Helping a travel brand’s message reach destinations around the world

With its eyes on improving development, launching across new markets, and engaging global customers, Centific provided the strategic expertise to shape a leaner, more agile organization.

Smiling man with a laptop and smartphone sitting on a rocky mountain.

A global leader in travel, auto, and hotel bookings, our client was an American travel technology company with more than $10 billion in annual revenue.

The client wanted to expand its international footprint to new markets, and wished to simplify its technology and operational ecosystem, which had grown complex as a result of a range of acquisitions and strategic partnerships.

To achieve these goals, our client needed to reach customers on new channels and in more engaging ways, enhance its established affiliate network, and adopt a swifter development approach to ensure customer and business needs were being met.

Leveraging our expertise in channel distribution, next-gen technology, as well as Agile and DevOps enablement, we implemented solutions that accelerated production and gave our client access to additional markets worldwide.

KEY SUCCESSES

Demonstrated the marketing capabilities and opportunities of social platform with over 900M users
Evolved development team from Waterfall to Agile + DevOps approach to speed up production and delivery
Redesigned IT infrastructure to support DevOps microservices methodology
Increased client market share globally by developing personalized, region-specific user experiences in expanding markets
Consolidated APIs from multiple brands, expanding API services to client partners
Developed CICD platform to enable a faster deployment cycle and add new monitoring and analytics capabilities

NEW CHANNEL DISTRIBUTION

Social apps are giving brands more timely ways to reach their audience. With WeChat, our client saw an opportunity to reach over 900 million people worldwide, including an astonishing 90 percent of smartphone users in China. Their goal: to maintain business and brand relevance in China and promote outbound travel products in Southeast Asia.

To demonstrate the business impact of WeChat’s capabilities, Centific conducted a workshop on the benefits of adopting the new channel. Drawing on our team’s research and analysis, we presented detailed insights on WeChat marketing best practices, how competitors leverage the app to boost customer traffic, and where opportunities to better utilize the app existed.

By launching a WeChat Official Account, these efforts resulted in implementation of client marketing on the app, enabling them to access the full range of WeChat users, internationally and across China.

UX PERSONALIZATION

Capitalizing on opportunities in foreign markets can challenge any organization. Centific research was able to identify our client’s main competitive disadvantage overseas: customer experience personalization. By making channels locally relevant and engaging, we identified an opportunity to reach new markets and customers.

To help make this happen, we moved the client from a content-driven app to an eCommerce platform, enabling the introduction of new functionalities and integration with external data. Carrying out a strategic UX testing and learning process involving multi-currency pricing, VIP programs, and vehicle rentals across different regions, we landed on a personalized, user-friendly experience for each of the client’s markets and channels.

Finding success with this personalization approach, our team helped the client quickly introduce and ramp up new global channels through PoS Factory, expanding its reach to more customers worldwide.

AGILE & DEVOPS ENABLEMENT

To enable our client to develop digital products and features in a leaner, more streamlined fashion, Centific identified issues that resulted in slow, complex release cycles. With over 500 servers being utilized in the deploy and release process, and siloed development and operations teams causing production slowdown, we saw a clear need for an Agile workflow and DevOps approach.

We redesigned the client’s IT stack on the cloud, modularizing and decoupling its services into microservices, and creating APIs to speed up production. With this advanced tech architecture in place, we helped the client shift from a Waterfall development methodology to full Agile and DevOps adoption. In addition to creating greater collaboration between development and operations, these efforts enabled our client to boost deployment speed from monthly to weekly releases, and launch over 23,000 product enhancements in 2017.

DISTRIBUTED AUTOMATION & REPORTING

Siloed teams meant siloed technology and frameworks. For DevOps to be fully adopted, Centific merged this multi-platform environment into a single CICD platform, also introducing new toolsets to speed up the development pipeline.

As part of the CICD platform, our team developed Operation Eyes, which added monitoring and analytics features to the platform’s capabilities. To further speed up development, our experts created a distributed automation system to test and validate builds quickly, and a real-time reporting system for ensuring quality releases.

API CONSOLIDATION

While affiliate and partner networks help companies acquire more traffic, the acquisition of several brands, plus the launch of new partnerships, made our client’s growing stable of APIs, partners, and services too complex.

Our engineers consolidated APIs from various acquired brands, enabling the expansion of partner features and services to include booking, cancellation, payments, and self-service. After migrating these consolidated services to the cloud, our client saw substantial improvements in API performance, setting the stage for additional integrations and improvements and greater partner visibility.

RESULTS

Client engagement with Centific opened new market opportunities for this worldwide travel leader. With its enhanced approach to development, personalized and localized UX, and consolidated partnerships and technologies, the client is prepared for its next wave of global expansion.