Who we are
The Experience Excellence Awards (EEI Awards) is a wholly owned subsidiary of The International Customer Experience Institute (ICXI) — the independent global body that defines and certifies experience standards for organisations worldwide.
Our parent institute has spent more than a 20 years shaping how customer and employee experience is measured, benchmarked and improved. The EEI Awards were created as the natural extension of that work: a platform to celebrate the organisations, teams and leaders who are genuinely setting the global benchmark — not the ones with the biggest entry budget or the glossiest submission.
We run the Awards on behalf of the industry, not the industry’s marketing departments. That shapes every decision we make.
Our parent organisation
ICXI
(The International Customer Experience Institute)
ICXI is the independent global authority on customer, employee and patient experience standards, best practice and certification. Its frameworks — including the International Standard for Customer Experience and the Experience Excellence Maturity Model — are used by organisations across more than forty countries to assess, accredit and advance their experience capability.
EEI Awards operates as a wholly owned subsidiary of ICXI, and every award we issue is underpinned by ICXI's methodology, its panel of international assessors, and its standing as a neutral, non-commercial standards body.
Our President
Mr Philip Forrest
Philip Forrest serves as President of The International Customer Experience Institute and, in the same capacity, as President of the Experience Excellence Awards company.
For more than ten years Philip was Chairman of the UK Business Awards and the European Business Awards — two of the most influential awards programmes in the commercial world. In those roles he presided over tens of thousands of entries, worked with hundreds of judges across dozens of industries, and watched, first-hand, what makes an awards programme credible — and what makes one hollow.
It is Philip's advanced, almost unique knowledge of the ‘awards business’ — the mechanics, the incentives, the judging science, and the common failure modes — that led the team to design the EEI Awards around something different: a Maturity Assessment, not a marketing submission.
His conviction is simple. Awards should measure capability that exists inside the organisation, observed and verified by independent assessors, rather than the persuasive skill of whoever wrote the entry. That principle is the foundation of everything we do.
Most awards reward a story. Ours reward a system.
Why ‘Maturity Assessment’ awards?
A traditional awards entry asks you to describe your work in two thousand words and hope the judges agree. It favours organisations with large marketing budgets, experienced entry writers, and a single great case study. It tells you very little about whether the capability is real, repeatable, or sustained.
The EEI Awards take a fundamentally different approach. Every entrant is evaluated against the ICXI Experience Maturity Model— a structured, evidence-based assessment that examines leadership, strategy, culture, insight, design, delivery and measurement. Winners are not the organisations that write the best entry. They are the organisations that, under independent scrutiny, demonstrate the deepest and most sustainable experience capability.
OBJECTIVE
Scoring is anchored to a published international standard, not to a panel’s subjective taste. Two assessors evaluating the same organisation should reach the same conclusion.
EVIDENCE-BASED
Claims are verified by qualified ICXI assessors through documentation, interviews and, where relevant, site observation — not accepted at face value from an entry form.
DEVELOPMENTAL
Every entrant — winner or not — receives a full maturity and recommendations report. The Award is the recognition; the assessment is a lasting asset the organisation keeps.
What we stand for
We believe customer and employee experience is now the primary battleground on which organisations compete — and that the awards celebrating excellence in this field should be held to a higher standard than most currently are.
We believe winners should be proud not just of the trophy, but of the rigour behind it. We believe runners-up should leave the process better equipped than when they entered. And we believe the wider industry benefits when recognition is tied to a transparent, published, international standard.
That is the programme we have built, and the principle we will continue to hold ourselves to.
Who we work with
The Experience Excellence Awards are open to organisations of every size, sector and geography — from global enterprises to public-sector bodies, from fast-growing scale-ups to specialist teams within larger groups. Entries are received, assessed and recognised in multiple regional editions each year, with a global ceremony bringing the winners together.
Our assessors, and advisory panel are drawn from ICXI’s international network of certified experience professionals, supplemented by senior industry leaders who bring first-hand operational experience to the evaluation process.