Check out this month's update to Xperience by Kentico. AIRA's capabilities now include enhanced content generation, support a dedicated agent for customer journeys, and are introduced to campaign management. Marketers can create role-gated membership experiences, and developers will be thrilled to see persistent Lucene.NET search indexes for SaaS environments.

Improve conversions with the Customer Journey Optimization Specialist

Xperience by Kentico's customer journeys give marketers the ability to model key audience touchpoints as a series of ordered steps towards a specific goal.

Although they clearly show the effectiveness of digital touchpoints, the value of customer journeys extends beyond raw data and visualizations. That value exists in the ability to leverage that data to optimize the journey and improve conversions.

AIRA could already draw insights from customer activity across segments and channels, showing who converts and who does not.

Now, the Customer Journey Optimization Specialist can help marketers understand why their journey stages lack conversions and how to optimize them. With AI in digital marketing, context is key, and marketers can enrich AIRA chat conversations with screenshots from web, email, or headless channel experiences to improve optimization recommendations.

Customer journeys now have a dedicated agent, and marketers can filter journey data by date range, transforming their growing libraries of journeys into an evergreen optimization toolbox.

If you are just getting started with customer journeys, our official guides on this product feature are a fantastic place to start.

The Customer Journey Optimization Specialist is enabled through the AIRA agent configuration screen where marketers can find our growing list of AIRA agents, including upcoming agents:

Contextual content generation with AIRA assisted content writing

AIRA content generation for email subject lines and content fields was introduced in the the October 2023 Refresh - well before AIRA even had a name!

Marketers have used these features to quickly generate helpful snippets of content from their existing messaging, automatically using Xperience's AIRA tone of voice guidelines to keep the AI transformed content on-brand.

The March Refresh redesigns this content generation experience both for marketers and AIRA.

The field-level content generation dialog shown above may look like the the text refinements dialog, but it is much more powerful because we now can give AIRA additional, targeted context.

Marketers can use a completely customized prompt for full control or choose the regenerate content option using this new, improved context for AIRA. Regenerated content is updated in-place, reducing the number of clicks required to improve your messaging.

When regenerating the content, the enhanced context includes the following:

  • Text from fields selected as context in the content type definition

  • Custom instructions for each field with the content generation AIRA feature

  • The field's attributes:

    • Name

    • Size

    • Caption

    • Tooltip

    • Text below the input

Teams that invest in the content authoring user experience for marketers are rewarded with better content generated by AIRA.

We plan to deliver two additional improvements to AIRA content generation in upcoming Refreshes by deriving context from:

  1. The Page Builder - For many webpages, Page Builder's widgets are also an important source of content context, for example when generating the summary of a campaign landing page.
  2. Linked content items - Content item fields don't always contain the content themselves. They can link to other pieces of structured content, like FAQs, testimonials, or image assets in the Content hub. These items are the content context of these fields.

AIRA features for reusable field schema fields

Additionally, as part of the AIRA content generation redesign, we filled out the underlying scope of AIRA capabilities for content generation, expanding them to reusable field schemas.

Campaign coordination and insights with AIRA managed marketing campaigns

Launching a campaign across multiple channels, let alone a single website, requires a campaign strategy and multiple digital assets. But launching the campaign is just the beginning. Investments into campaigns, and digital experiences in general, are expected to deliver a return on investment (ROI).

Marketers need tools to both manage the campaign and evaluate its performance. That evaluation should be grounded in the original campaign strategy.

  • Was the campaign a success? That's impossible to determine without goals and KPIs.

  • Is this campaign performing better than the previous one? We need historical campaign performance data to draw any conclusions.

To help marketers with their campaign management and analysis, we added a new, dedicated Campaigns feature in Xperience by Kentico.

AIRA assists in crafting the campaign brief based on an initial campaign idea and goal, focused on increasing the sales of a discounted product.
AIRA assists in crafting the campaign brief based on an initial campaign idea and goal, focused on increasing the sales of a discounted product.

Campaigns in Xperience are composed of the following:

  • Campaign brief - a structured text document that outlines the strategic goal, target audience, key messages, role responsibilities and timelines for the given marketing initiative.

  • Assets - the digital components within Xperience that drive the campaign experience.

    • Pages

    • Content items

    • Emails

    • Forms

    • Automation processes

  • Customer journey - the performance evaluation and optimization tool that transforms campaigns from just being a cost into an investment.

When a campaign is created, it's automatically linked to a new, dedicated customer journey.

Marketers then design this journey to model the key engagement points required for their audience to achieve the campaign goal. Each stage of a customer journey has its own KPIs. Once a campaign is launched, these KPIs are used when a marketer asks AIRA for a campaign analysis.

When prompted, AIRA evaluates:

  • The campaign brief

  • The conversion and drop-off rates for each stage

  • The KPIs that define success for the campaign

Marketers can leverage AIRA's campaign insights in multiple ways:

  • A large marketing initiative can be broken down into multiple campaigns and performance can be evaluated across them.

  • Longer campaigns are often optimized during execution. AIRA is able to compare the performance of these campaigns across specific dates, helping marketers compare the impact of the experiment or optimization.

  • Recurring, seasonal campaigns with similar journeys and briefs can be compared against each other by AIRA, helping to pinpoint what caused a specific audience segment to engage more or where a customer journey gap exists, leading to improvements for the next campaign.

Deploying prepared content strategies with CI/CD support for AIRA Artifacts

Xperience by Kentico's Content Strategist agent can help marketers prepare their content strategy directly in the AIRA chat interface. This is great for teams that want to quickly produce a rubric from an existing web page and iterate on it with the agent, over time.

Other teams might want to prepare their strategy document externally and then persist it across all environments. This is especially important when a team uses content sync to author content in a pre-production environment and sync it to production. For this use case, we now support AIRA Artifacts in our CI/CD configuration.

Marketing teams can share content strategy documents with developers, who can then deploy them across environments.

Personalized membership experiences with membership roles

Membership experiences are not the outcome of a simple registration page on a website. They are critical marketing assets for many organizations that deliver significant value and advantages.

  • Unify identity across channels with one profile and consistent personalization everywhere.

  • Enable first-party data collection as anonymous third-party tracking erodes; members consent and share explicitly.

  • Drive retention over acquisition which is cheaper and higher-ROI than constant new customer spend.

  • Power segmentation with behavioral and declared data, which lets marketers target with precision vs. campaigns based on poor quality data.

  • Close the attribution gap because logged-in journeys are fully trackable across web, email, and headless channel experiences.

Xperience by Kentico has allowed marketers to reward registered members with gated content, but there are often many levels of membership, driving even more personalized experiences across channels.

This latest Refresh adds membership roles to Xperience's member management capabilities.

These roles can be assigned to members and to the content they access - both in the Content hub and website channels. Roles assigned to web pages can be inherited by children pages in the website channel page tree.

Roles in Xperience are managed in the Members application, fully under a team's control, modeling the relationships between an organization's customers, content, and digital experiences.

Developers building Xperience by Kentico applications can extend the use of membership roles beyond what is assigned to content item properties, using them to drive things like:

  • Page Builder personalization

  • Digital commerce product availability and discounts

  • Bundle, temporal, or partial content access

Membership roles are extremely flexible and we're excited to see how our customers use them to improve their customers' experiences with Xperience by Kentico.

Better customer search experiences with persistent Lucene.NET indexes for SaaS

Our fully-supported Lucene.NET search integration was added to the product in August 2023. Since then, it's been enhanced with new features and extension points, staying up to date with the latest Xperience by Kentico Refreshes.

Although it works in both private cloud and SaaS environments, because Lucene.NET depends on the file system and we follow cloud infrastructure best practices, each SaaS deployment previously required rebuilding Lucene indexes. For some customers this could mean just a few minutes of search unavailability, but for others with large amounts of web pages or reusable content items, search index rebuilding could take much longer.

Persisting Lucene indexes in SaaS environments required an update to Xperience by Kentico itself along with a new version of our Lucene.NET integration.

Customers can now deploy their Xperience by Kentico SaaS projects without requiring a full rebuild of any Lucene search indexes their channels depend on.

The Xperience by Kentico Lucene GitHub repository includes instructions developers can use to adapt their project's storage configuration to take advantage of this improvement.

Streamlined KentiCopilot adoption with a plugin marketplace and skills

KentiCopilot is a suite of AI development tools that enables agentic development for Xperience by Kentico projects.

Developers adopting agentic AI tools when building Xperience by Kentico projects can watch our 6-part video series, covering KentiCopilot's features and use-cases.

The AI software development space is rapidly evolving with new tools, technologies, and patterns emerging every day. We initially launched KentiCopilot with a set of prompts and instructions developers could copy to their projects to guide their AI agents when performing tasks like widget creation and Kentico Xperience 13 codebase migration.

Based on feedback from the Kentico community and our own observations of technology trends, we saw an opportunity to improve the developer experience with faster, simpler onboarding.

We just released a new version of the Xperience by Kentico KentiCopilot GitHub repository. All prompts and instructions have been transformed into skills, exposed through plugins and a custom plugin marketplace.

Developers can review the updated repository Usage Guide or share the link with their AI agents.

We're quickly iterating on KentiCopilot and always on the lookout for opportunities to help developers deliver more value, faster with AI and Xperience by Kentico.

Take a look at some of the planned updates to KentiCopilot on the Xperience by Kentico roadmap:

What's next?

As always, check out our documentation Changelog for the full Refresh feature and technical details.

We hope these capabilities, features, and API improvements help you deliver new solutions. Try them out and let us know 👋 what you think.

What's planned for the next Refresh?

  • AIRA - SEO & GEO Specialist, analyzing page structure, metadata, and content clarity to provide actionable recommendations and one-click fixes for optimizing pages across both traditional search engines and AI-powered discovery platforms.

  • AIRA - Campaign Manager, evolving AIRA's campaign insights into a strategic, brand-aware assistant that draws on historical campaign briefs, performance data, and brand context to guide more consistent and insight-driven campaign creation.

  • Customer Data Platform - Identity resolution and Audience Segmentation, introducing a unified contact profile that merges contacts, members, and customers into a single view, with new segmentation tools, admin-configurable identity resolution, and extensible APIs for developers.

  • KentiCopilot - Content migration support Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico, providing AI-assisted guidance and interactive tooling to help developers restructure content models and configure the Migration Toolkit when upgrading from Kentico Xperience 13 to Xperience by Kentico.

  • AIRA Usage Overview, surfacing a new credit consumption dashboard so teams can see how AIRA credits are being used across individual agents and features.

  • Custom URL Uptime Monitoring, extending Xperience Portal's uptime monitoring to let customers add their own URLs and track live site availability alongside standard infrastructure checks.

As always, these updates will also include UX and developer-focused improvements.

Check back soon for the next Xperience by Kentico Refresh review!