In the report Lessons in CX Excellence, we provide highlights from 11 Temkin Group CX Excellence Award finalists. This jam-packed 127-page report also includes their nomination forms. Here are some highlights from each of the finalists:

• In just 17 months, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan assembled its customer experience team and leveraged a variety of insights and data to devise a comprehensive strategy to "Find and Fix" near-term opportunities and "Transform" the organization to be customer-centric at its core. 
• Bombardier Aerospace drives continuous improvement through its multi-faceted Amazing Customer Experience (ACE) initiative. Customer feedback is essential to ACE and is gathered through a variety of channels including surveys, customer forums, and Bombardier's Executive Listening Program.
• Citrix places an emphasis on giving customers a voice in its product roadmap and building a user-centered culture in order to continuously improve its products, services, and experiences. Through the Design Matters initiative, Citrix helps its employees rethink core business processes with a focus on customer needs.
• EMC has a Total Customer Experience (TCE) program with a mission to enable business growth through improvements based on a customer-focused, data-driven strategy. The program provides ways for customers, partners, and EMC field personnel to provide feedback on their experiences, and measures customer quality in every interaction.
• Founded on the core value "The Customer Is Always First," Fidelity Investments has a well-established, well-rounded program that delivers enterprise-wide results. The program comprises four integrated elements: Voice of Customer & Associate, End-to-End Process Improvement, Culture & Communications, and Measurement & Rewards.
• The Customer Insight (CI) team at JetBlue Airways provides the business with a multi-faceted view of its customers through feedback from surveys, text analytics, social media monitoring, and third party benchmarking. The CI team also has a program in place to address all unsolicited customer feedback that is received regardless of source through its Customer Retention Program.
• Microsoft believes that the better it is at building a culture of accountability, listening and responding to customers, simplifying offerings, and innovating based on customer feedback, the stronger its Customer and Partner Experience (CPE) will be.
• "Create Repeat Guests Profitably" is the mission of the Guest Relations team of the Oklahoma City Thunder. The team uses various fan feedback platforms to gather feedback including email, text message, telephone, written submissions, as well as social media, all of which are promoted on the team's website and during in-game announcements.
• Oracle drives consistent customer experience activities across all regions and lines of business through a structured framework and standardized approach to monitoring the customer experience: Listen, Respond, Collaborate for Customer Success. The portfolio of feedback tools includes transactional and product surveys, relationship surveys, customer advisory boards, user experience labs, and independent user groups.
• On the company's path back from bankruptcy, Safelite AutoGlass CEO Tom Feeney set a goal in 2008 to double business in four years by 1) putting Safelite's people first by focusing on talent development and employee engagement and 2) going above and beyond to delight every customer.
• Sovereign Assurance of New Zealand's strategy is to create customer engagement and advocacy through effortless experiences, with a program of initiatives around four key levers: customers front and center, stickier relationships, maximize touch points, and focus on value. 

Using the Temkin Employee Engagement Index, we analyzed employee engagement across more than 2,400 U.S. employees in the report Employee Engagement Benchmark Study, 2013. Here are a few of the other findings:

• Fifty-seven percent of U.S. employees are moderately or highly engaged, an increase from 47% that we found last year.
• Engaged employees are more than twice as likely to stay late at work if something needs to be done, help someone at work even if they're not asked, and do something that is good for the company even if it's not expected of them.
• Engaged employees are almost three times as likely to make recommendations about an improvement and more than six times as likely to recommend that a friend or relative apply for a job.
• Three-quarters of employees in companies with significantly above average financial performance are moderately or highly engaged, compared with less than half of firms with subpar financial results.
• Nearly twice as many employees at companies with subpar customer experience are looking for a job compared with employees at companies with good customer experience.
• Seventy-five percent of senior executives are moderately or highly engaged, compared with only 46% of individual contributors.
• The most engaged employees tend to be older, male, college educated, and African-American.

Bruce Temkin
Customer Experience Transformist
& Managing Partner
Temkin Group

Chair, Customer Experience Professionals Association