Motability Operations Transforms Customer Experience with AWS Customer Enablement

Motability Operations (MO) operates the Motability Scheme, which provides affordable mobility solutions—including cars, wheelchair accessible vehicles, scooters, and powered wheelchairs—to help its customers achieve greater independence. The company helps over 600,000 customers in the UK use their mobility allowance by exchanging it to lease a mobility service to suit their needs.

MO offers three-year leases of new, fully serviced, insured vehicles to its customers. For several years, MO has been undertaking a transformation by moving its business processes to digital platforms. As part of that effort, the company adopted a cloud-first strategy to enhance business agility and maintain consistently excellent service. “We pride ourselves on customer service,” says Jon Secker, head of IT operations at Motability Operations. “We know that an increasing number of our customers will want to interact with us digitally. We had to ensure our digital service both complemented and matched the fantastic experience they receive when speaking to us in person.”

MO leaders sought to replace legacy technology with modern systems to enable increased flexibility, outstanding customer service, and new ways of operating.

In 2018, the Motability Operations IT team decommissioned some of its legacy technology and built a container platform using microservices to develop new applications. “With the container platform in place, we were able to deliver several new business-critical services at pace,” says Rob Meredith, technical delivery manager at Motability Operations.

Next, the company needed to determine how to manage and secure traditional workloads that were less suitable for containerization. With the aim to reduce its on-premises data centers and move toward cloud-based hosted services, MO adopted a cloud-first IT infrastructure strategy. “We wanted to adopt a broad set of services we could integrate easily and to engage with a single cloud provider,” says Meredith. “We decided Amazon Web Services (AWS) was the right provider for us.”

Starting with a pilot project, MO enlisted AWS Customer Enablement services, including AWS Managed Services (AMS), to host and secure its traditional, non-container workloads and keep pace with the business requirements for increased resilience and availability. “Using AWS Managed Services shifts the responsibility for maintaining and securing our traditional workloads using the shared security model,” says Meredith. “AMS has been the last piece of the puzzle allowing us to deploy any workload in the cloud.”

To define a full infrastructure and application automation strategy, MO also worked with AWS Professional Services. “The AWS Professional Services team looked at our traditional workloads, explained our options, and made recommendations,” says Meredith. “They also helped us educate our teams so we could maintain those services going forward and empowered us to migrate other services in the future without assistance.”

Following the success of the pilot, MO began migrating additional systems to AWS Managed Services to handle infrastructure and operational management. The effort will continue for the next few years as the company works to gradually reduce its data center footprint.

Motability Operations benefited from several improvements as a result of the AMS engagement, including an enhanced overall security posture. By taking advantage of AWS Managed Services and AWS technology such as AWS Landing Zone, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Config, and AWS CloudTrail, MO ensures its workloads comply with key regulations around data privacy and governance. “We have been able to shift responsibility to AMS for operating and securing key elements of our platform,” says Secker. “On AWS, we knew we had access to the latest patches and build versions, which meant we could minimize vulnerabilities wherever possible. We knew we could never compete with the investment AWS continually makes in security.”

MO also increased its cloud platform service availability to 99.97 percent, which is important as the company begins to provide customers with more digital services. “As we develop our online offerings, our service availability needs to continue exceeding our customers’ expectations,” says Meredith.

MO also relies on AWS Enterprise Support to enable immediate assistance should it experience any issues and to help with cost optimization. “AWS Enterprise Support personnel provide recommendations on ways we can manage costs, achieve better utilization, and preserve resources,” says Roshni Neogi, service delivery manager at Motability Operations.

Finally, AWS Customer Enablement services have helped the platform services team at MO become more agile. “The use of automation and the ability to perform upgrades with minimal impact to service has improved the rate of release. Deployment frequency used to be about 16 releases per quarter and is now over 16 per week and rising,” Meredith says. “Now, everyone's comfortable and confident that we've got the right controls in place, which means we can deliver value to our customers faster and more frequently.”

With AMS managing the company’s non-containerized platform, MO teams now spend more time focused on providing excellent customer experiences. Going forward, MO plans to introduce further online services and to use technology to better integrate with partners. “The key driver is to provide better service to our customers and more choice in how they interact with us,” says Secker. “With AWS Customer Enablement services, we are making that happen.”

To learn more, visit thinkwithwp.com/customer-enablement.