Grounded in legacy

In the competitive airline industry, there is nothing more valuable than customer loyalty, and ensuring a positive customer experience is the key. As global air travel accelerates towards pre-pandemic levels, the competition for travelers is also heating up.

One major European airline had a customer care and loyalty application built on legacy technology, which lacked the flexibility to quickly implement changing business processes. In the fight for new customers, the system needed to be responsive enough to rapidly roll-out new promotions and loyalty programs across multiple channels, handle multilingual communication, and process customer requests quickly.

The root of the problem was a technology platform incapable of providing a 360-degree view of the customer or efficiently integrating with all the other customer-facing systems and channels.

A modern solution takes flight

Based on a longstanding partnership, the airline turned to Atos for help reimagining and redesigning its strategic customer care application for the future. The systems integrator began by gathering requirements for the app and its 30+ interfaces with other systems.

To simplify the customer experience and reduce staff workloads, the app needed the extreme flexibility to support many different types of customer requests through a single, unified process. It also needed to support claim payments to more than 200 different bank codes in 300+ countries. Finally, it needed strong automation capabilities, to provide fast self-service for simple customer requests.

Once the requirements and functionality were defined, a team of experts began refactoring the application onto the Pega platform and rolling it out to the airline’s customer care centers.

Landing new customers

The new app was rolled out to more than 4,000 agents at 17 customer care centers, and now processes more than 1 million claims per year. The results have been immediate and dramatic.

There has been a 15% overall reduction in claims handling time, and 10–15% of all customer requests are now processed automatically — without manual intervention by customer service agents. Not only are the airline’s call centers more efficient, but it has also improved the customer experience by providing a self-service option that appeals to today’s travelers.

The low-code Pega solution is vastly more flexible than the old legacy system, enabling new business rules and functionality to be quickly developed and implemented — even by users without coding expertise. The airline now has a robust, adaptable new customer loyalty platform, one that can grow with it as air travel takes off again.