One month before the CERAs
Some milestones are coming up very quickly: We have a little over three days before the submission deadline and one month from today we’ll be handing out the awards
Oh how time flies when you’re laying awake thinking about something every night. We’re now one-month away from the 2015 Customer Experience Recognition Awards.
Will your company be a winner?
The sands of time are running out, but you still have time if you hurry. The iron-clad submission deadline is this Friday, September 4 at 5PM EDT.
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Information Development World 2015
What happens if you submit / win a CERA, but aren’t attending this year’s Information Development World?
The submissions are starting to roll in as are the questions about iDW and the CERA lunch. It’s a good question especially since it has a very simple answer.
The CERAs are fully independent of iDW. You or your company do not need to have planned on attending the conference. However, we want you to attend our Awards luncheon on October 1st so all teams who have entered into the CERAs will receive a maximum of five tickets to the lunch.
We look forward to seeing your entry and seeing you on October 1.
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We are nearing the deadline for the 2015 CERAs. We’re 10 days away from the closing of submissions. Yes, earlier the deadline was earlier, but we moved it to September 4, 2015.
]]>We’re closing in to two weeks to go before our September 4, 2015 deadline and having seen the entries so far, we don’t envy the judges one bit. But, we want to get even more entries before our deadline so we’re highlighting what entrants receive for their efforts.
A submitter will receive:
- Public recognition @ the 2015 recognition event
- Inclusion in our post celebration press release
Winners will also receive the CERA Crystal trophy and a full profile article on TechWhirl.
We share this little bit of information to help make the decision a little easier for any and all companies thinking about submitting. We want your experience to be outstanding and beneficial just like the experiences of your customers.
A quick reminder: the deadline is Friday, September 4, 2015 at 5PM EDT.
]]>Added a few more grains to the sands of time for this year’s CERAs
We’ve decided to extend the deadline for this year’s Customer Experience Recognition Awards to Friday, September 4, 2015 at 5PM EDT.
Frankly, the deadline should have been this one the entire time, but our initial planning suggested the 28th was the right date. On Sunday, when we started doing the detailed planning on judging and ordering the awards we realized that we could extend another week.
Please contact us with any questions on your submission or the new deadline. We’re now at the very edge of our timeline so there won’t be another extension unless everyone wants a hand drawn award rather than the edged crystal we gave last year.
Recognizing the Best
The Customer Experience Recognition Awards were created to bring much needed recognition to companies around the world who are investing their time, talents and capital into projects that improve the experiences of their customers through content. The question we keep receiving is – who can nominate a company or a project?
The simple answer is that anyone can and should nominate a company for their good work. Companies, consultants and customers are welcome and encouraged to submit a nomination for this year’s awards.
Has your company just rolled out a new project or had one come online that is making your customer’s experience better? If so, then you should summarize the project and submit it.
Are you a consultant who helped plan and rollout a project for a client? If the answer is yes, then reach out to your client and encourage them to allow you to submit it for a CERA.
Software or product suppliers – do you know that one or more of your customers used your product to create a remarkable experience for customers? Why not nominate them for a CERA?
And finally, are you a customer of a company that is just knocking it out of the park when it comes to your experience? Yes? Then, submit them for a CERA and show them how much you appreciate their efforts.
We want to hear these great stories so we can share them with the rest of the world and the only way we can do that is if you share them with us.
Please contact us if you have any questions or would like some feedback on the validity of your possible submission.
]]>Last year, we recommended, but did not require, that submitters provide supporting information / data and found that only a fraction of those organizations shared information with us showing that they had truly been successful in their endeavors. The lack of information was the #1 complaint we heard from our judges.
Our judges kept asking: where’s the proof of their success? How can we judge something as successful without data? The winners last year all provided some type of proof of their success.
In response to their concerns, we have required proof this year. From our 2015 Submission Form:
Of course, we have exchanged one set of concerns for another. This year the concern is with our submitters: what are you going to do with this information? Will it be published?
We fully understand that this request means a greater responsibility on our part to ensure that your information is kept private and safe. TechWhirl understands this need and pledge to keep your company information confidential and private. We will only share the information with the three judges who will review the submission and they have committed to keeping this information private as well.
The information is needed to help us understand your success so if some of that information is very private and you have major concerns then please contact us and we’ll work with you to put together a submission package that proves your claims, but allows you to feel comfortable about the sharing.
]]>One month before the CERA Deadline
Your Customer Experience Recognition Award nomination is due on Friday, September 4, 2015. The submission form is set to turn off at the stroke of 5PM EDT. We really want you to submit a great project so we can review it and we really want to have enough time to do the judging…
We’ve received some wonderful entries so far, but we know there are more out there. The rest of this note provides information on project eligibility, submissions, reasons to take the time to submit and finally a reminder on the deadline.
Is my Project a good Candidate and what are the Categories?
We’ve provided a lot of additional information on the awards site so please check it out. As a hint, the project needs to have something to do with creating, managing, publishing or distributing content and the outcome of that project has improved the experiences of customers or your employees. The project doesn’t necessarily have to be content technology focused. It could be the development of new processes, procedures, training and policies that lead to better CX.
For instance, did you rollout a new training program for all front-line staff? Of course, tech projects are likely such as installing a new customer feedback system that’s tied directly to customer service, product development and the tech / user docs people? Or, were you able to take your tour scripts and translate them into multiple languages & provide captions for those with hearing difficulties? (hint you could submit in two different categories)
The Categories:
- Accessibility
- Customer Loyalty
- Customer Support
- Employee Engagement
- Information Discovery/ Pre-sales and Sales
- Translation/Localization
- User Community/Social Media
Learn more about each of these categories
How do I Submit an Entry?
Go to our website and fill out the form. We’ve fixed a couple bugs in the form so it should work very well, but please type your answers first so you don’t have to repeat the process. Contact us if there’s a problem and we’ll work with you to get the information.
Also, once you submit your entry, would you mind sharing your submission via Twitter and other social media? Our thank you for submitting page has an easy to share button … also, you can follow our shared articles and updates via the Twitter hashtag #infodevworld.
Who can submit?
Anyone who knows of a great project or business activity are encouraged to submit.
You can submit your own work, consultants can submit their client’s work and finally Jane on the street can nominate a company they think are doing a great job.
Why would you want to submit?
The fame, the fortune and our soon to be shown snazzy hardware. This is a celebration of creating remarkable experiences for customers so even if we just gave you a firm handshake and a little publicity, it’s all good.
When is it Due?
Friday, September 4, 2015 by 5PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time.
Do you have questions or concerns? Please contact us and we’ll do our best to answer them.
]]>We’re a little over three weeks away from our CERA submission deadline of September 4, 2015. It’s exciting to see the entries and read about all of the remarkable work focused on creating better customer experiences.
For those of you still thinking about making a submission, but wondered if your project is right – this post is for you!
We setup our submission to be like a traditional response to an RFP. The form asks you to
- categorize the project,
- provide an elevator-pitch summary,
- summarize the problem you were attempting to solve,
- the results of the project (so far),
- the budget for the project – round numbers are fine here – was it $5K or $5 mil
- and then a pitch to us on why your project should be considered the best project of them all.
- find the best data you can find showing your success (say it, then prove it)
- capture some pictures, screen shots, copy or videos so our judges can see the project in addition to reading about it.
We hope this logical structure is both intuitive and very easy to develop. With the assumption you had to get funding, a lot of the early work could be lifted from the business case.
A couple submitters from 2014 turned their CERA submission into marketing case studies. And a few have turned the information into some great blog posts and content marketing.
While time is drawing to a close (and to be clear we’re not going to extend the deadline – it would be unfair to those who prioritized the work and got the submission in ahead of time), but you still have plenty of time to submit. Please contact us if you would like to chat about the criteria, categories or if you have any questions.
Submit Your Entry Today: Online Form | Submit your Entry
]]>Going for the CERA 2015 win
We’re nearing one month before the 2015 CERA submissions are due. In this post, we’re going to discuss our judging process a little more to help organizations who are curious about the process.
Our judging process is fairly straight forward. Our judges are all industry experts who, by the time they review your submission, will have been through our training session. The training is designed to help standardize approaches and criteria that will be used to evaluate a submission.
Winning bids from 2014 were those submissions were those that provided the clearest view of the activities of the work and success of the endeavor. Submitters who provided pictures, PDFs of websites and other imagery that helped the judges really “see” the work were rewarded for their efforts.
However, the submission form and eye-candy only go so far. We need to know how successful the initiative was in terms of metrics. And, we don’t mean statements like: it was really successful – our site visitors doubled. This is nice, but where’s the proof? The winning bids in 2014 made the outcome statements and then supported it with data. We understand that some things are proprietary so please contact us and we can work out some approach that gives us the data, while protecting your IP.
We will assign two or three judges per category to do their reviews. Once complete each entry receives a raw score. We will then compile the scores by totaling the number of points awarded to each submission and then taking an average.
The submission with the highest average will win the category. The Best in Show winner is the category winner with the highest total points.
We want to keep the reviews and final winners as analytical as possible. The gaps in the submission content (lack of supporting data) has (hopefully) been corrected in 2015 with some revisions to our submission form. We’ve made supporting data a requirement for submission and added a little clarification on some other topics, which drew a lot of questions next year.
Is your company preparing a submission? We’d love to hear more and answer any of your questions.
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