Stop talking about improving CX outcomes and start delivering: Real lessons from the 2026 Emplifi Excellence Awards

Recently, I’ve noticed that everyone seems to be talking about outcomes in the customer service and experience space.

I’m excited about this as I’ve been banging on about the need for an increased focus on outcomes (customer, colleague and business) for years now.

However, while the talk is welcome, I do find myself wondering if it’s just the “word of the moment”, a bit like customer-centric, omnichannel or friction-free were in their time.

Because the reality is that if you ask customers, many of them report that they think experiences are getting worse or that they are being taken for granted, even if they are loyal customers, and it’s data like that that makes me slightly suspicious that all the talk about outcomes is just that… talk.

But. Every now and then, I come across a brand or a series of brands that just seem to get it. They have a clear idea of who they are, what sort of experience they want their customers to have, and why that matters. And, in turn, they are clear on what data and tech they need to deliver that experience.

They aren’t just deploying technology because it’s the “flavour de jour”, they are using it to bring their vision to life and to redefine what’s possible in engagement, service, and growth.

I recently came across a few of these brands while reviewing the winners of the 2026 Emplifi Excellence Awards. Among the winners, there are some excellent examples of teams and individuals who are leveraging Emplifi’s platform to drive those all-important improvements in outcomes.

Now, there were too many winners to showcase them all here, but I’d like to highlight a few themes and some of the winners that really stood out for me, especially because of the impact they are having on their customers, colleagues, and businesses.

1. Speed and Responsiveness at Scale

Whether you are a customer or not, it’s pretty safe to say that nobody likes waiting.

So, the first shout-out goes to Kelly Lewis, the Global Social Media Manager at Hollister Incorporated, who took home a CX Superhero Award and is utilising Emplifi to launch and maintain their influencer programme, a key part of their growth plan. Prior to implementing Emplifi, response times for private and direct messages lagged behind customer expectations.

However, following the implementation, Kelly set a new target for her team of 20+ responders, operating in 6 languages, to respond within 1 hour during 14 business hours. The team blew through that target, and in 2025, their response rate was just 17 minutes. 

That’s impressive, and as a result, it seems like the word that Hollister is now more responsive, especially regarding influencer engagement, is getting around as they are experiencing a significant rise in inbound enquiries from high-quality influencers seeking collaboration.

Then there is Naked Wines, a winner of the Care Champion Award, which has adopted a similar approach and has used Emplifi’s platform to improve its response times to customer queries received on social channels, even during peak trading periods such as Christmas, when message volumes increase significantly due to delivery concerns around gifts and key occasions.

Specifically, their team has used Emplifi Care to triage messages in real-time, allowing them to prioritise critical cases like missed deliveries for family celebrations. Moreover, when more complex cases need to be handed over to customer service, they make sure that the full context goes with them so the customer never has to repeat themselves. Consequently, they have managed to reduce their average response time from 41 minutes to just over 31 minutes in the past year, a nearly 25% improvement, which has driven an increase in their NPS scores from 56.9 in FY24 to 70 in FY26, as well as consistent improvements in both customer sentiment and loyalty.

Again, more evidence that responsiveness matters, is impactful and even at scale, can still feel profoundly human.

2. Listening to Protect

Social listening is often used just to track brand mentions or sentiment. But what if you used it as a real-time defense mechanism for your customers?

That’s what Wing Bank, a Social Listening Leader Award winner, did. 

Now, in financial services, a single scam incident related to a brand can destroy customer trust and undermine years of brand building. 

Early in 2025, they identified a rising trend of fraudulent activity and immediately took proactive action to detect and remove impersonation accounts. By leveraging Emplifi’s real-time trend detection, social listening, and sentiment monitoring, their team conducted in-depth keyword analysis that uncovered the root cause of fraudulent Facebook pages impersonating the bank to scam customers and harvest their personal data.

The team at Wing Bank immediately launched a real-time scam alert campaign to educate their customers and, over the course of 2025, worked to systematically shut down approximately 500 fake pages. At the same time, Emplifi insights enabled our team to efficiently document and report fraudulent activity to platform partners.

The upside? Wing Bank’s efforts to remove these pages as well as their proactive scam alert campaign greatly decreased any negative sentiment but, more importantly, reinforced Wing Bank’s positioning as a “Safety-First” financial institution in the eyes of their customers.

3. From No Visibility to Clarity, Focus and Impact

Before you can begin delivering excellent customer experiences, you need to make sure your internal operations are in order.

That was the situation with ALDO, the winner of the Service Excellence Award. Prior to adopting Emplifi, ALDO’s social care team managed customer interactions across three brands directly through Facebook Business Suite. However, according to ALDO’s Ashley Miller, that system offered “no visibility into performance, no way to track productivity, and no ability to measure response or resolution efficiency.” In fact, the only thing they found they were able to do was monitor their “start-of-day inbox count” and “end-of-day inbox count,” which limited their ability to optimize service or understand customer trends.

However, by implementing Emplifi’s platform, including real-time dashboards and AI-powered responses, they have gained clarity and focus in their social customer care operations. Specifically, agents now have a complete customer history presented in a single view, which is boosting productivity, improving first-contact resolution, and reducing average handling time. This, in turn, helps decrease customer frustration and enhances social engagement outcomes. Additionally, with the insights provided by the platform, they can now easily identify their peak demand hours, allowing them to schedule more effectively and reduce unnecessary part-time payroll, all while maintaining high service standards.

Overall, by moving from a state of limited insight into their social customer care operations to a clearer, more focused approach enabled by Emplifi’s platform, they are now achieving improvements across customer, colleague, and business outcomes. 

That’s the ultimate trifecta of customer service and experience.

4. Connection equals conversion

Finally, let’s look at the massive commercial impact you can achieve when you truly connect with your audience. 

Traditionally, around the New Year, it’s not uncommon to see lots of generic bank ads that focus on good financial management, saving for the future, etc., etc. 

However, ABA Bank, the winner of the award for Best Social Media Campaign, recently flipped things on their head when they transformed their approach to the Cambodian New Year from a traditional seasonal promotion into what can only be described as a national cultural movement. 

Instead of distributing generic bank ads around the New Year, they incorporated Cambodian traditions, original music, and educational short films into their app and marketing.

The Emplifi platform was at the heart of their approach as it helped them analyze previous strategies, monitor real-time audience sentiment and emotional engagement, and quickly readjust distribution when things weren’t working as well as they might.

The results? Well, the campaign smashed it. It achieved 123 million impressions, 75 million video views, and reached 8.7 million unique users. It also contributed to a significant surge in new account openings and app adoption during the campaign period. Moreover, it positioned ABA not only as Cambodia’s most culturally connected and digitally innovative bank but also elevated their brand beyond finance to a symbol of national cultural leadership.

Impressive.

The Punk CX Takeaway

These themes and award winners demonstrate that technology is simply the enabler; it’s the strategy and the people that make the magic happen. These brands aren’t just processing tickets; they are protecting their customers, valuing their time, and engaging with them on a cultural level. That’s how you move beyond discussing CX and start actually delivering real and meaningful improvements to customer, colleague and business outcomes.

Ready to move beyond talk and start delivering real outcomes? Book a demo with Emplifi to see what’s possible.