2013 Customer Experience Excellence Award

Congratulations to the following companies that are winners of the 2013 Temkin Group Customer Experience Excellence (CxE) Award:

AIG Asia Pacific, Cisco, EMC, Intuit, and Oracle

• AIG Asia Pacific: As they undergo an expansive service culture transformation, AIG Asia Pacific’s FEEL GOOD message has turned its leaders and employees into enthusiastic supporters of customer experience.
• Cisco: The company’s Ease of Doing Business (EoDB) philosophy inspires innovative and meaningful solutions that simplify complex issues for their customers.
• EMC: The dedicated TCE team at EMC recently enhanced its Total Customer Experience Program (TCE) by fine-tuning their data-driven approach to improving their customer and partner experience.
• Intuit ProTax Group: The company helps their professional accountant customers save time and grow their businesses by continually improving their processes, services, and support to anticipate the needs of their customers.
• Oracle: The company’s customer experience initiatives are founded upon a comprehensive understanding of their customers’ interactions and experiences with the company.

In addition to the winners, the following six organizations were selected as finalists for the award based on their strong customer experience efforts: Adobe, Cox Communications, Findel Education Resources, Fiserv, Rackspace, and UMB Bank.

About the CxE Awards

Across all industries and sectors, organizations are findings ways to improve customer experience in a sustainable manner. The CxE Awards are meant to highlight those transformational efforts. Since customer experience is a journey, not a program, nominees will not need to have fully completed their journey to be eligible for this award.

Last year’s winners were EMC, Fidelity Investments, Oklahoma City Thunder, Safelite AutoGlass, and Sovereign Assurance of New Zealand. You can find best practices from across all 11 finalists and see their nomination forms in the Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence.

The awards are based on the following criteria:

• Transformation. What improvements have been and are being made in the four customer experience core competencies?
  • Purposeful leadership: Leaders operate consistently with a clear, well-articulated set of values.
  • Compelling brand values: Brand attributes are driving decisions about how you treat customers.
  • Employee engagement: Employees are fully committed to the goals of your organization.
  • Customer connectedness: Customer feedback and insight is integrated throughout your organization.
• Results. How is the effort creating value for customers and for the company?
• Sustainability. How well is the company setup for ongoing success?

We assembled an expert panel of judges who really understand what it takes for an organization to become more customer-centric:

• Shep Hyken is the Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations.  He is a customer service expert, speaker and author of New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling books including The Cult of the Customer and The Amazement Revolution.
• Ingrid Lindberg is Customer Experience Officer at Prime Therapeutics. She is a proven change management and customer strategy executive whose previous roles include Customer Experience Officer at CIGNA and Chief Marketing Officer at Ceridian Benefits Services.
• Aimee Lucas is CX Analyst at Temkin Group. She has over 15 years of experience improving service delivery and transforming the customer experience through people development and process improvement initiatives.
• Bruce Temkin is CX Transformist & Managing Partner of Temkin Group. He is widely recognized as a customer experience thought leader and chairman of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA.org).
• Bob Thompson is CEO and Editor-in-Chief of CustomerThink, a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. He has over three decades of experience in customer-facing management and consulting roles.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Answers to questions that came up:

• Can vendors submit applications on behalf of their clients? No. They can help prepare submissions for their clients, but the nominations must come directly from the company being nominated.
• Can non-profit organizations apply? Absolutely. The CxE Award is meant to recognize any organization that is making significant and sustainable improvements in its customer experience, whether its a for-profit company, non-profit organization, or a government agency.
• Is this award only for consumer-based businesses? No. The CxE Award is not only for business-to-consumer businesses, we also expect many business-to-business applicants.
• If we are one of the winners, will we be able to put out a press release? Yes. All of the finalists and award winners will be able to refer to this award in any communications.
• We don’t have the best customer experience in our industry, is it worth entering? Maybe. We are looking for customer experience efforts that are having a positive effect. So it is worth entering if you are making progress.
• Will there be more than one winner? Probably. We expect that their will be multiple winners, but we will determine the number based on the nominations.
• Can we enter if we are not in the U.S.? Yes. This award is open for entrants from around the world. The only requirement is that the nomination form must be completed in English.
• We are doing some great things in a part of our company, but not everywhere. Is it worth applying? Yes, as long as your efforts aren’t just in one narrow area. Transformation often starts within areas of a company.
• Can we send in more than one nomination for a company? Maybe. Since this award looks across several aspects of your CX efforts, it probably only makes sense to submit more than one if there are different efforts underway within different operating groups.