG iCare exists; to show empathy and support for the dedicated team members at Learning Care Group. 

PRFT colleagues pictured: Erin Rushman – Director of Delivery, Client Services, Jody Payne – Sr. Project Management Lead, Patrick Schwierking – Vice President, Sales & Field Operations, and Joel Stanesa – General Manager

As a long-term client of Perficient, we’re proud to be able to sponsor such a worthy event each year. It was a fun-filled day with golf tournaments, food and raffles, and “footgolf,” a mix between soccer and golf!  

To learn more about this organization and its inspiring mission, please visit the LCG iCare Foundation.

Perficient is proud to help our clients provide elevated customer experiences and improve business processes, so it’s great when the work we do for our clients is recognized by leading industry experts. We’re excited to announce that the new B2C site we built for Benchmade Knives was named Best Consumer Goods Website by the Internet Advertising Competition (IAC). 

The new site features an improved design, as well as re-architected product data for Benchmade’s extensive catalog to provide a more streamlined ordering process for customers. Better connectivity between product families and variations creates a more user-friendly selection process for Benchmade customers and improves the purchasing experience. We also improved Benchmade’s organic search with a detailed SEO strategy. Our work to create a more streamlined ordering process resulted in a 22% increase in online sales, and our SEO work helped Benchmade realize a 23% increase in site traffic for unique visitors. 

This award marks the fourth consecutive year Perficient has come away victorious from the IAC awards. In 2019, our team was awarded Best Financial Services Mobile App for the new, multi-platform app we helped create for GM Financial. Our team also brought home the award for Best Energy Mobile App in 2018 for our work with Jackson Energy Authority, and a pair of Best of Industry Awards in 2017 for the work we did for Carhatt and The Henry Ford. 

Some business disruptions can be planned for— material shortages, natural disasters, compliance or fulfillment roadblocks. But what about the obstacles we don’t see coming? The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has touched nearly every business in the world in some way or another, and in the face of such an unprecedented global crisis, many are struggling to keep operations moving. 

While it can be daunting to pivot and redirect in the midst of a constantly changing situation, it’s necessary to do so if businesses want to minimize disruptions. Here are some of the ways our clients are utilizing digital solutions to find new, innovative ways to reach their customers in a global pandemic. 

Specialty Craft and Fabric Retailer

In uncertain times, it’s not only important for businesses to reach their customers, but also to connect with them. With a fully integrated Order Management System (OMS), our client is able to provide its customers with additional shopping options, such as curbside pickup for online orders and ship-from-store. These measures not only ensure patron safety and comfort, but also allows the business to continue fulfilling customer orders. 

In direct response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the company is providing free materials to any customer who wants to sew masks, gowns, and other essential medical equipment for healthcare workers. Customers can request supplies and use the company’s online library to find patterns and video tutorials to assist them along the way. Then customers even have the option of bagging up any donations they’ve made and doing curbside drop-off at any of the company’s retail stores, and our client will ensure items are donated through the proper channels.

Leading Beauty Product Retailer & Distributor

Elevating the order experience with an OMS can mean anything from providing the ability to split-shipments to buying online and picking up in-store. Over the past year, we worked with a leading distributor and retailer of beauty products to implement an OMS to do those things and more. Recently we were challenged by our client to help quickly enable ship-from-store (SFS) and same-day delivery (SDD) capabilities concurrently. Under normal circumstances, this type of project would take three to four months. When our client asked us to find a way to deliver these capabilities in just ten days, we accepted the challenge and leveraged the foundational elements to stand up the new features in no time.

As retail businesses struggle during the COVID-19 crisis, the ability to implement new capabilities, like SDD and SFS, are becoming a must-have rather than an optional feature. In the end, we implemented the capabilities in a matter of days, and our client was able to continue fulfilling orders while keeping employees and customers safe.

Some deliverables from our work include:

• Expanded SDD to 600+ stores
• Rolled out SFS for 450+ stores in US and Canada

International Consumable Product Supplier

But what about B2B businesses? Our client, a manufacturer and distributor of various paper, building, and office products, has found ways to help its clients stay afloat as well. Many grocery and big-box stores rely on this business to supply operational items from receipt paper and paper bags to cleaning supplies and hand soap. When COVID-19 triggered worldwide hoarding and panic buying, the business’s customers found their stores were being wiped out of those products deemed necessary to continue operations and maintain the health and safety of employees. 

When its warehouses and call centers were inundated with order requests, the company was able to leverage its eCommerce system to deploy resources from other departments to help manage the increase in inbound and outbound product requests. Internal teams are now able to coordinate better with their customers that are dealing with outbreaks or shortages to deliver products faster.

This is a crazy time; one few people saw coming. But it is in these times of crisis that businesses must find ways to work together. Whether it be fast-tracking the production and distribution of crucial goods, or finding ways to provide aid through donations and services; every business can harness the power of digital to connect with its customers and weather the storm together. Not sure where to start? Find out how our team of digital experts can help your business build the right digital solutions.

Modern B2B customers have come to expect the same level of service, transparency, and customer service that they receive as consumers in their personal lives. But delivering that kind of experience requires a comprehensive approach to supply chain management, from technology investments to extensive data management integration.

Perficient Digital’s order management experts, Pawan Gupta and Steve Gatto, sat down with Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick and IBM to discuss how B2B companies can shift to this customer-first approach, and why it’s more important now than ever.

Watch our five-part video series.

• Chapter 1: The B2B Channel Shift
  • How can you change from a product-centered model to a digital business?
• Chapter 2: How to Deliver on Emerging B2B Models
  • How can you enable customer-centric experiences?
• Chapter 3: Complement Existing ERP Systems with OM for a Scalable, Omnichannel Experience
  • How can you combine an order management system with existing ERP software to fulfill customer expectations?
• Chapter 4: The Benefits of a Cloud Order Management System
  • How can you use the flexibility of a cloud-enabled platform to adapt to new technologies and ways to engage with customers?
• Chapter 5: Why B2B Organizations Should Adopt OM Now
  • How and why should you get on board with order management today?

Interested in learning more about how to achieve seamless order management? Check out our guide!

Headless commerce has gained momentum throughout the industry as the new approach to commerce. But how exactly does it work and how quickly should your organization adopt this way of doing business? Our experts at Perficient Digital were engaged to help answer those questions in a recent Forrester report. The report, The New Commerce Revolution: Off With Their Heads (Or Not!), outlines how API-based architecture is defining headless commerce and explores the ways it can reduce friction between back-end commerce platforms and front-end content management systems (CMS). 

Bringing Headless Commerce Capabilities to Our Clients

We’ve worked with clients across multiple industries to help achieve headless commerce. Our teams are equipped to build and deploy complex integrations between back- and front-end systems in a variety of formats, so platforms can seamlessly interact without limiting capabilities on either side. 
This is best demonstrated by our work with a Fortune 500 manufacturing and engineering corporation, which provides products and services to industrial, commercial, and consumer markets. Our client has many products that have multiple variations and SKUs that make each part slightly different. Some complex products required deep integration to configurators and visual modelers to provide customers with a consistent experience for all types of products. Product data was being stored in multiple locations without governance and product management was suffering. Our client needed to streamline content creation and management while enabling product exploration and acquisition.
We created a headless architecture for all its diverse product and selling options. We used a new CMS platform with APIs that integrated with its existing commerce system to provide marketers with the ability to make every moment shoppable. The goal was to provide a seamless integration during the authoring process to enable marketing teams to provide customers with a consistent brand and shopping experience. The headless architecture allowed our client to provide its customers with an exceptional customer experience from landing and brand pages with shoppable products, to managing the product detail pages (PDP) and category list pages. As a result, our client was able to expand its product content, improve the user experience, and streamline internal processes.
To learn more about our approach to headless commerce, read our recent post, The Business Impacts of Headless vs. Traditional Commerce.

In early May 2019, Google announced that Googlebot is now evergreen. What exactly does this mean for the search community?
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge where he and Google’s Martin Splitt explain how the new evergreen Googlebot will affect search in areas such as rendering hash URLs, <div> tags, and infinite scroll. It’s important to understand the evergreen Googlebot and how it will impact SEO and your search efforts. Here’s why:

SEO for imagery is becoming more important to marketers. But why?
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge, who joined Perficient Digital through our acquisition of digital consultancy Stone Temple, where he explores Google’s inclination toward presenting more visual content. Visual SEO impacts rankings. Here’s why:

To learn more about Stone Temple, read our blog post.

Businesses face several challenges when implementing technology. Over the last several decades, organizations have built their tech stacks to help them with their business processes, but as time goes on, business needs grow and customer expectations change. Many businesses are now finding they don’t have the funds or technical agility to evolve their technology to add new and necessary capabilities, and they end up feeling stuck.

To weigh in on the business challenges that come with implementing new technologies to stay ahead in the digital realm, Perficient Digital’s senior commerce consultant Karie Daudt joined in on recent episode of PIMtalk, inRiver’s product marketing podcast. “This is a big investment and it’s not just the cost; it’s the resource investment and it’s the organizational commitment and investment.” emphasized Daudt. “So all of those pieces really play a key role in companies starting on this kind of digital transformation journey.”

Karie explains that a company’s digital maturity is a major factor in their readiness to digitally transform and implement new technology. However, there are several questions that every organization needs to ask when embarking on a digital transformation, regardless of their digital maturity level.

1. What business problems are you trying to solve?
2. What challenges are you currently facing?
3. What technologies do you have in place?
4. What data are you trying to solve for?

It can be daunting when organizations feel they need to completely overhaul their technology stack. But the reality is, the process of digitally transforming can be done incrementally to better evaluate business needs. ”You may need to get those best-in-breed [technologies], but there are also solutions that can get you to a certain point,” said Karie. “Then, you can plug in better technologies when they make sense and really align to your roadmap, your strategy, and where you’re going.”

For more insights from Karie on digital transformation and the technical implementation challenges that come with it, listen to episode 26 of the inRiver PIMtalk podcast.

According to Google’s John Mueller, Google has not been using rel=prev/next tags for a while now. So should you still implement pagination?
Check out our recent video from Eric Enge, who recently joined Perficient Digital through our acquisition of digital consultancy Stone Temple, where he explores why Google has not made use of rel=prev/next tags for some time. Pagination is still valuable. Here’s why:

To learn more about Stone Temple, read our blog post.

During last night’s Magento Imagine Excellence Awards, Perficient Digital – along with our client Baker Distributing Company – received the 2019 Imagine Excellence award for our work implementing a strategic eCommerce solution on the Magento 2 platform.
The award-winning end-to-end solution developed by the Baker internal commerce thought leadership and development team, Perficient Digital and Gravity Department, helped Baker Distributing digitally transform its commerce business and achieve strategic growth goals to create engaging customer experiences.
“Selecting a long-term, strategic partner with B2B expertise on the Magento 2 platform like Perficient Digital enabled us to leverage our eCommerce capabilities for the successful launch of our new website for Baker Distributing Company,” said Paul McCluskey, Director of eCommerce at Watsco. “It is an honor to be recognized by Magento for our work developing an innovative solution that is focused on customer experience.”
We’re thrilled for our client and excited to be recognized for our expertise in the B2B space.
As today’s B2B companies continue to see customers make more purchases online, more organizations will need to enhance their eCommerce solutions. Our strong partnerships with Magento, Adobe, and Marketo make us the perfect partner to help you develop innovative eCommerce solutions that provide the exceptional customer experiences needed in today’s digital space.
With a true, end-to-end solution, companies can enhance the digital experience and increase customer loyalty in the increasingly complex B2B landscape. Read our news release to learn more about our work and the award.