Gold at the UK Customer Experience Awards 2026
On the night of 14 October 2026, Bupa and Elev-8 Performance won Gold for Best Learning and Development at the UK Customer Experience Awards 2026 (UKCXA) at Wembley.
We’re chuffed. Properly chuffed. The celebrations were, let’s say, enthusiastic.
- The award: Gold, Best Learning and Development, UKCXA 2026
- The winners: Bupa in partnership with Elev-8 Performance
- The competition: a shortlist of other big brands, and some seriously good learning and development work
The programme behind the win: the Bupa Experience
Bupa wanted a customer experience to match its ambition of becoming the world’s most customer-centric healthcare provider, with a target of NPS 80+.
Process changes alone were never going to get there. It needed 6,000 colleagues to change how they serve customers, every day. So we co-created the Bupa Experience, a colleague-led programme that built capability, confidence and customer impact.
It sits on four areas:
- Frontline capability: handling complex conversations, showing empathy and taking ownership
- Manager coaching: reinforcing learning through call listening and feedback in the flow of work
- Leadership climate: setting the standards and conditions for high performance
- Sustainability and scale: colleague ideas, internal Business Partners and capability for future rollout
The result is learning that doesn’t stop in the classroom. It carries on in every shift.
The results behind the Gold
Across the wider rollout at Bupa:
- NPS up from 72 to 81
- Right first time up from 77% to 85%
- Cross-team collaboration up from 69 to 93
- Average handle time down from 13.25 to 12.10 minutes
- Terminated leavers down 75%
- 170 colleague improvement ideas, with 15 already implemented
The full story, including the controlled pilot, is in the Bupa case study.
There are not many consultancies I’ve worked with where I could genuinely say it’s a partnership… Elev-8 are smart enough to know when to push back and always lead with integrity.
Head of Organisational Development, Bupa
Thank you
To the Bupa colleagues who made this real on the floor, every shift: this is your Gold as much as ours. To the Bupa learning and development team, thank you for the trust, the challenge and the partnership. And to our own team and associates, thank you for the late nights and the very good ideas.
It also follows Gold and Silver for this work at the UK Employee Experience Awards 2025. Not a bad run.
Want customer experience results like these?
Bupa’s results came from changing everyday behaviour, not from another process redesign. If you’re looking at the same challenge, have a look at our customer experience training, or at how we build a better team climate around it.
You can also find us at CX Vision 2035 at Wembley Stadium on 5 November 2026, where we’re partnering with CXM. Come and say hello.
