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CX Day 2026: Good CX Delivers Better Outcomes

By John Bord, CX Consultant | 4-minute read

Every year on the first Tuesday in October, customer experience professionals around the world unite to celebrate CX Day, a global recognition of the people, teams, and organizations committed to improving customer experiences. Since its launch in 2013 by the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), CX Day has grown into an opportunity to celebrate progress, share ideas, recognize achievements, and reinforce the importance of customer-centered organizations1.

This year’s theme, “Good CX delivers better outcomes for customers, employees, and organizations,” is a reminder that customer experience is about much more than delivering great service. When organizations truly understand and respond to customer needs, the benefits extend beyond individual interactions to create stronger employee engagement1, improved operational performance, greater trust, and more resilient organizations.

For utilities, CX Day can be much more than a celebration. It is an opportunity to pause, reflect, and renew an organization’s commitment to the customers and communities it serves. As customer expectations continue to rise and utilities navigate affordability challenges, grid modernization, digital transformation, AI, and changing regulatory environments, customer experience has become a strategic business capability.

Start with the Outcome You Want

There is no single way to celebrate CX Day and that’s exactly the point. Rather than asking, “What should we do for CX Day?” consider asking:

  1. What do we want employees to learn?
  2. How can we strengthen our customer-centered culture?
  3. What customer successes should we recognize?
  4. How can we inspire new ideas and collaboration?
  5. What actions will continue long after CX Day is over?

Beginning with the intended outcome transforms CX Day from a single-day event into a catalyst for continuous improvement across the organization, supporting the same goal at the heart of this year’s theme: better outcomes for customers, employees, and the organization.

Please share this article with your CX teams, HR and your Corporate Communication teams. It’s ready to print or you can customize it for your utility. The focus is that when employee experience and customer experience work together, they deliver incredible results.

Customer Experience Is Everyone’s Responsibility

One of the greatest opportunities CX Day presents is reminding employees that customer experience isn’t created by one department. Every interaction shapes how people perceive their utility, from restoring power after a storm to helping a family manage their energy bill or supporting a growing business customer to designing a digital experience or maintaining infrastructure.

When every employee understands how their work contributes to customer experience, organizations build stronger alignment, greater engagement, and a more resilient business.

Utility-Focused Ideas for Celebrating CX Day

Every utility has its own culture, priorities, and customer needs, but these ideas can help create meaningful engagement across your organization.

  1. Celebrate Customer Champions. Recognize employees and cross-functional teams who have made a measurable difference for customers through innovation, collaboration, service excellence, or operational improvements.
  2. Share Customer Stories. Highlight real examples of how employees positively impacted customers during outages, billing challenges, energy efficiency programs, community events, or business customer partnerships.
  3. Bring Customer Insights to Life. Share Voice of the Customer findings, customer research, personas, journey maps, and feedback to help employees better understand evolving customer expectations.
  4. Walk the Customer Journey. Invite employees to experience key customer journeys from the customer’s perspective and identify opportunities to simplify processes and remove friction.
  5. Connect CX to Business Success. Demonstrate how customer experience contributes to customer trust, operational efficiency, employee engagement, regulatory relationships, financial performance, and stronger community partnerships.
  6. Explore Innovation. Showcase how customer analytics, AI, digital technologies, proactive communications, and customer intelligence help utilities better anticipate customer needs and deliver more personalized experiences.
  7. Commit to One Improvement. Encourage each department to identify one meaningful action they will take over the coming year to improve customer experience.

More Than a Celebration

The organizations that gain the greatest value from CX Day don’t treat it as a standalone event. Instead, they use it to reinforce customer-centered behaviors, celebrate progress, recognize employees, share customer insights, and inspire the next generation of improvements.

Good customer experience doesn’t end when CX Day is over. It becomes part of an organization’s culture, shaping decisions, strengthening relationships, and creating lasting value for everyone it touches.

Join Chartwell in Celebrating CX Day 2026

Join us for a complimentary virtual celebration on Tuesday, October 6, as we celebrate our third annual Global CX Day event. All Chartwell members will be invited to attend.

Hosted by Chartwell’s Customer Experience Leadership Council, this year’s program will recognize the achievements of customer experience professionals, highlight innovative utility practices, and explore how organizations are creating more empathetic and meaningful customer interactions through Generative AI, omnichannel strategies, customer intelligence, and customer trust.

This year, members of Chartwell’s Business Customer Leadership Council will attend the discussion. A unique opportunity to compare residential and commercial customer expectations and explore how Voice of the Customer insights can strengthen relationships across both customer segments.

Whether your organization is just beginning its customer experience journey or advancing a mature enterprise strategy, CX Day is an opportunity to learn from peers, celebrate achievements, and recommit to creating better outcomes for customers, employees, organizations, and the communities you serve. We hope you’ll join us on Tuesday, October 6th.

1Requires Insight Center Membership

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John Bord is a customer experience and marketing leader with more than 25 years of experience helping organizations better understand customer needs and improve the customer journey. He currently supports the Customer Experience and Business Customer Leadership Councils at Chartwell Inc., where he contributes insights on persona development, journey mapping, multicultural marketing, internal culture, and training initiatives and offers consulting services.

Formerly with Tucson Electric Power and Salt River Project (SRP), John led Voice of the Customer, customer insights, segmentation, and targeted marketing initiatives for residential and business customers. His work included customer journey mapping, analytics, and engagement strategies designed to better understand customer needs, reduce friction and improve experiences, and better serve diverse customer segments.