News23 Apr 2025 · 7 min read

The 2025 CX Awards: Revealing This Year’s Categories

The CX Awards is back for 2025, recognizing the best in customer experience innovation. Categories celebrating the pinnacle of CCaaS, CRM, and AI make a welc...

Charlie Mitchell

The CX Awards is back for 2025, recognizing the best in customer experience innovation.

Categories celebrating the pinnacle of CCaaS, CRM, and AI make a welcome return.

Yet, they feature alongside several others that are new for 2025.

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Indeed, this year's edition shines a light on the best in customer data platforms (CDPs), voice of the customer (VoC) tech, and beyond.

In doing so, these awards cover more of the customer experience stack, commending the best solutions from across the space.

The CX Awards' decorated panel of judges understands that space inside out and will help isolate the leading solutions across each category.   

Soon, we’ll unveil that judging panel will land with great aplomb. However, that’s an announcement for another day.

For now, let's dive deep into the complete list of categories for the 2025 CX Awards.

→ APPLICATION FORM: Get your hands on a copy here.

Best Enterprise Contact Center Platform

This award shines a light on a platform with bread-and-depth to satisfy 500+ seat operations, coupled with a large user base of content customers.

Ideally, these contact center providers will also isolate key differentiators for the enterprise, whether that’s in their data and AI strategy, co-innovation, global support services, or something else.

Why is this so critical? Because it helps underline a vision that sets the contact center vendor apart in a crowded market.

Best Mid-Market Contact Center Platform

This award recognizes a highly customizable contact center platform that 100-500-seat customer service operations can optimize.

The providers gunning for this award should pinpoint how they've developed a strong customer base in the mid-market through innovation, integrations, and/or sales strategy.

Moreover, these participants should highlight the steps they are taking to ensure value optimization amongst this customer segment.

Best CRM Solution

Whether it’s a service-specific CRM that offers unique advantages or a CRM ecosystem that impresses in its brawn, this award spotlights a powerful, differentiative CRM solution.

The key word is "differentiative". Indeed, the winner in this category is likely to showcase how they are evolving their offering to meet the needs of tomorrow's CRM buyers.

Yet, alongside that vision must come a track record of delivering results through verified customer reviews and/or success stories.

Best Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) Platform

This award isolates an advanced platform that comprises contact center workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA) solutions.

Vendors should spotlight how they are moving the needle with these technologies beyond what was available in previous-generation workforce optimization (WFO) suites.

Moreover, they may wish to isolate adjacent technologies within their WEM platforms – like conversational analytics, coaching tools, and gamification – that help them differentiate.

New: Best Voice of the Customer (VoC) Solution

This award identifies a powerful solution that gathers customer feedback from various sources and derives actional insights for customer experience teams.

These are the core two elements: collecting feedback and driving actionable insight. Participating VoC providers should identify how they’re enabling end-users to do both in new, innovative ways.

Moreover, vendors may wish to pinpoint how they’re connecting customer feedback management with broader CX data to bolster insights.

New: Best Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Data strategies must evolve to make AI successful. Recognizing this, CDPs are coming to the fore, and this award recognizes one such leading platform.

Whether it's a standalone solution or an offering that's part of a broader CX ecosystem, it doesn't matter so long as the CDP provider offers a compelling vision for the future of the tech category.

Alongside this vision, vendors should showcase success stories that underline their CDP's proven impact across organizations.

Best Conversational Intelligence Solution

Conversational intelligence solutions empower brands with new data to transform experiences. This award pinpoints a solution that unpacks tremendous insight.

Also known as "conversational analytics," these solutions are a mainstay in enterprise contact centers but are also gathering momentum in marketing and sales.

After all, advancements in large language models (LLMs) have democratized the tech.

Finalists in the category will underline how they leverage LLMs and other AI models to break the boundaries of conventional analytics systems.

Best Conversational AI Platform

Conversational AI platforms are in a state of flux with the development of AI Agents. This award recognizes a provider ahead of the curve with its vision and innovation.

Providers can demonstrate this in two ways: by highlighting recent/upcoming releases and by speaking more broadly about how they see the conversational AI space developing.

Known last year as the "Best Virtual Agent Platform" category, this space is crowded and evolving quickly. Conversational AI companies can showcase this award as evidence that they're inching ahead of the pack.

Best Customer Service BPO

As contact centers evolve at an unprecedented speed, service teams need trusted partners. This award recognizes a BPO with a track record for being that dependable ally.

Central to this is offering crucial third-party customer support. Yet, the modern BPO provider does so much more, offering advisory, consulting, technology, and many more support services.

Providers that go the extra mile for their customers and demonstrate aptitude for delivering on expectations will perform well in this category.

Best CPaaS Platform

This award recognizes a CPaaS platform with depth, flexibility, and innovation that aligns with an astute market vision.

That vision should extend beyond pure CPaaS APIs and SDKs to how end-users can leverage these to improve customer journeys.

It should also show ingenuity. After all, with telcos converging on the space and crowding it even more, this differentiation is something CPaaS vendors often lack.

New: Best Employee Experience Innovation

This award spotlights an innovation that's powerful in making the lives of those delivering a customer experience – whether a service agent, sales rep, or store associate – easier.

Whether it's a solution that enables real-time support, aids employee well-being, or helps quell angry customers, the aim here is to highlight a solution employees can’t live without.

Entrants must remember to highlight what’s unique about their offerings, too. Given the dawn of copilots and virtual assistants, there’s no shortage of these EX-focused solutions.

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New: Best Customer Experience Partnership

Whether two vendors come together to deliver a powerful solution or a tech provider and a partner deliver incredible transformations, this award spotlights the best CX collaborators.

Those partners could include a systems integrator (SI), a consulting firm, or a digital services provider; it doesn't matter. What does is a proven track record in enabling outstanding CX outcomes.

As such, applicants should namedrop mutual customers, highlight those outcomes, and share testimonials to reinforce the power of their chosen partnerships.

Best Use of AI

Across the CX market, there are thousands of AI applications. This award spotlights a differentiative example that has delivered significant value to end-users.

Maybe that value is in a newfangled generative AI (GenAI) use case that's driving real results, or perhaps it's an evolution of an older, NLP- or ML-based application.

Ultimately, the award will go to a vendor demonstrating cutting-edge AI innovation and thought leadership.

New: Best CX Deployment

This award goes to a technology provider and their customer for an implementation that delivered terrific customer, employee, and business outcomes.

The key here is to highlight the challenges the brand faced before the deployment, the implemented solution, and key outcomes that the customer achieved.

A supporting quote or testimonial from the customer will help drive the message home and better place the prize winner.

Most Innovative Product

This award recognizes an idea for a customer experience solution that demonstrates original thinking and an impressive market understanding.

Perhaps a CCaaS vendor has an architecture that transforms the norm in the space. Alternatively, think of a CRM vendor that's connected its apps to deliver a connected, multi-CRM ecosystem.

Whatever the case, the prize will celebrate a customer experience tech provider offering something powerful and - compared to its competitors - unique.

Best Overall CX Solution

One solution to rule them all… This award showcases a platform transcending its subset of customer experience and delivering demonstrable value.

Yet perhaps there's not even a subset. Maybe it's a fast-out-of-the-blocks AI agent platform or a CX solution supporting an underserved market segment or industry.

Don’t just think about the classic categories of customer experience software. Consider the broader impact of the CX offering.

Apply for the CX Awards 2025!

Applications for the CX Awards 2025 are now open. So, start formulating your entries!

However, don’t chew the fat for too long. Applications will close on Friday, May 23, 2025.

To help, here is the application form to fill in and submit.

Just remember, you can create multiple entries. In fact, if you pay for two submissions, you get a third one for free.

The CX Awards are a chance to celebrate diverse portfolios alongside individual innovations.

For those of the most merit, the grand finale and some much-deserved recognition await.

We wish you all the very best of luck!

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