2015 Customer Experience Excellence Awards

Congratulations to 2015 Winners:
EMC Global Services, Safelite AutoGlass, and SunPower

In addition, congratulations to these five organizations that were selected as finalists: Hagerty, InMoment, The Results Companies, Verint, and Wheaton-Bekins.

The 2016 CxE Awards will be announced in September 2016. Keep an eye on this blog for more information.

About the Award Winners

Here’s a brief description of the winners:

• EMC Global Services: EMC’s Total Customer Experience program, which promises to “Enhance the total customer/partner experience,” keeps the entire company focused on delivering outstanding CX. This commitment starts at the top, with the CEO making CX metrics a company-wide goal, and trickles down to all employees, who enjoy easy access to customer feedback and sentiment, allowing them to deliver a better, more personalized experience to customers.
• Safelite AutoGlass: Safelite is committed to becoming “People Powered and Customer Driven.” The company focuses on people as a key strategy by consciously creating engagement among associates, hiring talented employees, and exhibiting a sincere concern for people’s well-being. Being “People Powered” enables the company to also be “Customer Driven” as it helps Safelite understand customer pain points better, deploy its resources more effectively, implement differentiating solutions, and finally, delight its customers during every interaction.
• SunPower: SunPower’s three core principles – knowing our customers, creating a branded experience, and driving engagement with customers and employees – guide everything the company does. From cross-functional executive steering committees to residential journey maps, SunPower’s “Customer First!” initiative is put to work throughout the company, helping to engage and keep customers for life.

We will be publishing a report in January with more details and insights from the winners and all of the finalists, in the report “Lessons in CX Excellence, 2016.” Here’s last year’s report.

About the Customer Experience Excellent Awards

Across all industries and sectors, organizations are findings ways to improve customer experience in a sustainable manner. The Customer Experience Excellence (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.

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:

• Ginger Conlon is editor-in-chief of Direct Marketing News. She develops and directs its editorial vision and content strategy across all communications platforms. She was cited as one of the “Top 100 Most Social Customer Service Pros on Twitter,” by Huffington Post contributor Vala Afshar.
• 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 the CXO and Founder of Chief Customer.  She was one of the first CXOs in the US, and has 20 years of practice in customer experience and employee engagement strategy.  She was named as one of the “Mavericks of the Year” by the Stevie’s in 2014 for her impact to the health care industry.
• Aimee Lucas is CX Transformist & Vice President of 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 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-related management, consulting, and research, and is the author of Hooked on Customers: The Five Habits of Legendary Customer-Centric Companies.

Last year’s winners were Dell, EMC, and Touchpoint Support Services. You can find best practices from across all 11 finalists and see their nomination forms in the Temkin Group report, Lessons in CX Excellence, 2015.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are answers to questions about the CxE Awards:

• We want to include confidential information, will it be shared? Do not submit any confidential information. If you are selected as a finalist, then we will share your entire nomination form in a published report. We do not share any information about companies that are not selected as finalists.
• Is there any fee for applying? No. There are no fees of any sort for applying, and no hidden fees that will affect the judging of applicants.
• 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 (B2C) businesses, we also expect many business-to-business (B2B) applicants. Many of the previous winners have been B2B companies.
• 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.
• Are we able to provide supplemental information like a PowerPoint or Video in the submission? No. The judges will only look at information contained in the document (which must be 12 pages or less) and will not look at additional materials such as a separate Powerpoint deck or any material that is provided via a link. You may include graphics within the document as long as it complies with the page limits.