American Honda Financial Corporation’s Rapid 3-month Migration to Amazon Connect
In a demonstration of partnership and efficiency, American Honda Financial Corporation (AHFC) successfully migrated to Amazon Connect in just three months—from initial planning to full implementation.
This significant effort, a collaborative endeavor between AHFC and its longtime partner, USAN, encompassed the seamless migration of 8 regional contact centers, spanning five lines of business and 12 queues, all while transitioning over 1,500 agents to the new Amazon Connect solution. The solution positioned AHFC to take advantage of the many innovative capabilities available within the Amazon ecosystem. It also paves the way for AHFC to continuously improve both the customer and representative experience, all at the same rapid pace as Amazon’s innovation.
About American Honda Financial Corporation
American Honda Financial Corporation (AHFC) provides services to fulfill the financing needs of consumers of Honda and Acura products. AHFC offers financing in the form of retail installment contracts and leases and administers vehicle service contracts sold by Honda and Acura Dealers throughout the United States.
Over the last 15 years, the partnership between AHFC and USAN has thrived on trust and collaboration. The rapid migration to Amazon Connect demonstrated the value of this tenured relationship, highlighting the strength and success of a long-term partnership. This accomplishment speaks to the partnership’s effectiveness in overcoming complex technological challenges.
The Challenge: Omnichannel Contact Center Transformation
AHFC embraced the challenge of moving from the existing legacy contact center solution to a next-generation contact center. The new contact center technology allows continuous customer service transformation by easily and quickly implementing advanced capabilities. As a company that highly values the customer experience, AHFC aims to provide customers with seamless, integrated experiences. This was just another reason that they embraced the challenge of migrating its contact center operations to Amazon Connect (“Connect”), an Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud customer contact center service.
Maintaining AHFC’s high-quality service standard was at the forefront of the migration.
The successful migration of AHFC to Amazon Connect within an astonishing three-month timeframe was a testament to the power of Connect and a celebration of a 15-year-long partnership with USAN. In an industry where projects of this magnitude often require years to gain approval from senior leadership and to execute, the trust and collaboration between these two organizations propelled them forward at an unprecedented pace.
“The AHFC and USAN partnership resulted in a successful project that met an extremely ambitious timeline.” – Doug Newhoff, Assistant Vice President
Another critical business requirement was maintaining a “like-for-like” customer and dealer experience throughout the migration. USAN helped deliver a seamless transition by carefully considering operational needs and recommending steps to avoid downtime. Options were presented to the AHFC team at key decision points, ensuring buy-in and maintaining alignment.
“The USAN team’s results-driven approach by gathering metrics before, during, and after our solution implementation provided a clear picture of this product’s benefits and success,” noted Chris Hawes, an Assistant Manager at AHFC.
The Solution: Frictionless Transition, Improved Representative Experience, and Conversational Analytics
Frictionless Transition
The migration to Amazon Connect positioned AHFC to immediately take advantage of existing opportunities to provide a more intuitive, easy-to-use set of tools. For AHFC, this aligned with their strategic goal of providing an excellent experience to representatives and customers alike, including opportunities for streamlined reporting and improved visibility of representative performance and customer experience.
The most important factor during the migration process was avoiding confusion for customers and dealers and ensuring no impact on call completion and handling. USAN played a pivotal role in accomplishing this goal by thinking several steps ahead before any changes occurred.
AHFC tracks business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) related to customer service, originations, and collections. The implementation avoided any negative impact on these metrics and provided additional supervisor/business insight into opportunities for representative recognition through Contact Lens and the associated dashboards.
Improved Representative Experience & Utilization
Any contact center faces the challenge of dynamically adjusting to representative turnover and customer demand. AHFC emphasizes the importance of representatives’ experiences. USAN helped AHFC preserve a traditional desktop experience, creating a positive, easy-to-use experience for representatives as the company transitioned to Connect.
“USAN’s experience within the contact center technology space and their learned knowledge of AHFC’s business objectives aligned nicely with our goal for a smooth transition from our legacy solution to the next-generation solution while capitalizing on opportunities to improve both our customer and representative experience.” – Doug Newhoff, Assistant Vice President
Conversational Analytics
Given the success of the initial Amazon Connect implementation, the leadership team decided to quickly adopt Contact Lens (CL) for Amazon Connect, a set of intelligent speech analytics capabilities to surface valuable contact center representative insights. The CL deployment provided at-a-glance insight into representative performance, helping to identify opportunities for representative recognition and establish benchmarks.
To enable this, USAN developed a QuickSight CL dashboard that fulfilled AHFC’s need for at-a-glance insights into call categories and representative performance with a clear picture of category analysis, a leaderboard, rep–level detail, and contact center metrics. By implementing Amazon Connect, AHFC can better focus on its key business objectives and continue adding quality and efficiency to the ongoing representative coaching process.
“USAN is an excellent collaborator when designing and implementing a solution that fits business needs. During our engagement, we saw USAN and Amazon’s partnership in action as they created a pilot for us to test CL, QuickSight CL Dashboards, and customization to meet our needs.” – Stephen Cato, Business Operations Manager
Summary
Throughout the project, the strong collaboration between AHFC and USAN built an understanding of each other’s strengths and areas for improvement, delivering the project successfully.
The migration to Amazon Connect and collaboration with USAN allowed American Honda Financial Corporation to meet its aggressive timeline and maintain a consistent customer and dealer experience. By leveraging USAN’s expertise and the trust built through years of partnership, AHFC positioned itself for the future with state-of-the-art technology, aligning with its vision of continuing to deliver a quality customer experience.
Want to learn more about how a CX Transformation can impact your business? Get a Demo.