Vancouver, Canada – Vision Critical has announced the winners of its annual Visionary Awards, honoring customers that demonstrate excellence in utilizing customer intelligence to improve their organization’s performance in three key areas: product innovation, customer experience, and marketing.

“We are thrilled to highlight what we believe to be some of the best examples of customer-led organizations available worldwide,” said Scott Miller, CEO for Vision Critical. “They – and all of our Visionary Award participants this year – have clearly demonstrated that listening to their customers and engaging with them on an ongoing basis enables them to make better decisions, operate more efficiently, and offer a better customer experience overall. We look forward to learning more from them at our Customer Intelligence Summits later this year.”

LinkedIn: Product Innovation Visionary Award, North America

LinkedIn wins the Product Innovation Visionary Award. With “Members First” as a core value, LinkedIn needed a way to have an ongoing, two-way conversation with its members. Adding seven insight communities to its research toolkit has revolutionized the way LinkedIn does research. LinkedIn can now gather agile insight to keep pace with the speed of product development decisions from idea generation to design to in-market feedback, rather than going on gut or waiting for the results from slower approaches. For example, the insight communities were heavily leveraged in the recent redesign of the LinkedIn desktop experience. The ROI is in delivering insight in time to have an impact on decision making.

Politico: New Community Visionary Award, North America

Politico, a Washington, D.C-based global news and information company, wins New Community Visionary for its community of influencers, which includes high-ranking government officials and C-suite executives. Previously, the company could answer Who, What, Where, When and How, but were missing the Why. Pairing the Sparq platform with analytics from other data sources gives Politico an understanding of what makes influencers tick, helping it to anticipate audience needs and improve strategy, content and advertising partner relationships.

Priority Health: Customer Experience Visionary Award, North America

Priority Health, Michigan’s second largest health plan, with nearly 800,000 members, wins the Customer Experience Visionary Award. Its community helps it to develop innovative products and programs and to improve communications, which engages people more in their health care. In one recent case, the company used feedback from its community to rework a critical customer communication piece in a single day. Priority Health has seen increases in its Customer Experience Index as it uses its community to pinpoint touchpoints along the member journey to improve. Without the actionable, timely and targeted data from its community, this wouldn’t be possible.

SMUD: Marketing Visionary Award, North America

The Marketing Visionary Award goes to Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD), a community-owned, not-for-profit electric utility serving approximately 600,000 residential and commercial customers in Sacramento County, California. SMUD has repeatedly turned to its insight communities for feedback and collaboration in developing advertising campaigns, from concept development, to scripts, images, and testing during the production process. Making decisions based on direct customer feedback has resulted in its marketing campaigns consistently achieving or exceeding goals, and the speed, efficiency, quality and volume of insight from the community could not be matched with traditional market research approaches.

Telstra: APAC Visionary Award

The winner of the overall Visionary Award for the Asia Pacific region is Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications and media company. Following the recent launch of a new plan, Telstra was able to tap into its insight community to assess customer understanding. The evaluation from the insight community identified areas of risk that may have affected customer satisfaction and retention, as well as clear actions to mitigate them, giving the company the ability to make quick, evidence-based changes.

Prudential Singapore: APAC New Community Visionary Award

The award for New Community of the Year for the Asia Pacific region goes to Prudential Singapore, one of the top life insurance companies in the country. Through its insight community, Prudential Singapore ran an assessment of its customers’ insurance needs and requirements, leading the company to identify coverage gaps. The results led Prudential Singapore to implement new agent training and customer education programs that led to a significant jump in its customer satisfaction scores. Its philosophy of “Always Listening, Always Understanding” necessitates the continuous engagement of its customer base, which can only be achieved with the efficiencies of an insight community.

Bauer Media: EMEA Visionary Award

Bauer Media, a European-based company with a portfolio of more than 600 magazines, over 400 digital products, and 50 radio and television stations worldwide, has won the overall Visionary Award for the EMEA region. The consumer insight and knowledge of purchasing habits from its consumer panel audiences gives its UK operation – which reaches over 25 million UK adults across multiple media channels – a competitive edge. This ensures Bauer’s sales teams are able to clearly differentiate its offering to commercial partners with clear insight, coupled with instinct about these audiences.

Jacquet Brossard and Scripps Networks Interactive: EMEA New Community Visionary Award

In the EMEA region, two companies tied for New Community of the Year: Jacquet Brossard, the leading provider of industrial bread and cake products in France, and Scripps Networks Interactive, the leading developer of engaging lifestyle content in the home, food and travel categories.

Jacquet Brossard needed an insight community to strengthen the link with its customers over the long-term and become more customer centric. Jacquet Brossard utilizes its insight community to provide feedback to guide agile product development, including recently making packaging changes and identifying taste preferences in advance of a new product launch. Its new community has helped to improve the overall customer experience and to grow brand ambassadors.

Scripps Networks Interactive has tuned to its viewer insight community to support its channels and commercial teams. The new community has become a valued asset to the region and has helped the research team to further enhance stakeholder engagement and demonstrate the importance of understanding its audience.