Feature
The Gist
- IMPACT Awards 2026 now open. Applications are officially being accepted across eight categories celebrating excellence in customer experience from both practitioners and vendors. Check out the video interview of last year's CX Leader of the Year above!
- Craft a strong story. Successful applications focus on a clear narrative, measurable results and collaboration among the right team members to bring the story to life.
- Confidentiality and fairness. CMSWire protects applicant data, while a diverse panel of vetted judges reviews each entry based on evidence, clarity and impact.
- Valuable feedback for all. Every applicant receives a detailed scorecard with judges’ comments—offering insights to strengthen future CX initiatives.
- Recognition that drives visibility. Winners gain industry-wide exposure, credibility and shareable digital badges highlighting their leadership in CX innovation.
Fall means one thing around here: It’s IMPACT Awards season. Now in its fourth year, CMSWire is officially accepting applications for the 2026 IMPACT Awards across eight categories. Entries are open now through Nov. 14.
Whether this is your first time applying or you’re a returning winner, this guide breaks down what to expect from the application process, shares tips for crafting a standout submission and explores why participation is well worth your time.
Table of Contents
- FAQ Summary for CMSWire IMPACT Awards
- What Are the IMPACT Awards?
- Winning Strategies for Completing Your Application
- What About Confidential Information?
- Who Are the Judges and What Are They Looking For?
- Benefits of the IMPACT Awards
- Visibility and Credibility
- Not Ready to Apply? Consider Judging
- Apply Today for CMSWire's IMPACT Awards
FAQ Summary for CMSWire IMPACT Awards
Key questions from the CMSWire Impact Awards summarized here:
Yes. Professionals can volunteer as judges to gain behind-the-scenes insight into the process, earn a digital badge and prepare for a stronger submission next year.
CMSWire protects applicant data by dividing submissions into two parts: demographic details and category-specific responses. Only the second part is shared with judges. Applicants are not required to name specific customers and may use general descriptions instead.
The IMPACT Awards honor excellence in customer experience (CX) across eight categories, recognizing both practitioners and technology vendors. Practitioner awards highlight individuals and teams improving CX within their organizations, while vendor awards celebrate companies delivering innovative solutions or successful customer case studies.
All applicants receive a detailed scorecard with judges’ comments and scoring insights. Winners receive a physical trophy, a digital badge from Accredible and visibility across CMSWire’s platforms, press releases and articles highlighting their achievements.
Applications for the 2026 CMSWire IMPACT Awards are open through Nov. 14. Submissions can be completed at awards.simplermedia.com
Each application is reviewed by at least three judges—industry professionals, consultants, academics and executives. Judges look for a clear narrative, evidence of measurable results, well-defined success metrics and accessible language free from jargon.
Both CX practitioners and vendors are eligible. Practitioners can apply individually or as teams, while vendors can submit case studies or product/solution applications demonstrating measurable CX impact.
What Are the IMPACT Awards?
The IMPACT Awards honor the best in customer experience (CX) from the practitioner (like Mandi Fang, the reigning CX Leader of the Year in the video above) and technology-provider sides:
- Practitioner awards celebrate those in customer experience roles who work to improve the customer experience within their organizations. Practitioner awards can honor individuals (Customer Experience Leader of the Year) or departments or teams (Customer Journey Innovation).
- Vendor awards celebrate companies that create products or solutions designed to enhance the customer experience for their clients. Applications fall into two main types.
- Case study awards highlight outstanding initiatives or implementations that demonstrate measurable success for a specific customer.
- Product/Solution Awards recognize vendors that actively partner with their clients to improve and innovate their offerings — delivering solutions that meet real-world needs today while evolving to address the challenges of tomorrow.
Winning Strategies for Completing Your Application
- Decide on a narrative: Crafting an application is about telling a good story. Like any good story, it has a beginning, middle and an end. Where did you start? What are the driving factors? How did you address any problems or challenges and what were the results?
- Involve the right people: A well-crafted application takes time and detail. You may need to get others to weigh in on your application with the right information that supports your narrative.
What About Confidential Information?
At CMSWire, we recognize and are sensitive to the fact that information you might provide in your application may be confidential. This is why we take steps to protect your information.
While the application is divided into two parts (demographics information and category-specific questions), only the second part is shared with our judges. Demographics information is only collected so we can notify you if you win and ship your trophy to you. Several demographics questions are optional and leaving them blank does not reduce your chances of winning.
One particular question we get a lot is the naming of a customer on vendor applications. Naming your customer is not required; we are happy to keep that information vague. If you don’t want to name your customer, simply leave that question blank or generalize it (“small organization in healthcare” or “a major logistics firm” for example). If you don’t name your customer in the second part of the application, the judges won’t know who they are either.
Who Are the Judges and What Are They Looking For?
Every application receives at least three judge reviews, to ensure scoring consistency and minimize the effect of outlier scores. Judges are experts who volunteer their time and knowledge to rate and review applications. Judges can be academics, consultants, industry professionals, founders and more. If you’re applying for Leader of the Year, 90% of the people reading your application will be at the C-Suite level. We vet everyone who applies to judge for us and encourage them to return to the awards program year after year.
- Avoid jargon: Judges may be experts in their field, but they might not be experts in your field — we intentionally assign judges applications outside their industry to reduce bias. Keep this in mind as you write your application: if your company or industry uses a lot of niche acronyms and jargon, you may need to simplify some concepts.
- Demonstrate needs assessment, define success: Judges appreciate concrete evidence of success and want to know that you’ve spent time identifying what success looks like. What was going on that spoke to the need for a particular solution or initiative? What did you expect the ROI to be for your new product, service, initiative or solution?
- Include metrics: Do you have specific metrics? Provide them. Can’t provide exact numbers? Ballpark figures are fine. Are you still waiting for final numbers from a program’s completion? Give us the preliminary data or whatever you’re seeing in the early stages.
What matters to judges is knowing that you’ve thought carefully about the solution to a particular problem and you have metrics in place to measure the success of your initiative or solution.
Related Article: Highlighting the 2025 CMSWire IMPACT Awards Winners and Finalists
Benefits of the IMPACT Awards
Participation in the IMPACT Awards comes with plenty of benefits — and not just only for the winners.
Benefits for Everyone
Everyone who applies to the IMPACT Awards receives a scorecard on their application. This features your overall score as well as all judges’ comments about your application. During the judge review cycle, we ask judges to answer these two questions:
- What impressed you most about this application?
- What suggestions do you have for this organization around improvement in this award area?
These comments are an invaluable resource to get a firsthand opinion from industry experts on the strength of your product, solution, initiative or program. You can then share the scorecard internally to either prove your efforts or point out where your programs might be lacking.
Benefits for Winners
Winning an IMPACT Award also comes with a physical trophy and a digital badge. The trophy? That’s for the office. The digital badge is a way to share with the world your achievements. We partner with badging platform Accredible to make your badges easily accessible and sharable across all social networks without requiring you to sign up to another service.
Visibility and Credibility
Awards recognition builds credibility for your organization. You have been judged and designated the best in your category by a vetted group of experts. This isn’t just tooting your own horn; others agree on the merits of your work.
Visibility across our websites is another benefit to awards recognition. For over two decades CMSWire has been the world's leading community of customer experience and digital experience professionals. Today our community consists of over 5 million influential business leaders and senior practitioners, the majority of whom are based in North America and employed by medium to large organizations. If your organization wasn’t on our readers’ radar before, it will be once you win an IMPACT Award. Award winners are announced in a press release, covered more in depth in an article and featured prominently on our awards website.
See last year’s, and 2024's, announcements to get an idea of what to expect around award promotion:
For practitioners, there’s even more opportunities for visibility. Winners of the practitioner categories can participate in CMSWire TV and share their experiences with our Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro.
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Not Ready to Apply? Consider Judging
Have a project that won’t be ready till next year? If you want to participate in the IMPACT Awards and get the “inside scoop” on what other companies are doing around customer experience, consider volunteering as an awards judge. Judging costs nothing but time, and at the end of it you’ll receive a digital badge and public thanks on our website. You’ll also see how other companies approach the awards application, which you can then take to your own application next year. Click here to sign up to judge.
Apply Today for CMSWire's IMPACT Awards
Applying to the IMPACT Awards can be rewarding for your business, thanks to independent recognition building credibility, increased visibility among CX practitioners and the recognition of your peers. Applications take time, so don’t want; apply today.
Submit to the IMPACT Awards by Nov. 14 for a chance to be recognized. Register and complete your application at awards.simplermedia.com.
