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Now in its fourth 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 Experience Leader of the Year
Winner: Mandi Fang, SVP, Client Operations, Cox Automotive
In her current role as SVP of Client Operations, Mandi Fang leads the training, implementation and client care teams supporting retail software solutions and products at Cox Automotive. She previously served as VP, Operations for Dealer Software Solutions at Cox Automotive, including the Dealertrack DMS, Dealer.com, VinSolutions and Xtime brands. She has had positions of increasing responsibility over the course of her career, but the common thread is her drive to deliver a frictionless customer experience.
Judges were impressed with Fang’s ability to deliver results while managing a large team and working cross-functionally with other supporting functions within the company. As one judge said, “Her ability to manage such a large team while remaining focused on goals and alignment for the broader company is impressive. Fang has proven that her initiatives within the company are measurable and have a direct impact on Cox Automotive's ROI, making her role a critical asset not just within CX but every touchpoint of the organization.”
With this award, Fang adds to her impressive list of honors, including being recognized as a Decade of Tech honoree at the 2024 Utah Women Tech Council awards, a Spirit of Leadership Award from Women’s Automotive Association International and a Woman in Remarketing award from Auto Remarketing, both in 2016.
Finalist: Meni Dahan, Head of CX and Digital, Board Member H.Y. Group
Meni leads the customer experience at H.Y. Group, making sure that the entire organization speaks the language of customer experience. He also sits on the board, ensuring that the customer's voice is heard in every important decision made within the organization. In addition, he teaches at two of the leading schools in Israel in the service and customer experience sector, instructing students how to best implement CX with organizations.
Meni’s passion for CX impressed our judges, with several commenting on how evident it is that Meni loves what he does. One judge noted that Meni was “very focused on customer experience at every level and service,” while another said that “the impact they have made at their company is all encompassing and the role and responsibility they have is a testament to it.”
Finalist: Lindsey Major, Chief Member Experience Officer, The Mechanical Licensing Collective
The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) is over 55,000 members strong and includes songwriters, music publishers and other rightsholders. As Chief Member Experience Officer, Lindsey Major leads efforts at The MLC to better serve and support all members. Through Major’s leadership, The MLC has improved the member experience across the member journey, from onboarding to achieving nearly $3 billion in total royalties distributed.
“In reading about Lindsey's accomplishments, it was clear that she was a transformational leader, adapting, responding and successfully collaborating across the organization,” one judge said. Another commented, “Improvements via use of member feedback, technology and cross-functional engagement are all key to optimizing success. The broad scope of her work and influence are impressive.”
Finalist: Rohit Khanna, Chief Customer Officer, Smarsh
With over 25 years of leadership experience, Rohit Khanna has a demonstrated track record of running global customer success and support services for cloud software providers. As the Chief Customer Officer for Smarsh, Khanna supports Smarsh clients to maximize customer satisfaction and ensure the best outcomes for their businesses.
Judges highlighted the scale of Khanna’s accomplishments, including how Smarsh scaled six key divisions designed to address diverse customer needs and ensure exceptional service delivery under his leadership.
Customer Journey Innovation
Gold: Customer Experience Team, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, World Trade Center
Customers at the World Trade Center are there to visit, for reflection, commuting, shopping, learning and more. The Customer Experience division supported the customer journey via the QR Code Wayfinding Program, enhancing the overall visitor experience by providing a seamless and intuitive navigation solution. Program implementation required several phases, research, testing, multi-language functionality, accessibility considerations, customer communication and post-launch evaluation. Judges were impressed with the complexity of the challenge and the attention to supporting all customers.
Silver: Marketing and Customer Experience Team, CV3 Financial Services
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Established in 2023, CV3 provides financing to real estate investors. Repeat customers are vital to their business, so attention to the customer experience is paramount. CV3’s challenge was nothing less than building a customer-focused lending company from the ground up. They accomplished this by developing a fully integrated tech stack, analyzing data with the help of AI, aligning the Sales and Operations teams and implementing a customer loyalty program — all of which impressed the judges.
Vendor Award Winners
Best Customer Experience Transformation
Gold: CSG
A major telecom company came to CSG for a solution to help decrease call center volumes and manage customer interactions more efficiently. They deployed CSG Bill Explainer, an AI-driven solution designed to enhance and personalize bill summaries with insights that eliminate bill confusion — answering customers’ billing questions before they ask. The solution brought the telco clear ROI, creating a clearer customer experience and reducing the strain on its call center operations.
Silver: Sitecore
One challenge for a major airline was to deliver personalized content to thousands of digital signs in airports worldwide, giving passengers the most advanced end-to-end travel experience possible. The company turned to Sitecore's composable digital experience platform to improve its digital signage with enhanced personalization and multiple language support. Both English and non-English speaking travelers praised these new features and found them useful, with 82% of non-English speaking customers saying they made the traveling experience easier.
Best Use of AI in Customer Experience
Gold: VOZIQ AI
A Top 5 home security provider turned to VOZIQ AI to uncover customer experience gaps and areas of dissatisfaction by making its data more usable and actionable. VOZIQ AI in turn implemented the AI-Enabled Predictive Customer Retention Solution, powered by VOZIQ’s enterprise AI platform and multiple machine learning models. The solution enabled the customer to better identify true drivers of customer cancellations and engage with those customers before they ended services, with proactive and profitable offers. This resulted in a significant increase of customer retention and improved their customer lifetime value by over $100 million.
Silver: NICE
One of NICE’s customers in the hospitality industry launched a transformative AI initiative for customer experience. Their journey to enhancing CX through automation began with a robust AI deployment designed to tackle long-standing operational challenges and modernize services. The implementation of NICE’s CXone Mpower Autopilot solution resulted in a deflection of 20% of interactions in digital channels and 30% in voice, thanks to introducing self-service capabilities for common inquiries.
Best Contact Center Innovation
Gold: NICE
Within NICE, the Open Network Exchange (ONE) team has more than 30 years of experience creating and supporting successful membership-based benefits and loyalty programs and solutions for some of the world’s most respected brands across many different industries and markets. ONE worked with a cruise line partner to improve processes, retire legacy systems and revamp call flow documentation in an effort to improve call center operations. This led to reduced ASA times and call flow volumes.
Silver: Twilio
With more than 325,000 active customers, Twilio’s Customer Engagement Platform helps today’s top brands build direct, personalized relationships with their customers. Twilio's unique combination of communications, contextual data and AI capabilities, enable customers to deliver personalized experiences at every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way.
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.
