Sunil Vadera from the University of Salford, with Donna Kelly of Nationwide Vehicle Contracts.
We're proud to announce that Nationwide Vehicle Contracts has won the prestigious Customer Engagement Transformation Award at this year's Centre for Digital Innovation (CDI) Awards, recognising our groundbreaking work in enhancing the customer experience through AI-powered technology.
The award was presented on Tuesday 8 April 2025 at the inspiring Festival of Innovation, hosted at the Royal Northern College of Music. The event celebrated digital discovery and collaboration, with energising keynotes from renowned voices in innovation, including Ayo Sokale, Dani Wallace, and Matt Hunt of Apadmi.
Funded by the Government’s £100 million Innovation Accelerator programme, CDI brings together leading universities, colleges, and industry partners to fuel the North West’s digital future. It offers businesses like ours access to expert researchers, cutting-edge facilities, and the opportunity to co-create future-facing solutions.
Nationwide Vehicle Contracts joined the CDI programme in late 2023 with one clear goal: to revolutionise how we listen to and act on customer feedback.
Working closely with CDI experts, we developed a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered customer feedback tool that blends Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, and real-time sentiment analysis.
This intelligent platform analyses every customer comment, identifying emerging issues before they escalate, and revealing insights that help us optimise support strategies, improve our sales process, and shape training programmes for our team.
The winners of the Centre for Digital Innovation awards 2025
The insights gathered from our AI platform laid the groundwork for our new tiered rewards system, a game-changing initiative that shifts the focus from just closing deals to delivering outstanding service. Our customer-facing teams are now incentivised based on satisfaction metrics, not just volume, aligning every interaction with our ‘service-first’ philosophy.
To support this shift, we’ve also introduced AI-driven personalised training, helping our teams refine their customer service skills, earn rewards, and continue raising the bar in every conversation.
In addition to winning the Customer Engagement Transformation Award, we were also Highly Commended for the Transformative Workplace Award, a nod to the positive internal impact our digital innovation has had on culture, training, and employee development.
This recognition from the CDI underscores what we’ve always believed: that listening to customers, acting on insights, and investing in innovation leads to better outcomes for everyone, including customers, employees, and the wider business.
We're thrilled to be part of a thriving digital ecosystem and look forward to continuing our journey with CDI and its exceptional network of partners.
