How Honda unified customer care in new era of online car sales
The Challenge
As Yoshiaki Inoue planned the launch of Honda’s first online car sales website, Honda ON, he was sure he’d need to sign contracts with an array of technology providers and staff up in order to meet the needs of the new site. For starters, Honda would need to engage even more deeply with tech-savvy Millennial and Gen Z buyers, who expect brands to meet them on whichever channels they choose to use that day.
“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 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.”
When the site launched in October 2021, Honda joined automakers around the globe to lead a transformation of how cars are sold. The car industry already had its eye on the online shopping revolution led by young consumers. But the global pandemic accelerated this shift, as shoppers quickly moved online to buy everything from toothpaste to jeans to takeout food — to cars.
With Honda ON, Inoue says, “Our goal is to connect authentically with this new generation of car buyers.”
To do this, Inoue needed to:
- Consolidate disparate point solutions in order to optimize cost spending
- 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 ON was already teed up for success. Honda had begun its partnership with Sprinklr in 2016 — embarking on a journey that would unify its customer experience management and propel Honda forward into a new era of online car sales in 2021.
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.
Chief of Honda ON, Honda
In 2016, Honda’s data science team first leveraged the Social Listening capabilities of Sprinklr Insights to listen and learn from the millions of relevant conversations happening across social channels and glean actionable insights for the brand. Soon, they added Sprinklr’s Display capability to transform that data into insightful, impactful, and interactive experiences for users. Today, 100+ users from Honda’s business intelligence, PR, and marketing teams actively use Sprinklr Insights to track more than 100 car models — measuring their marketing effectiveness, benchmarking social content and engagement against competitors, and keeping a close watch on potential crises before they escalate and require intervention.
Honda then expanded its usage of Sprinklr to include Sprinklr Marketing, Sprinklr Social, and Sprinklr Service, replacing three point-solutions and reducing costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform helps Honda to:
- Manage multi-channel customer care solutions (digital and voice) seamlessly in a single platform.
- Plan, publish, and manage brand content across multiple channels from a single platform —then efficiently measure and respond to customer engagement with automated workflows, intuition moderation, and engagement dashboards shared across its teams.
- Mitigate potential brand risk by listening across 30+ social and web sources
The Outcome
In Q3 of this year, Honda added Sprinklr’s voice capability, which expands the company’s ability to engage with customers, as Honda ON gathers momentum. Now, not only can Honda agents interact with customers on email, social, and chat, but it’s become the first Sprinklr customer to implement voice, enabling agents to provide seamless, 360-degree care — engaging with consumers however and whenever they choose to connect with Honda.
“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.”
For Honda On, Inoue says, Social Publishing & Engagement and Sprinklr Service will be the keys to the online car sales site’s success, providing for full-circle customer care. “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.”