Don’t worry if you don’t know what agnosia is because we didn’t either. We found however that it quite nicely describes what is happening with companies’ efforts around experience. Wikipedia defines agnosia as “the inability to process sensory information. Often there is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss.”

This similar inability by a company to recognize mutual experiences might cause you to sometimes question your sanity when interacting with them either as a customer or as an employee.

Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions:

  • “Didn’t I just buy an item from this company’s website, and now they’re marketing it to me on social media?” 
  • “I’ve told IT that I prefer to talk to an agent, not interact with a chatbot. Don’t they remember my preferences?” 
  • “I’ve been a customer or employee of this organization for the last ten years — don’t they know me by now?” 

If your answer is yes, what you’re experiencing is the result of having multiple digital personas. This happens when organizations view your interactions with them in isolation. Whether you’re a customer or an employee, the organization has no awareness of other interactions you’ve had with them in the past. This makes it difficult to understand your preferences, anticipate your needs, and deliver you the products and services you desire. Note that this is only related to real users, not tests.

Why Don’t You Recognize Me? 

You get dissociated experiences when organizations do not recognize, for example, that an employee interacting with the corporate HR system is the same individual interacting with their retail website as a customer. The problem is that companies cannot recognize the full experience an individual has with them. On the other hand, humans can and do recognize discrete interactions as part of a whole relationship.

The danger for organizations is that humans don’t keep these various scenarios isolated. Frustration with one interaction will naturally taint the next interaction, regardless of whether the human is acting as a customer or an employee. Likewise, a great experience can carry forward and instill greater tolerance in future interactions that don’t go as well. Organizations need to apply what they learn about behaviors and tendencies that work with one persona, analyze that, and see how that can or can’t be applied when interacting with other personas. A higher level of understanding is necessary for organizations to move experiences forward.

Experiences: We’ve Had A Few … Too Many In Fact 

Before delving too deep into how a multitude of digital personas is wreaking havoc on organizations trying to deliver a unified experience, we need to identify the different ways that experience can be identified and monitored:

  • End-user experience management (EUEM). This set of capabilities helps infrastructure and operations professionals manage employee daily experiences primarily based on endpoint data. They’re also known in the industry as digital employee experience (DEX) tools.
  • Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). The broad umbrella of AIOps aggregates, correlates, and analyzes sensory and telemetry data from a multitude of sources to gain insights into the real-time experience users are having as they interact with complex systems. 
  • Observability. Real-time visibility and analysis of complex systems provide the opportunity to quickly identify and/or infer situations that could impact the interactions between a user and the system. 
  • Digital experience monitoring (DEM). These capabilities seek to help the modern enterprise deliver a stellar digital customer experience by identifying performance issues, downtime, or other disruptions to the customer’s interactions with digital services. 
  • Application performance management (APM). Deep knowledge of application performance can lead to considerable insights and inferences about the experience that individuals (both employees and customers) are having with the application but are narrowly focused on applications.
  • Network performance management (NPM). These tools provide network-level insights and the possibility of inferences that digital experiences are not meeting designed expectations. 

As you can imagine, organizations have strengths and weaknesses with respect to the above capabilities. What all companies struggle with is bringing all of these data sources together into a singular composite digital persona. Ideally, companies can then use this composite to ensure the experience an individual has is influenced by all their previous interactions, regardless of where they took place. A superior, consistent, and contextual experience is the goal across their various digital personas. 

What Is Your Monitoring Integration Strategy?

Companies need to develop unified digital experience observability management practices that bring together all the various experiential technologies and isolated efforts under one management umbrella. Individuals are tired of the digital agnosia that companies exhibit at every interaction. The burden is on companies to acknowledge this and on vendors to enhance their capabilities to move in the direction of a composite digital persona.

Join The Conversation 

We are currently conducting research on the “Future Of Experience Monitoring.” If you’d like to participate in our research, please reach out via social media. All thoughts and general feedback are welcome. Forrester clients can email inquiry@forrester.com to set up a meeting and learn more. Click Carlos or Andrew to follow our research and continue the discussion.