Beyond the Buzz: How Top Firms Convert CX into Bottom-Line Growth

NEW YORK, NY – January 14, 2026 – In an era where "customer-centricity" has become a ubiquitous corporate mantra, a select group of global enterprises is demonstrating how to translate the concept into concrete financial returns. Medallia, a leader in the experience management sector, has spotlighted these pioneers with its 2026 Expy Awards, recognizing CIBC, Vanguard, Verizon Business, and Paloma Paraja of Santalucía Seguros for transforming customer and employee feedback into a powerful engine for growth, efficiency, and retention. The awards signal a maturing industry moving past passive data collection toward proactive, AI-driven strategies that deliver measurable business impact.

These organizations are being honored not just for listening to their stakeholders, but for fundamentally rewiring their operations to act on those insights at scale. As Medallia CEO Mark Bishof stated, "This year’s winners from CIBC, Vanguard, Santalucía, and Verizon Business aren't simply talking about customer and employee-centricity – it is foundational to how they operate."

From Insight to Impact: A Blueprint for Growth

The achievements of the 2026 Expy Award winners provide a practical blueprint for how enterprises can move beyond theoretical CX goals to achieve tangible results. Each honoree was recognized for a distinct, high-impact accomplishment that directly connects experience management to core business metrics.

CIBC earned the Growth Accelerator Award for an ambitious enterprise-wide transformation. The Canadian bank was lauded for aligning its culture, strategy, and operations around a central purpose of helping clients achieve their ambitions. This holistic approach reportedly drove significant revenue and client growth, improved retention rates, and reduced friction points for millions of customers. The award highlights a crucial lesson: impactful CX is not a departmental project but a company-wide strategic commitment.

Vanguard received the Insights to Impact Award for its disciplined and innovative approach to enhancing the investor experience. The firm was recognized for its ability to create a unified view of the digital journey and foster a culture of evidence-based action. Vanguard demonstrated remarkable success in rapidly scaling its initiatives from pilot programs to enterprise-wide implementation, drastically cutting the time required to generate actionable insights and boosting overall decision velocity and operational efficiency.

Perhaps most indicative of current industry trends, Verizon Business won the Employee Empowerment Award. The company was honored for building a powerful model that formally unites Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EX) as a single strategic priority. This integrated approach yielded impressive results, including the resolution of half of all identified employee pain points, a significant improvement in its Customer Experience Index, and a reversal of customer churn. This achievement validates the growing belief that a supported and empowered workforce is a direct prerequisite for delivering superior customer service and achieving business stability.

Individual leadership was also celebrated, with Paloma Paraja of Santalucía Seguros receiving the Experience Transformation Leader Award. Paraja was recognized for architecting one of the most comprehensive listening ecosystems in the insurance industry. By integrating surveys, advanced speech analytics, digital behavior tracking, and social signals, her team analyzes over a million calls annually. This system triggers tens of thousands of real-time alerts, enabling proactive intervention that has led to significant improvements in customer recovery and retention for the Spanish insurer.

The AI Engine Driving the Experience Revolution

The transformative results achieved by the award winners are not the product of manual data sifting or intuition alone. They are powered by sophisticated technology platforms capable of making sense of billions of disparate feedback signals. At the core of these initiatives is the increasing role of Artificial Intelligence in turning unstructured data—from call center conversations to social media comments—into clear, prioritized actions.

Medallia's platform, utilized by the honorees, embeds AI throughout its architecture to facilitate this process. Recent advancements in the field, including the launch of generative AI tools, are accelerating this shift. Features like 'Intelligent Summaries' can instantly distill lengthy customer interactions for frontline agents, while 'Themes with Generative AI' can identify emerging issues or trends with greater precision than ever before. This allows organizations to move from reacting to problems to predicting them.

The work of Santalucía Seguros, analyzing a million calls per year, is a prime example. Such a feat is only possible through advanced speech and text analytics that can automatically detect customer emotion, sentiment, and intent. Likewise, Vanguard's ability to improve "decision velocity" relies on an AI engine that can process immense volumes of data, identify the most critical insights, and deliver them to the right teams in real time. This technological underpinning is what allows companies to act decisively at scale, a common thread among the Expy winners.

A Cultural Shift: Embedding Experience into Corporate DNA

While technology provides the tools, the success of the Expy Award winners underscores that lasting transformation is rooted in organizational culture and leadership. Verizon Business's award for employee empowerment is particularly telling, as it directly confronts a major challenge in the corporate world. With global employee engagement declining and work-life balance becoming a top priority for talent, companies that fail to address their internal experience risk losing both employees and customers.

By formally uniting its CX and EX divisions, Verizon Business broke down internal silos and created a feedback loop where employee insights directly inform customer-facing improvements and vice versa. This strategic alignment demonstrates a deep understanding that disengaged or frustrated employees cannot be expected to create positive customer interactions. The subsequent reversal in customer churn provides a compelling business case for investing in the employee experience as a driver of external success.

Similarly, CIBC's recognition for its enterprise-wide transformation points to the necessity of top-down executive sponsorship and a shared vision. True experience-led growth requires more than a new software platform; it demands that customer and employee feedback becomes a foundational element in strategic planning, operational workflows, and performance management across the entire organization. As CEO Mark Bishof noted, these companies show "what's achievable when you align your entire organization around solving experience problems."

The Industry Gathers: What's Next for Experience Management?

The stories of this year's winners offer a glimpse into the future of business, where the ability to understand and act on human experience is a key competitive differentiator. The broader industry is taking notice, operating in a dynamic and competitive landscape with major players like Qualtrics and others all pushing the boundaries of experience management technology.

To that end, the conversation will continue at Medallia Experience '26, the company's upcoming flagship conference in Las Vegas. The event, scheduled for February, is expected to bring together thousands of industry professionals to explore the next chapter of CX and EX. The agenda is structured around key themes that mirror the winners' achievements, including creating a "new CX playbook," leveraging AI as an "experience multiplier," and "leading the shift" to make experience a shared responsibility.

The leaders from CIBC, Vanguard, Verizon Business, and Santalucía are slated to share their stories from the main stage, offering attendees a firsthand account of their transformation journeys. The insights shared by these award-winning practitioners will likely set the agenda for how enterprises across all sectors approach customer loyalty, employee engagement, and sustainable growth in the years ahead.