With submissions now closed, judging for CXMStars 2025 is due to start, before the final votes are cast by our CX community.
Here is the judging panel for the 2025 edition of CXMStars!
Ginger Conlon, director of customer stories, Genesys
Ginger Conlon is an award-winning editorial leader with extensive experience covering marketing and customer experience sectors for most of her career.
In 2023, Conlon claimed top spot in CXM’s Top CX Influencer list and has also won a DMCNY Silver Apple lifetime achievement award for her contribution to marketing.
Conlon was a founding board member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA).
Conlon continues to tell stories about marketing and CX at Genesys, where she was recently promoted to director of customer stories.
Greg Melia, CEO, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)
Greg Melia has led the CXPA, the global trade body for the CX professionals, since April 2019. During that time he has championed the CX profession and empowered customer experience professionals, with the promotion of the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) qualification.
Prior to joining CXPA, Melia served as the US-based VP for programme development at ITN. Greg is a long time friend of CXM and Awards International, where he has appeared on several discussion panels, including one at this year’s UK Customer Experience Awards.
Dr Maxie Schmidt, vice president & principal analyst, Forrester
Dr Maxie Schmidt is a passionate CX expert with over 12 years experience at Forrester. As well as helping organisations transform their customer experience capabilities and coaching CX leaders, she’s also a university lecturer.
Dr Schmidt holds a PhD in business management, focusing on customer care monitoring, where her research underscores the importance of customer satisfaction and retention.
Ian Golding
Welcome back CXMStars’ ever-green judge, Ian Golding.
Golding is a highly influential CX writer, consultant and mentor, with clients all over the globe.
He became a CCXP in 2014 and is the CEO and founder of Customer Experience Consultancy. His 30-year experience in both private and public sectors has given him rare insight into how organisations adapt and evolve their approach to experience management.
Ian is closely tied to Awards International, as recent chairman of the judging panels of the UK Customer Experience Awards and the Gulf Customer Experience Awards. He also regularly hosts Awards International’s series of CX awards programmes.
Neil Skehel, CEO, Awards International
Neil Skehel with the late Don Hales founded Awards International in 2008 and then went to launch the UK Customer Experience Awards two years later.
The firm currently operates over ten awards programmes around the globe, specialising in CX, EX and DX. Its rigorous and transparent awards methodology has also been licensed in several countries.
What happens next?
Nominations close just before midnight today. When the shortlist is drawn up, the judges set to work. The scoring is the same for each contestant — whether for CX professional or CX influencer — each application’s total score is split into two parts.
40% public votes
The public vote scores come down to each contestant sharing and encouraging their connections to vote for them. The contestant’s application profiles will also be publicly available on our site for our community to read through and place their votes.
Each voter can assign scores to up to 5 people per category, with up to 5 points available.
60% judging panel’s total scores
The judges are assigned to either influencer’s or professional’s applications. The judges score each answer of a contestant’s application.
They will rate the answers based on how well they believe the participant has met the criteria and provided evidence.
For every answer of the application, the contestants may achieve a total of 100 points. With 6 criteria for the judges to score, that means that there’s 600 points up for grabs on every application.
Industry awards, certificates, and publications have a fixed number of points that will be automatically assigned upon entry submission.
For CX professionals:
– 1 point per certificate
– 10 points per award
For CX influencers:
– 5 points per published article
– 10 points per book
– 10 points per awards