We just announced the winners of Forrester’s inaugural Outside In Awards at Forrester's Forum For Customer Experience Professionals East this afternoon. The awards recognize organizations that excel at the practices needed for planning, creating, and managing a great customer experience. We accepted nominations in six categories that align with the six customer experience disciplines in our research: strategy, customer understanding, design, measurement, governance, and customer-centric culture.

To evaluate the submissions, each panel of judges graded each nomination form on five criteria: clarity of approach, impact on customers’ experiences, impact on business performance, degree of innovation, and lessons provided for other firms. Each category was judged independently, and there could be up to three winners in any category. Winners and finalists were chosen based on their scores.

And the winners are . . . 

  • Ally Bank for design.
  • American Cancer Society for measurement.
  • Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan for customer understanding.
  • The Lego Group for measurement.
  • Pitney Bowes for measurement.
  • PwC Australia for design.
  • Safelite AutoGlass for customer-centric culture.

And the finalists are . . .

  • DBS Bank for strategy.
  • VMWare for customer understanding.
  • RagingWire Data Centers for governance.
  • Rogers Communications for customer-centric culture.

Stay tuned to our customer experience blog for more details on what made these programs award-winning.

Thank you to Harley Manning for co-leading the awards program and judging several categories, and thank you to my fellow Forrester judges Kerry Bodine, Jonathan Browne, Megan Burns, Tony Costa, Paul Hagen, Ron Rogowski, Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian, and Amelia Sizemore. And a big thank you to our two non-Forrester judges: Tamara Adlin of adlin and Mila D’Antonio of 1to1 Media. Finally, a special thank you to Carla O’Connor, our research associate, for managing all of the logistics!

Thank you to all of the organizations that participated in the process. And congratulations to the finalists and winners!

For more information on Forrester’s annual Outside In Awards, please visit: www.forrester.com/outsideinawards.