The Sky's The Limit For Travel Company With Portal
Description
Business Needs
- Increase revenue-based services
- Customer Growth and Satisfaction
- Reduce costs
Software
- WebSphere Portal
- Web Content Management
- WebSphere Dashboard Framework
CLIENT BACKGROUND
This company is the premier reservation and travel transaction processing company servicing 4 out of the top 5 travel entities in the world including American Express, Expedia and most major airlines. In total, they are responsible for 1/3 of all travel-related transactions within the United States providing online booking, data intelligence, reporting and analytics. They deliver technology applications in an on-demand environment to travel agencies, corporations, travel suppliers, government agencies, etc — providing more interaction and reservation processing than any single entity in the world.
BUSINESS PROBLEM
With its depth of knowledge around reservation methodologies, the company has a highly automated and streamlined set of processes allowing them to track every precise detail of a transaction. They looked to extend those valuable processes out to their customers — reaching new markets and offering more value-add services. In this cost-sensitive industry, the objective was to improve the efficiency of and reduce overall costs for their customers, the travel companies and agents; as well as improve the consumer’s experience. And as with any company in the service industry, they desired to increase customer satisfaction and remain competitive, something especially important with the current climate of air travel.
SOLUTION
The company’s goal was achieved with a Customer Portal offering a rich user interface and expanded services. With 5 previous generations of travel automation and transaction processing systems, its branded and hosted travel platform became their solution able to handle scale and high volume transactions from such mega-travel sites as Expedia. A unified Portal enabled them to expose this platform and leverage their assets while tying together both new and old applications, and allowed their processes to be consumed in multiple ways. While their competition was forcing customers to a new platform, this company strategically decided it was important to evolve their engine one layer at a time — favoring functionality and consistency for their clients instead.
Prolifics, with a blended onshore/offshore model, implemented WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, and WebSphere Dashboard Framework to deliver a Customer Portal that would provide self-service capabilities, customer-specific branding, role-based views and access, dashboards, reporting, and a streamlined process for publishing new content.
Prior to the Portal implementation, the organization increased their automation rate while decreasing processing costs by 1/3. With this new initiative, the exponential growth is already apparent with the ability to process 10 ticket transactions a second. By opening up their processes to buyers and suppliers, they can take the cost down for their customers and also offer monetized applications such as notifying travel agents about unused tickets and monitoring seating charts to automatically switch passengers based on preferences. In an industry riddled with decreased routes and rising costs, the company has seen an increase in overall transactions because they are able to lower costs and offer these improved services.
Within a one month time period, and leveraging their new portal, they have already increased small business wins by not being out priced with three new previously unattainable clients. The company was able to bring these new customers on board faster (in just minutes versus days and months) during the brief beta period. In June of 2008, they went live to all of their customers.
Looking ahead, this travel company will beta release a virtual portal hosting solution via WebSphere Portal enabling them to offer unique self-service features to their customers. Customers will be able to react to and fix failed transactions where credit card numbers are expired or, for whatever reason, cannot be processed. The application will email the passenger directly, bypassing a manual task, allowing them to log in and self-correct the data. Additionally they are seeking partnerships with other services which will assist customers in finding the lowest fare through constant monitoring and possibly offer credits or refunds if rates go down. Currently this system is done via polling, but with the new infrastructure in place, the information can be pushed out to a client proactively.
Customers are excited and have praised their technologies and new portal implementation while looking forward to the next phase of growth within the industry. The company is excited to expose and leverage their new reservation features to current and future clients, increasing the value of their portal. The end results are new and innovative customer service options which will benefit everyone traveling the skies.