The Customer Experience Professionals Association, the premier global non-profit organization dedicated to advancing and cultivating the Customer Experience profession, has announced the winners of its 2016 CX Innovation Awards. Presentations were made at the CXPA's annual Insight Exchange event in Atlanta, May 3-4, where more than 300 customer experience professionals gathered for world-class learning and networking, with a unique approach to knowledge exchange.

The CX Innovation Awards, now in their fifth year, recognize companies that demonstrate innovative techniques to improve customer experience and business results. A panel of expert judges selected five winners from this year's finalists:

• Barclaycard US: "Customer Journey Operating Model"

  Barclaycard’s innovation focuses on the often overlooked yet critical component of organizational design. The CX team created a governance model centered on key customer journeys, and assigned owners, who have end-to-end accountability and are empowered to make decisions for their journeys, including resource allocations. Though it is early in the implementation, benefits include transparency in project investment, alignment across channels and functions, and more focus on the customer.

• Ciena: "One Version of the Truth"

  Ciena's innovative program maps internal metrics against customer perceptions to identify misalignments, resulting in an “Inside Out/Outside In” visual scorecard that provides the company with “One Version of the Truth.” This scorecard is then reviewed monthly by functional stakeholders and executives, to drive actions, bridge gaps and better understand regional needs and expectations. These new metrics better reflect customer expectations, resulting in improved perceptions and increased bookings, while also supporting the company’s shift from primarily focusing on delivering quality products to also delivering a superb customer experience throughout the customer’s journey. .

• Cigna: "10 Every Time (Best Net Promoter Company)"

  Cigna's integrated program fosters widespread awareness of, and commitment to, delivering service experiences that customers rate as the best. It includes a transaction-based measurement system, a data-driven approach to uncover what's most important to customers, and analytics to increase insights, projections and stakeholder confidence. NPS results have risen significantly, as have FCR and customer effort scores. The program partnered with IT to enhance experiences in the Web, IVR and Chat; leveraged segmentation to drive differentiation; created an “innovation laboratory;" and synthesized multiple data sources to truly understand the holistic customer voice.

• EMC: "Predictive Customer Insights Model"

  To address a gap in understanding how customers feel, EMC created a predictive insights model. Utilizing historical survey data, EMC identified triggers that correlated with dissatisfaction drivers. Using this insight, a predictive algorithm was developed. The algorithm identifies potentially dissatisfied customers, and sends an automated notification to a service manager to follow up. Results include positive impacts on customer satisfaction and NPS scores, as well as a significant increase in customers returning online transactional surveys. The EMC model shows how CX approaches can evolve beyond “Tracking” to “Prediction” and closer to “Prescription.”

• Humana Inc.: "Accelerating Consumer-Centricity in a Fortune 100 Company (FastStart CX Lab)"

  Our Customer Experience FastStart team leverages customer-centered processes to accelerate the speed and quality of new idea, product, and process development. It is creating a movement within the organization, driving culture change at a macro level through activities driven by deep understanding of the customer experience. Co-locating teams of associates within the FastStart lab from all levels of the organization, the initiative focuses on customers’ touchpoints – what matters most to them – while optimizing cost structure and delivering benefits, such as recently eliminating pain points for our members.

"Each year the remarkable winning innovations set the bar higher, and then the next year's entries reach and surpass those high levels, as these creative and sophisticated initiatives demonstrate," said Tabitha Dunn, Vice President, Customer Experience, Concur Technologies and co-lead for the 2016 Insight Exchange. "The teams who developed this year's remarkable winning innovations, benefitting their companies and their customers, are also benefitting the whole CX field and moving the industry forward."

The judges for the 2016 CX Innovation Awards were:

• Carol Chapman, Founder, Heartfelt Brand, LLC

• Matthew Larson, Senior Director, Client Experience, Optum

• Michael Lenz, Global Director Brand Experience, Cisco

• Ben London, Manager of Customer Experience, MoneyGram International

• Claudia Vale, CCXP, Customer Experience Manager, John Deere Latin America