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Now in its third year, the CMSWire IMPACT Awards celebrate individuals and teams, practitioners and vendors who excel in delivering exceptional customer experiences for their internal customers and external clients.
Earlier this year, CMSWire announced the winners and finalists of the 2024 CMSWire IMPACT Awards program. This article goes further into winning applications and judges’ responses, to give a better understanding of how the best of the best approach customer experience and digital experience.
Practitioner Award Winners
Customer Experience Leader of the Year
Winner: Eric Carrasquilla, President of Customer Experience, CSG
With over 20 years of experience building, launching and monetizing enterprise-grade solutions that deliver extraordinary customer experiences, Carrasquilla oversees product, sales and services for the business. Under his leadership, CSG has accelerated the growth of its customer experience practice into core markets while driving new product innovation that helps global brands wow their customers. Over the past several years, Carrasquilla has helped launch several customer experience solutions.
Judges were impressed with Eric’s credentials and praised his tireless efforts to improve the customer experience. One judge commented, “This application conveys his unique ability to innovate solutions coupled with versatility to cross industries and positively impact CSG customers and their customers’ customers.” Judges agreed that Eric’s long tenure at CSG gave him a distinctive and deep understanding of the customer experience and made him uniquely suited to improve CSG’s CX and take the company to the next level.
Finalist: Jose Herrera, CEO and Co-founder, Horatio
Founded in 2018, Horatio is a Customer Experience and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) company based in New York and the Dominican Republic. Herrera started Horatio with Columbia classmates Alex Ross and Jared Karson to create meaningful high paying job opportunities in his homeland, while also improving working conditions in Latin America. Today, the firm works with the fastest-growing mission-driven e-commerce companies in the U.S. Horatio's cutting-edge CX results in revenue generation and is a disruptor in the e-commerce space.
Some of Herrera’s recent accomplishments include opening a new office in Latin American for increased support to that region and providing further investment into Horatio’s divisions around safety, security and content moderation.
Finalist: Mary Quinones, Vice President of Global Customer Service, Accurate Background
With more than 30 years of customer service experience, Quinones joined Accurate Background in 2021. In her role, Quinones consolidated three independent customer service teams across different platforms into a unified customer organization, providing an excellent standard of service to Accurate Background customers around the world.
Judges were impressed with just how much Quinones has redefined the strategic direction of customer service during her short tenure at Accurate Background. Judges further praised her commitment to the industry at large, through her speaker and mentor positions that empower women in leadership roles.
Finalist: Nichole Hinton, Founder and Principal Consultant, N&M Consulting
Having been in tech for over 25 years, Hinton has worked with some of the most notable leaders in the world to solve challenges in the areas of sales, marketing, and customer experience and operations. Hinton works tirelessly in the CX space to affect company-wide improvements to CX. Judges praised Hinton’s passion for and longevity in the industry, alongside her unique focus on the brand marketing side of CX.
Customer Journey Innovation
Gold: Customer Success Team, Banzai
Customer Marketing is a segment of Banzai's Customer Success team that strives to hone in on and realize opportunities that drive revenue and boost the customer’s ROI. This team devised and executed a strategy that identified and addressed a lack of awareness among Banzai’s existing customer base about plan offerings. Outside parties felt the steps the team took to inform users of their options were novel, innovative and effective.
Silver: Consumer Technology, ClearChoice Management Services
The ClearChoice Information Technology Team's purpose within the organization is to enable success through innovative and effective solutions. Faced with multiple exit points within the purchase cycle, the team built a new portal that would better address and mitigate those exit points. Having a portal design so clearly influenced by the customer journey impressed the judges.
Customer Service Excellence
Gold: Small Business Strategy Team, CNA Insurance
The Small Business Strategy Team is responsible for liaising between Small Business Underwriting/Sales and Small Business Operations at CNA. The team meets and speaks to agents and brokers, gathering feedback on how to improve their experience. The team surveyed their customers to identify ways to take a more proactive approach to building and maintaining customer relationships. Judges were impressed with how the team was able to identify a problem to solve from disparate data — even in the absence of clear weak points.
No Silver award was given out in the Customer Service Excellence category.
Innovative Use of CX Technology
Gold: Global Marketing and IT, Vertiv
Vertiv’s Global Marketing and IT teams deliver innovative customer experiences to complement the Vertiv infrastructure solutions that empower their customers to meet the demands of an increasingly connected world. Vertiv took time during the COVID-19 pandemic to identify the megatrends of customer behavior and shift their organizational strategy accordingly, to better reach their customers — particularly those of younger generations. Judges felt Vertiv’s approach was comprehensive, innovative and rigorous.
Silver: Professional Services, ImageSource
Led by Chief Information Officer Ryan Keller, the Professional Services team fulfills the services delivery of ImageSource solutions, IT governance, security and risk management, and infrastructure operations. Keller guides the overall direction of the company’s internal technology systems and ILINX product deployments, and supports application development processes worldwide.
After deploying a new self-service solution, ImageSource saw how it could also be used to solve some of their own challenges. The company then deployed their own solution internally, to improve process visibility and eliminate redundant manual tasks.
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Vendor award winners
Best Customer Experience Transformation
Gold: Progress
Progress provides software that enables organizations to develop and deploy their mission-critical applications and experiences, as well as effectively manage their data platforms, cloud and IT infrastructure. Over 4 million developers and technologists at hundreds of thousands of enterprises depend on Progress to achieve their goals.
Progress worked with one of its clients — a regional transit company — to migrate the company’s website to a more modern infrastructure, while consolidating the number of websites its customers used to find information easily. This resulted in a seamless and more engaging digital experience.
Silver: NICE
NICE CXone Guide helps its customers create extraordinary customer experiences while meeting key business metrics. When a financial solutions company was tasked with modernizing their customer experience — moving a bigger portion of their business from physical locations to online and in-app — they turned to NICE. Their new solution changed the way information was used for the company, simplifying transactions and better promoting their loyalty program. Judges felt this was a great example of an existing customer leveraging an existing relation to do something completely new.
Best Use of AI in Customer Experience
Gold: Coveo
Coveo powers the digital experiences of the world’s most innovative brands serving millions of people and billions of interactions across every digital experience. Coveo’s single SaaS AI platform and robust suite of AI and GenAI models are designed to transform the total experience from CX to EX across websites, ecommerce, service and the workplace. Covero has been working tirelessly to eliminate data silos, boost enterprise adoption of AI and generative AI in the workforce and generally improve trust in Enterprise AI. Judges felt the results were truly impressive.
Silver: GroupBy
GroupBy is a SaaS-based B2C and B2B eCommerce search and product discovery technology leader. The company’s cloud-native, all-in-one Search and Product Discovery platform, powered by Google Cloud Vertex AI Search for Retail, fuels the world’s most relevant and highly converting eCommerce websites.
GroupBy worked with a mid-to-high end department store to unify their in-store and online presence, to reduce customer frustration and provide a more seamless experience. The resulting solution solved several issues for the retailer, from improving product findability and search relevance to data integration improvements that support real-time inventory updates — all of which impressed the judges.
Best Omnichannel Personalization
Gold: Kustomer
Kustomer is a conversational CRM platform, helping businesses perfect every customer experience. Built with intelligent tools such as AI and automation, no-code configuration and a connected data platform that unifies data from multiple sources through a single timeline, Kustomer empowers businesses to operate with greater efficiency and deliver more personalized service to customers across any channel.
Kustomer’s client — an online retailer — needed a solution that would enable them to offer 24/7 customer support. Kustomer helped their client integrate data from multiple different sources and offer the ability to access customer support from nonstandard channels. Judges appreciated the omnichannel approach Kustomer took to delivering CX improvements for their client.
No Silver award was given out in the Best Omnichannel Personalization category.
Best Contact Center Innovation
Gold: Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a leading enterprise software company for all customer-facing functions, helping brands eliminate disconnected processes, siloed teams and disparate technology with one unified, AI-powered platform. With advanced AI, Sprinklr's unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform helps companies deliver human experiences to every customer, every time, across any modern channel.
Sprinklr worked with their customer — a financial service company — to improve overall customer service, monitor social media for insights and increase customer care. Judges were impressed with how Sprinklr’s AI-powered platform was able to impact so many different levels of the customer experience.
Silver: UiPath
The AI-powered UiPath Business Automation Platform combines a robotic process automation (RPA) solution with a full suite of capabilities to understand, automate and operate end-to-end processes, offering unprecedented time-to-value.
One of UiPath’s long-standing customers Fiserv — a fintech company — was already using some of their products and wanted to expand that relationship, to incorporate broader automation capabilities. The resulting solution (and added employee training) increased hours saved, reduced average handle time and provided measurable cost savings.
Methodology
Final winner determination is at the sole discretion of CMSWire’s Research and Editorial departments. Applicants who may be customers of CMSWire and SImpler Media Group have no influence in the selection of award winners. In addition, organizations who apply for the practitioner awards must reference their company’s internal policies, processes, workflows and outcomes. Organizations who use the practitioner awards to reference their products or services are disqualified.
Judging is done by a group of volunteers, who are practitioners, consultants and otherwise experts in their respective fields. Applications are scored according to a weighted rubric and multiple judges review each application to ensure consensus. Judges are not given applications within their industries and are required to recuse themselves of any application that might be a conflict of interest to avoid bias.
Learn more about the CMSWire IMPACT Awards here.
