Meet the winners of the 2026 WAVE Customer Awards

€4.7 million in new sales. 70% of cases resolved end to end. Every inbound call answered. At WAVE 2026, six Parloa customers took the stage with results like these, and they demonstrated what customer experience becomes when AI is trusted with some of the most important moments: the holiday rush, the roadside breakdown, a member’s health and money, the sale.

Our expert panel reviewed dozens of nominations and judged each against category-specific criteria, from documented ROI to deployment complexity. Here are this year's winners:

1. AI Agent of the Year: IKEA

The award: Our top honor goes to the most advanced and effective AI agent of the year, one that raises the bar for everyone.

Why IKEA won: IKEA built its AI voice agent to solve customer problems at scale. With thousands of products, complex customer needs, and real volume peaks around holidays, their agent needed real knowledge and understanding of their business to deliver a seamless experience. The agent handles routine questions instantly and knows exactly when to hand a conversation to a human co-worker, so every customer gets a fast, consistent, and helpful experience.

Now, IKEA’s AI agent answers 100% of incoming calls, eliminating hold times for customers and lightening the load on human teams. Within just a few months, they've increased end-to-end automation of their agent by 16%, enabling the agent to handle anything from general questions to product support and delivery scheduling.

2. Omnichannel Master: HealthEquity

The award: Omnichannel Master recognizes the customer who connects voice, chat, and other touchpoints, so context and quality carry throughout every conversation.

Why HealthEquity won: HealthEquity serves 17 million members across voice calls, in-app chat, and web conversations, all powered by the same agentic AI. Context carries from one channel to the next, so the AI agent knows each member no matter where they reach out.

The results speak for themselves, with 98% call coverage and 91% positive sentiment. Better service pays off: members who get a problem-free experience are 31% more likely to grow their HSA contributions. Members trust HealthEquity with their health and their money, so a human agent is always available for the most sensitive conversations, while AI agents handle the everyday questions.

3. Performance Pioneer: Allianz Partners

The award: Performance Pioneer goes to the customer who runs complex AI deployments across multiple use cases and markets, with rock-solid accuracy and zero compromise on trust.

Why Allianz Partners won: In insurance and assistance services, a single bad experience erodes trust fast. Allianz Partners set out to fix fragmented customer service across geographies and business units, and today its AI agents are live in Spain, the UK, France, and Germany, handling roadside assistance and travel insurance.

These are high-stakes conversations, and the AI agents deliver. In the last three months alone, they handled 125,000 calls and resolved more than 60% end to end. They capture license plates with over 95% accuracy and achieve successful localization in more than 75% of cases, including 50% through voice alone, all while maintaining quality and compliance.

4. Innovation Champion: MediaMarktSaturn

The award: Innovation Champion recognizes the customer who uses AI to tackle new, complex problems.

Why MediaMarktSaturn won: Product search sounds simple until you're facing thousands of SKUs, endless variations, and customers who can't quite describe what they want.

MediaMarktSaturn took a different approach and handed one of retail's hardest customer service problems to AI. Its AI agent helps customers check product availability through natural conversation. In the pilot, around 7 in 10 callers got help end to end from the AI agent alone, in just over two minutes per call.

What started as one market and one language is now rolling out across eight markets over the next six months. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland go live at the end of October, just in time for Black Friday and the holidays, with Spain, Benelux, Hungary, and more to follow.

5. ROI Hero: tbi bank

The award: ROI Hero honors the customer who moves past experimentation and proves their AI agents can pay for themselves through revenue growth or efficiency gains.

Why tbi bank won: tbi bank wanted more growth from its existing customers, but its CX center didn't have the capacity to reach them all. So the bank deployed an outbound AI agent named Victoria to contact "sleeper" customers that human teams can't reach, and turn those conversations into sales.

In the first half of 2026, Victoria generated more than €4.7 million in new business in Bulgaria and Romania alone, and that number doubled the following quarter. Their AI agent reaches more than 80% of the customers it calls, with conversion rates similar to those of human agents. With more markets still to launch, tbi bank expects to pass €10 million by the end of the year.

6. AI Visionary: Zalando

The award: AI Visionary celebrates a customer who treats AI as a core part of how they engage, moving from bold idea to large-scale reality.

Why Zalando won: Zalando serves 63 million active customers across 30 European nations. When they started their agentic CX journey with WISMO ("where is my order?"), one of the highest-volume, highest-friction categories in ecommerce customer service, it quickly validated voice AI can meet the expectations of their large customer base.

Now, Zalando has scaled voice AI across seven countries in less than a month, and is expanding beyond WISMO to drive excellence across the full customer experience, starting with returns and billing next.. Zalando exemplifies the agentic playbook in action: start focused, prove it works, then scale with confidence.

What this year's winners have in common

Six companies with six very different problems. Together they’ve redrawn what customers should expect from AI: faster, smarter, and trusted with what matters most. The standard has moved, and every enterprise now has a new benchmark to beat.

Congratulations to IKEA, HealthEquity, Allianz Partners, MediaMarktSaturn, tbi bank, and Zalando.