Medallia Honors Global Experience Leaders with 2026 Expy Awards: CIBC, Santalucía, Vanguard, and Verizon Business Take Home Accolades

TYSONS, VA. - January 14, 2026 - Medallia, Inc., the global leader in customer and employee experience, today announced the winners of the 2026 Medallia Expy Awards. The awards recognize Medallia customers who transcend departmental silos to listen comprehensively, act decisively at scale, and drive measurable impact through fundamentally transformed connections with customers and employees.

The 2026 winners demonstrate what experience management can achieve at its highest level: transforming feedback into foresight, empowering organizations to lead with conviction, and building enterprises that deliver enduring value across every stakeholder relationship.

2026 Medallia Expy Award Winners

• Growth Accelerator Award: CIBC
  • CIBC was recognized for the scale and ambition of its enterprise-wide transformation. The bank's commitment to client-centric growth, guided by a purpose to help clients' ambitions become a reality, drove cultural, strategic, and operational alignment. The transformation delivered significant revenue and client growth, improved retention, and reduced friction for millions of clients.
• Insights to Impact Award: Vanguard
  • Vanguard was honored for its exceptional innovation and discipline in translating experience insights into measurable business impact, significantly enhancing the investor experience. The team's execution, from creating a unified view of the digital experience to a cultural shift toward evidence-based action, was evident. Vanguard demonstrated strong success in quickly moving from pilot to enterprise scale, dramatically reducing the time needed to generate actionable insights, and showcasing major improvements in decision velocity and operational efficiency.
• Employee Empowerment Award: Verizon Business
  • Verizon Business won the award for building a powerful model demonstrating how employee empowerment can drive customer and business success. The team formally united Customer Experience and Employee Experience as a strategic priority. This rigorous approach led to the resolution of half of all identified employee pain points, significant improvement in their Customer Experience Index, major gains in operational efficiency, and a reversal of churn.
• Experience Transformation Leader Award: Paloma Paraja, Santalucia Seguros
  • Paloma Paraja was recognized for leading one of the most comprehensive and forward-thinking experience transformations in the insurance sector. She helped build a listening ecosystem that combined surveys, speech analytics, digital behavior, and social signals. This enabled real-time action, with over a million calls analyzed per year to trigger tens of thousands of alerts, resulting in significant improvements in customer recovery and retention.

"The Expy Awards honor organizations that have moved beyond words to genuine business transformation," said Mark Bishof, CEO of Medallia. "This year's winners from CIBC, Vanguard, Santalucía, and Verizon Business aren't simply talking about customer and employee-centricity - it is foundational to how they operate. These organizations understand that experience-driven excellence requires sustained discipline and real action. They're showing the industry what's achievable when you align your entire organization around solving experience problems and delivering stronger business outcomes"

The honorees were selected by a panel of judges including Jeannie Walters, CEO of Experience Investigators; Greg Kihlstrom, Author and Consultant at The Agile Brand; Dom Nicastro, Editor in Chief at Simpler Media Group; and Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia.

These transformational leaders will be speaking about the work that they are doing at Medallia Experience '26 in Las Vegas. Learn more about the event and register here.

About Medallia

Medallia is the global leader in customer and employee experience, trusted by the world's most iconic brands - including 7 of the Fortune 10. Medallia's AI-driven platform helps enterprise organizations turn billions of feedback signals into clear, prioritized actions. With deep domain expertise, a powerful partner ecosystem, and consistent leadership recognition from top industry analysts, Medallia transforms customer experience into a strategic driver of business growth. Learn more at https://www.medallia.com.

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