Challenge

Over the past nine decades, Alberta Motor Association has grown from an automotive club focused on roadside assistance and driver advocacy to a multiservice organization offering everything from marriage licenses to vacation packages. Throughout that transformation, in-person customer interactions—whether roadside or in one of AMA’s hundreds of locations across Canada—have remained central to the organization’s business model. By 2022, however, AMA recognized that both roadside and in-store payments were suffering from outdated processes, causing negative user experiences and operational inefficiencies.

For customers, the manual, multistep process made the payment experience cumbersome, often resulting in frustration. Meanwhile, for field agents, the process was time-consuming and slowed down service delivery. What’s more, roadside payments weren’t integrated with AMA’s backend systems, making transactions difficult and time-consuming to track.

In AMA stores, where customers can buy everything from home insurance to luggage, AMA was looking for a payment solution that could seamlessly handle diverse payment types, including gift cards, within the same system. AMA also looked to consolidate payment data across stores to eliminate fragmented accounting processes that negatively impacted both staff workload and service efficiency. AMA wanted to streamline processes for its staff and improve the customer experience by minimizing transaction times and creating a seamless checkout.

Solution

After exploring options for a new provider with a wider range of modern capabilities, AMA chose to partner with Stripe. In addition to offering solutions for online and in-person transaction processing, Stripe impressed the AMA team with its developer-friendly technology and commitment to continued innovation that would create a platform for AMA to expand and improve its offerings.

With the assistance of Hiveway, a Stripe Specialized Partner that helps organizations develop and implement technology payment solutions, AMA introduced Stripe Terminal, Stripe’s comprehensive point-of-sale solution, to both its roadside assistance program and its physical locations.

AMA, in collaboration with Hiveway, equipped its field agents with the BBPOS WisePad 3, a compact mobile card reader with a small screen and a PIN pad. The WisePad 3 is highly portable, allowing agents to easily carry it along with their other equipment, and highly durable, which is important for agents who often operate in variable weather conditions. The solution enabled field agents to process payments on-site in a quick, easy manner. It also allowed agents to complete each transaction faster, enabling them to assist more customers per day. Meanwhile, customers could pay more quickly and easily, with greater transparency into their payment process—and they could pay with a wider range of options, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. And since Terminal seamlessly integrated with AMA’s systems, AMA had immediate access to accurate records of field payments, streamlining transaction tracking and reporting.

Hiveway worked with AMA to incorporate AMA’s gift card system into Stripe’s in-store Terminal payment solution, allowing customers to redeem and reload gift cards in the same checkout process used to process standard payments. Terminal also provided a unified system that consolidated payment data across stores, creating a central hub for client data. This centralized data enabled AMA to streamline reporting, better track customer interactions, and maintain accurate, up-to-date records, allowing for better customer service and more efficient administrative oversight.

Terminal also improved AMA’s payment security and compliance. Terminal’s hardware and software are designed to meet PCI compliance standards, and by significantly reducing manual data entry and phone-based transactions, Terminal reduced the risk of mishandling or intercepting credit card data. Meanwhile, Terminal’s integration with the Stripe Dashboard gave AMA’s accounting and management teams an accessible, organized view of payment data, facilitating easier financial reporting, auditing, and revenue tracking.

Results

Efficient rollout minimizes disruption to operations

The partnership between Hiveway, Stripe, and AMA helped ensure a smooth transition to an integrated, in-person payment system across AMA’s vast network. With support from Hiveway, AMA performed a phased rollout of its new solutions, integrating a payments app with Terminal and helping to manage the migration from AMA’s previous system in a way that minimized disruption to operations.

Reduced checkout times and queue lengths lead to greater customer satisfaction

Stripe’s robust in-store solution enabled a fast, secure, and consistent payment experience across locations, reducing wait times and queue lengths and boosting customer satisfaction.

Integrated solution and streamlined reporting reduce staff workloads

Stripe’s streamlined reporting and integrated payments solution significantly reduced workloads for both customer service agents and back-office administrators. Registry agents across the province each save an average of about 23 minutes a day thanks to the new system. Since about 140 agents work for registry services, that adds up to nearly 54 total hours saved.

Staff across departments say the solution makes it easier to complete complex transactions. And with all transactions moved to Terminal, team members spend less time finding and reconciling incorrect pay methods, as well as less time processing cash out.

Use of Terminal increases security and compliance

Terminal uses advanced encryption methods that tokenize payment data from the moment of transaction, reducing AMA’s exposure to sensitive data, improving the security of each transaction, and reducing liability in the event of a breach.

Terminal provides a scalable payment solution, powering future growth

In addition to solving current challenges, Terminal provides AMA with a scalable solution that can adapt to future business needs, such as on-site services that might require different payment configurations.

About Partner

Hiveway, a Stripe Services Implementation Partner, is recognized for its exceptional expertise and broad experience with Stripe. Awarded Stripe’s 2023 North American Partner of the Year, Hiveway has successfully delivered hundreds of Stripe projects and integrations, setting the standard for quality in payment solutions.