The problem
We ran three award programs: Best of Home Care, the Customer Experience Awards, and a senior care awards program. Each had its own qualification criteria, its own scoring method, and its own survey product underneath it. As customers moved between survey products, the programs had to become one.
That sounds like an admin cleanup, but it was much more complicated than that. These awards only mean something if they're valid and comparable, and they also matter a lot to the customers who win them. Some organizations had won the same category every year since around 2012. I was not about to tell them their streak had ended because we changed survey software.
My role
I'd run the cycles for these programs as project manager since 2024, so I knew their quirks up close. As Product Owner for the awards portfolio, I owned the translation from three programs to one. I ran the decision log, tracked every open question, and coordinated input from Customer Success, Customer Support, Customer Operations, Marketing, and Product until each question had a documented decision.
The decisions that mattered
- Could the award questions carry over? Best of Home Care qualified organizations on a fixed set of five questions that couldn't change, because a standardized set is what makes results comparable. Those questions were written for home care, and they wouldn't necessarily fit a skilled nursing facility. Before changing anything, I checked whether the other survey products already had five questions that corresponded closely enough for fair benchmarking. They did, which let us validate one methodology across programs without forcing irrelevant questions on anyone.
- What happens to service categories? The Customer Experience Awards let organizations win in individual categories like dining or response to problems, each built from every applicable survey question. For customers switching products, we had to map each established category to questions in the new product and decide how historical streaks would carry forward. We made the category structure translatable across products, then went a step further and added service categories to Best of Home Care, so the unified program gave more organizations more ways to be recognized.
- How do you compare a 10-point scale to a 5-point scale? The Customer Experience Awards generally recognized organizations in the top 15%, with minimum response requirements. The products underneath used different answer scales, so we had to choose a standard scoring methodology and a fair way to compare scores across scales.
| Open question | What we weighed | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| Can non-home-care products qualify using the Best of Home Care question set? | Validity of a fixed question set vs. questions that don't fit other care settings | Mapped closely corresponding questions in each product and validated the methodology across programs |
| Do Customer Experience service categories survive a product switch? | Streaks dating back to about 2012 vs. different questions in the new product | Made categories translatable across products and added categories to Best of Home Care |
The hard part: standards vs. retention
Awards were good for the business in a very direct way. Customers who won regularly tended to stay, so the program helped reduce churn. That put us in a tricky spot. If we loosened the standards, the award would stop meaning much, including to the people who had already earned it. If we tightened them carelessly during the transition, we could knock out loyal winners over a technicality.
So the goal was never to hand out as many awards as possible. It was to keep recognizing genuinely great care, while making sure no established winner lost out just because the survey platform underneath them changed. Almost every decision above came back to that balance.
The result
The unified program, now one brand called the Care Experience Council, was scoped for a September 2026 launch, with exemptions, appeals handling, pre-launch QA, and a parallel run of the legacy and new programs so nobody fell through the cracks during the switch. It also runs on the nine-phase structure and SOP library I built as Program Manager, so the program works the same way every cycle, no matter who's running it.