Honda delivers omnichannel customer care in new era of online car sales

The Challenge

When Honda launched Honda ON, its first online car sales website, the company was responding to a broader shift in how consumers shop for vehicles. Digital-first Millennial and Gen Z buyers increasingly expect brands to engage with them seamlessly across channels and provide experiences that feel as convenient and connected as the rest of their online lives. For Honda ON, the challenge wasn't simply building an e-commerce site. Honda needed a way to manage customer engagement across multiple channels, deliver a consistent brand experience, and unify customer data without creating a complex ecosystem of disconnected technologies.

Our goal is to connect authentically with this new generation of car buyers. This means we listen to the voices of people in the world and proactively engage in relevant conversations. Having a single workflow across channels — from phone to social media to live chat, chat bot, and voice — enables a true omnichannel contact center.

Yoshiaki Inoue

Chief of Honda ON

Honda

“I thought that it would be necessary to bring together a lot of technology and personnel to realize such a wide range of communication activities,” says Yoshiaki Inoue, Chief of Honda On. “But after just one conversation with Sprinklr, we realized we could leverage Sprinklr as a one-stop, unified technology solution for all of Honda ON’s customer experience management needs.”

As online vehicle purchasing accelerated, Honda saw an opportunity to create a more direct relationship with its customers.

"Our goal is to connect authentically with this new generation of car buyers,” explains Inoue.

To do this, Honda needed to:

• Consolidate disparate point solutions to optimize costs
• Move all customer engagement data to one unified platform
• Ensure consistency in brand voice by deploying enterprise-class governance with a unified platform

The Solution

Honda's journey toward a unified customer experience began years before the launch of Honda ON.

Honda's data science team adopted Sprinklr Insights to better understand the millions of conversations happening across social channels. By using social listening and analytics to capture customer sentiment, track performance, and monitor industry conversations, Honda gained a clearer understanding of how consumers were engaging with both its vehicles and competitors.

Over time, adoption expanded beyond the data science team. Today, more than 100 users across Honda's business intelligence, PR, and marketing organizations use Sprinklr Insights to monitor more than 100 vehicle models, measure marketing effectiveness, benchmark performance against competitors, and identify potential issues before they escalate.

Building the foundation for Honda ON

As Honda's digital strategy matured, the company expanded its use of Sprinklr to include Marketing, Social and Service. Rather than relying on multiple disconnected tools, Honda consolidated key customer-facing functions onto a single platform. It replaced three point solutions and reduced costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars.

With this foundation in place, Honda was well prepared for the launch of Honda ON.

Using Sprinklr's Unified-CXM platform, Honda can now manage customer engagement across channels through a single, connected system. Marketing, social engagement, customer service, and customer insights teams work from the same platform, creating a more consistent and seamless experience for customers throughout their journey.

The unified platform helps Honda:

• Manage digital and voice customer care from a single platform.
• Plan, publish, and manage content across multiple channels while efficiently measuring and responding to customer engagement through automated workflows, moderation, and shared engagement dashboards.
• Monitor conversations across more than 30 social and web sources to identify customer trends and mitigate potential brand risk.

By bringing customer data, engagement, and service operations together in one place, Honda created the foundation needed to support a new generation of digital-first car buyers while delivering a consistent brand experience across every touchpoint.

The Outcome

As Honda ON gains momentum, Honda continues to expand its ability to engage customers across channels. By adding Sprinklr Voice, Honda became the first Sprinklr customer to implement voice, enabling agents to support customers across email, social, chat, and voice through a unified workflow.

With Sprinklr, Honda has:

• Unified customer engagement across email, social, chat, and voice channels.
• Replaced three point solutions, reducing costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
• Created a single workflow that helps teams deliver a more seamless, omnichannel customer experience.

“Sprinklr Service gave us the digital-first approach we needed,” says Inoue. “And Voice enables us to serve our customers even better, giving us access to traditional channels when a human touch is preferred.”

Looking ahead, Inoue sees unified engagement as critical to Honda ON's success. “This means we listen to the voices of people in the world and proactively engage in relevant conversations,” says Inoue. “Having a single workflow across channels — from voice to social media to chat bot and live chat — enables a true omnichannel contact center.”