The Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) has announced the winners of its 2015 CX Innovation Awards.
Crowe Horwath LLP, John Deere, Optum, Sandy Spring Bank, and Western National Insurance Group were the winners and additional finalists were also honored.
The awards were presented during the CXPA’s annual Insight Exchange event, which was held at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, California. Customer experience professionals from varied regions of the world gathered for world-class learning and networking, with the Insight Exchange’s unique approach to knowledge exchange and its focus on innovation.
The CX Innovation Awards have for four years recognized new practices that improve customer experience, result in strong business impact, and advance the field of customer experience for other organizations. A panel of industry experts reviewed a large group of entries, chose 10 finalists, and then selected the five winners:
Crowe Horwath – Improvements in CX through Employee Engagement
This initiative, focusing on recognition and communication to drive results, helps to connect the employee and the client experience. By extending the reach of recognition practices deeper into an organization, the company has been able to make it easy to share relevant and far-reaching stories – for example, adapting its Voice of Client program to allow recipients of client recognition to “Pay It Forward” to others in the firm who may be behind the scenes. This practice is improving both employee and client engagement scores. There is a simple, practical, easy-to-use system for sharing and tracking recognition of the right behaviors that drive client experience, and as a result both clients and employees are more engaged.
John Deere – New Machine Delivery Experience, Brazil
Research had found that Brazilian dealers performed the technical machine delivery not always consistently or in different ways according to local practices, with different technical information on operation and maintenance of the equipment: John Deere customers were not receiving the unique and distinctive experience representative of the brand. About 2,200 dealer employees were trained in 2013, and in 2014 the learning advanced to more than 4,400 dealer employees. Results have included 5% less time to deliver the machine while increasing experience quality, and cost reduction in FY14 of US$ 21 million. Also, the initiative achieved awareness of the critical importance of customer experience to the success of the business.
Optum – Centralized Client Insights for Action
The Optum Growth Enablement Program has taken Voice of Customer, executive discussion feedback, operational, marketing, CRM, subscription-based data, and account planning data and wrapped it all up in the centralized CRM system. Connecting all data in a relevant and actionable way allows the company to seamlessly understand a relationship and manage the account in one place. Optum harnessed big data to make it actionable and accessible, using best practices in data management, data warehousing, business intelligence, marketing analytics, client planning and voice of client. This initiative has resulted in substantial revenue, operating earnings and loyalty growth.
Sandy Spring Bank – Transforming Culture by Engaging Employees
Sandy Spring Bank has a clearly stated mission: to deliver a consistently remarkable client experience. Their Meeting in a Box initiative engages every employee in a synchronized effort to discuss the same topic each month and to learn by using a common language. The goal was to lay a foundation across the employee base around CX principles and initiatives that will be launched bank wide. While the initiative is centrally created, the model is distributed locally, which gives managers the opportunity to relate the CX topics to their employees’ roles within the bank. This hub-and-spokes model has connected all employees to the company’s CX journey, because it focuses on improving the client experience, educating employees, and inspiring ownership of the CX journey.
Western National Insurance Group – Public/Private Sector CX Training Partnership
Western National and Normandale Community College received a grant from the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development to provide CX training to Western National’s Minnesota employees. The curriculum consists of CX foundation courses and skill development courses on journey mapping, user-based design, measuring the customer experience, and managing for employee engagement. An advisory board of Minnesota CX community members provides insights. The CX curriculum and course materials are designed to be reused by organizations in
many different industries, to ensure that a program based on CX best practices is available to any Minnesota company.
Bruce Temkin, Co-Founder and Chair of the CXPA said:
“We congratulate the award winners on their impressive innovations, which are emblematic of the increasing sophistication of achievement in our field. We also applaud the accomplishments of our finalists, and we thank all the organizations that submitted nominations. Again this year, the winners display noteworthy variety – in approach to enhancing customer experience as well as in industry sector – and this points out how rich and deep the discipline of customer experience is becoming.”
The additional five finalists for the CX Innovation Awards were:
Ciena Corp.
JetBlue
Oxford Properties
PSAV
Reliant
