Charles Darwin said…

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent.
It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

As organizations make their way through the next phase of the pandemic, which will continue well into 2021, they’ll need to reorient their operations around emerging customer and employee patterns. This critical period will require organizations to quickly and repeatedly adapt even more than they’ve ever done in the past. 

We recently published a data snippet showing that employees who believe that their employer acts on their feedback are more likely to try harder at work. It turns out that there’s an amazing double-dip of value when you make adjustments based on someone’s feedback; you not only make smart, timely decisions, but you also benefit from an increase in their loyalty and trust.

So how effective are organizations at responding to the needs of their constituents? Earlier this year we asked 10,000 U.S. consumers to rate how well different types of organizations understand and adapt to their needs. As you can see in the chart below, there’s a lot of room for improvement.

Here are some observations from the analysis:

• Supermarkets are the most responsive organizations, as 71% of consumers think they are good at understanding and adapting to their needs
• Government is the least responsive, as the federal government’s 32% was well below all other groups, and state governments were next from the bottom
• Rental car companies are the lowest rated commercial entities, with 42% that equals state governments
• Employers aren’t particularly good, as they fall towards the bottom of the list, with a score of 47%

We also looked at the difference by age group and found that:

• The highest rating is with supermarkets adjusting to the needs of the oldest group, where they earned a good rating from 78% of those consumers
• The lowest rating is also with the oldest group; the federal government only earned a favorable rating from 21% of this group.
• Looking across all types of organizations, 58% of 35- to 44-year-olds feel that organizations understand and adapt to their needs; the highest level of any age group.
• Organizations get the lowest marks from 55- to 64-year-olds; with an average of 49%.
• The average gap across age groups is 17 %-points; it ranges from a high of 39 %-points for streaming media down to a low of seven %-points for utilities.    

How can organizations become more responsive to the needs of the people they touch? You probably won’t be surprised by my answer… Experience Management (XM). In this rapidly changing environment, it’s more critical than ever to tap into the XM capabilities to continuously learn, propagate insights, and rapidly adapt.

The bottom line: Experience management is the foundation for the fittest to survive

Bruce Temkin, CCXP, is the Head of Qualtrics XM Institute