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CASE STUDY
Travel

Flying to new heights

Reshaping passenger expectations with a friendlier and more personalized digital experience.

Challenge

Customer experience is the battleground for brands today. Winning in a customer-led market means being hyper-focused on customers and being agile enough to offer new, connected experiences to accommodate individual needs.

To respond to ever-changing customer demands and expand global reach, Philippine Airlines (PAL) sought to create a consistent, integrated digital experience that also reflects its Filipino values of customer-centricity and wholehearted hospitality.

It faced a number of challenges, such as separate websites for online bookings and loyalty programs, online booking navigation proved difficult, and there were limited functionalities for personalization. Also, running digital campaigns proved costly and involved significant numbers of resources and effort. How could it make digital campaigns timelier and more relevant?

In 2016, PAL embarked on a mission to improve and personalize its digital campaigns and promotions while reducing its time to market.

What Accenture did

Using Sitecore as a main content management platform, Accenture helped PAL build a responsive, easy-to-use, integrated system for online bookings, travel promotions, and loyalty programs that is accessible on a variety of devices.

With Sitecore’s content editor, the system enabled digital marketers to launch personalized marketing campaigns and customer-facing website content at any time. PAL’s website was also able to expand its reach through a localized version of the website for Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China. The website now also complies with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 for visually impaired customers.

PAL’s vision to create an exceptional customer experience is just getting started. Using more personalized content, we are reimagining the everyday to bring new ways for travelers to see and experience the world.

People and culture

Agile implementation was new to the IT team, and we helped them understand the principles and procedures for agile sprints, incremental releases and metrics to help embed new ways of working at PAL. We trained the marketing team on Sitecore’s web content management system before the system was taken live. Taking a responsive approach, we identified and proactively solved issues by tapping into our network of experienced professionals globally and locally to uphold PAL’s distinct service philosophy, "Heart of the Filipino," embodying the nation's culture of warmth, care and hospitality. The collaborative, proactive nature of the engagement, focused on providing an exceptional traveler experience and digital agility. Continuously driving that change has become part of the team’s boundaryless culture.

The new solution has enabled employees to break the sound barrier in speeding content to market. Previously, they needed to wait for a week or more to update the website, coordinating with different third-party vendors on new promotions and sales events. Now they can easily prepare materials in advance and update in a matter of minutes. Marketing teams worry less about managing the process and can concentrate on shaping personalized campaign content. In addition, they are more responsive to market needs and events while getting more time to focus on more strategic areas to generate increased business value.

Value delivered

PAL achieved its mission to improve and personalize digital campaigns and promotions while reducing time to market for new products and services. It displays relevant content across digital channels to make the user experience more enjoyable.

Customers can now easily access key features like online bookings and loyalty programs. PAL’s powerful, scalable marketing experience leverages customer analytics to target campaigns. The content editor functionality allows PAL to customize and publish content at any time, including personalized marketing campaigns for specific customers.

The responsive, easy-to-use and integrated website resulted in an 80 percent increase in users—and an excellent flight experience even before take-off. Web traffic, conversions and sales also grew dramatically.

132%

 

increase in page views

110%

 

growth in social traffic conversions

205%

 

increase in direct search conversions and online transactions rose by 3 percent

This digital transformation cemented PAL’s position as a leading airline in the Philippines. Skytrax, an international rating system, which classifies airlines and airports by the quality of front-line product and staff service standards, named PAL as one of the world's 10 most improved airlines and gave it a 4-star airline rating.

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