Toyota Streamlines the Customer Experience using Amazon Connect

Toyota Motor Corporation is one of the largest automotive manufacturers in the world. As an operating subsidiary, TMNA oversees all the corporation’s operations in Canada, Mexico, and the United States and brings together Toyota’s North American marketing, sales, engineering, and manufacturing arms. The company’s mission is to provide its customers with an exceptional guest experience, and the BEC is a key component in realizing this mission. BEC agents assist Toyota and Lexus customers who call in for help with warranty claims, roadside assistance, vehicle service or technology, and more.

In 2022, the BEC was nearing the end of its support agreement with the provider of its on-premises legacy interactive voice response. TMNA began looking for a cloud-based solution that would advance its Know Me, Know My Vehicle initiative—which focuses on a more personalized and efficient experience for its guests—and work well with Salesforce.

The company’s priority was expanding the number of channels that customers could go to for support. To create a seamless omnichannel experience, TMNA selected Amazon Connect with Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, which brings together voice conversations, digital channels, and customer relationship management data in real time. “Using Amazon Connect with Salesforce Service Cloud Voice, we can help our guests complete their journey through any channel of their choice,” says Mitch Aubin, manager of brand engagement technologies at TMNA.

TMNA also wanted to have real-time transcription capabilities so that agents could forgo detailed notetaking and focus on customers. “We want our agents to have all the data that they need to engage in dialogue with customers instead of having to put them on hold, toggle between windows, and take copious notes,” says Aubin.

TMNA migrated some of its bilingual customer service agents to Amazon Connect in April 2023. Encouraged by the results that this pilot group achieved, TMNA migrated the rest of its 700 agents in batches. The company onboarded its entire 700-agent BEC to Amazon Connect over two months.

TMNA has configured Amazon Connect to route its guests to self-service resources (when appropriate) at the outset of each call. Now, nearly four percent of guests who call the BEC can resolve their issues quickly, even after business hours, without speaking to an agent. Thus, TMNA’s agents can focus on more complex calls.

For customer calls that require support beyond self-service resources, TMNA uses natural language processing to direct calls to the proper department. This is accomplished using Amazon Lex, a fully managed AI service with advanced natural language models to design, build, test, and deploy conversational interfaces in applications. Since introducing an interactive-voice-response experience to its guests, TMNA has reduced its call transfer rates by 13 percent; the company can now accurately capture issues and pass them to the right agent.

“Our goal was to reduce transfer rates by five percent,” says Aubin. “But we far exceeded that goal and completed the project ahead of schedule. Our customers can now connect with the right agent on their first call much more frequently, which leads to higher satisfaction for both our guests and agents.”

The employee experience has also been improved by empowering customer service agents to handle inquiries across various channels. These include web-based forms, email messages, and calls in a single pane of glass. “The agents love Amazon Connect,” says Aubin. “They can do all their work on one screen. This has eased their labor and helped them pay more attention to our guests.”

Toyota also migrated their On-Premises VDI environment to a highly resilient, multi-region Amazon AppStream 2.0 VDI solution, delivering a secure and scalable desktop experience for call center agents. “The migration to AWS for our End User Computing needs has reduced our IT infrastructure burden and provided the business with the scale and features that Toyota needs to grow,” says Kishore Jonnalagedda, Director of Cloud Engineering.

Amazon Connect also offers built-in capabilities, including in-app web and mobile messaging, which are all linked together in Salesforce. TMNA is currently working to build out these capabilities using Salesforce Chat and Salesforce Digital Engagement. “If we need images, our guests will be able to send us photos from their phones,” says Aubin. “Our agents can now have richer communication with our customers than before.”

To foster continuous improvement and identify trends from its call center data, TMNA uses Amazon Connect Contact Lens, a near real-time (NRT) contact center analytics and quality management feature that is powered by AI. The company uses this feature to capture NRT transcriptions of calls; automatically redact sensitive information; and analyze the call data for sentiment, categorization, and theme detection.

The company has also focused on improving the availability of its systems by onboarding to AWS Incident Detection and Response, which provides proactive engagement and incident management to Enterprise Support customers, reducing the potential for failure within critical workloads. “We have not had an outage since we set up Amazon Connect,” says Aubin. “Taking advantage of the proactive response from the AWS Incident Detection and Response team, we can significantly reduce downtime if an issue arises.”

TMNA will continue to deepen its AI capabilities for its Know Me, Know My Vehicle initiative, which helps the company automatically identify guests from their phone numbers and vehicle information. “After we confirm their identities, we can provide them with key information about their vehicles, such as recalls, and advise them on what actions to take,” says Aubin. TMNA also plans to expand the solution to other lines of business, such as parts and reimbursements.

In line with this initiative, “Using Amazon Connect, we can expand our capabilities to become the omnichannel contact center that our guests expect and the market demands,” says Aubin.