American Airlines Upgrades AA.comwith ATG to Improve CustomerRelationshipsATG Relationship Management Platform Key to Improving the Overall Customer Experience of B2C Web Site
Summary
· ATG Relationship Management Platform has allowed AA.com to roll out new self-service initiatives quickly, such as online flight check-in on AA.com - designed to improve the travel experience for the customer and lower operational costs.
· AA.com has been able to extend profiling, reporting, and personalized content deliverycapabilities for its customers.
· Site performance has increased approximately 300 percent to an average of 1.7-second home page response times from broadband connections.
· AA.com can handle up to one million unique visitors on any given day - generating as many as 1.9 million business transactions.
· Since launching the new Web site, AA.com traffic has increased by nearly 25 percent to an average of 750,000 daily visitors.
· The site has enhanced the customer experience through easier navigation, better speed,frequent updates, and increased stability.
· AA.com has accelerated time-to-market with new services via a flexible architecture andbiweekly Web updates.
ATG Case Study: American Airlines
Introduction
American Airlines sought to enhance theonline experience of its customers at aa.com
Since the mid-nineties, the AA.com Web site has
served as a critical distribution channel for American
Airlines. As the site increased in popularity manage-
ment foresaw the need to re-architect the site to
support more customers and enable the swifter
delivery of new services.
American Airlines is the world’s largest airline with
jet service to destinations throughout the World.
AA.com is the airline’s award-winning Web site and
is recognized as one of the most popular travel sites
on the Web. The site’s initial architecture could not
support the company’s needs to scale this Business-
to-Consumer (B2C) site flexibly and allow American
Airlines to continue enhancing the online experi-
ences of its customers.
The Challenge
swiftly re-architect the site to scale to supportmore customers and increased transactions
Technology leaders wanted to generate new and
increased usage of the Web site while also creating
a better understanding of how AA.com could improve
the overall travel experiences of its customers. A
flexible-yet-powerful underlying technical architec-
ture was needed to accommodate the features that
AA.com customers desired and set the stage for
further enhancements necessitated by a competi-
tive industry.
The original Web site was based on a C++ architec-
ture.This limited the ability to add new features and
services, and made it difficult to keep up with ever-
increasing demand. American Airlines wanted to
expand personalization features available on the Web
site to improve customer service and create new rev-
enue opportunities. Per Rob Friedman, Managing
Director of Personalized Marketing,“We believed that
offering a unique user experience would enhance
customer service while providing a more effective
marketing and sales channel”. A flexible architecture
was required to support cross-selling and up-selling
opportunities, and to better enable the implementa-
tion of personalized promotions.
“The integration of additional functionality was a
cumbersome, time-consuming process on the last
version of the site,” explained Daniel Henry, Director
of Application Development for Customer Technology.
“To integrate new functions we had to make signif-
icant changes to the architecture.We recognized that
the old site required longer development cycles
and, due to the nature of our rapidly changing
industry, this was not a position that we wanted to
find ourselves continuously encountering. We
wanted to ensure that we investigated a myriad of
technologies and carefully evaluated prospective
vendors. Getting the ‘right’ solution in place and
building strategic, long-term working relation-
ships with solution providers – both product and
services – were integral to our efforts.”
The Solution
atg relationship management and atg professional services
The need for a standards-based architecture led the
AA.com team to J2EE technology as the foundation
of its next-generation e-commerce site architecture.
With the decision to adopt J2EE technology as the
basis for its site came the need to replace the under-
lying software platform. Following an examination
of the most trafficked e-commerce destinations,
American Airlines chose ATG Relationship
Management Platform. Henry said,“ATG provides
us with a robust set of personalization capabilities
that truly gives us a competitive advantage. ATG also
demonstrated total commitment to making our
initiatives a success.”
American Airlines also required expertise to help
internal staff design and implement the new site.
ATG Professional Services provided architecture
design and configuration assistance, and Totality
Corporation provided managed services at an EDS
hosting facility.“Because ATG software is at the heart
of our application engine, we wanted to find a
managed services provider that had expertise
with high-volume ATG deployments,”explained
Susanna Brown, Manager of Operations and
Infrastructure for Customer Technology.“The contri-
bution of Totality to the management of the
hardware and software provides significant value
to AA.com.”
Orbitz provided the booking engine capabilities, thus
enhancing AA.com’s travel reservation offering.
Working with these and other technology vendors,
American Airlines successfully designed and
implemented a next-generation application and
platform infrastructure. It was deployed in an
aggressive timetable. Even with enhanced
functionality and flexibility, the site’s architecture is
designed to rapidly scale. The standards-based archi-
tecture provides a solid foundation on which AA.com
can continue to integrate additional enhancements.
Members of the ATG Professional Services Group
worked with AA.com staff on the architecture design
for the next-generation e-commerce site. Together,
they broke down the deployment into manageable
projects on a detailed schedule. A beta version of the
site was released with testing for Quality of Service
(QoS) requirements, security, scalability, availability,
and performance. ATG Professional Services worked
with the AA.com development team on implement-
ing the application and platform infrastructure
throughout the process, with full production
deployment less than a month later.
Building an Integrated Solution
One of the architectural challenges of the new version
of AA.com was the requirement to integrate with
the American Airlines Transaction Management Sys-
tem (AATMS) database, which hosts more than 46
million AAdvantage accounts. AATMS runs in an IBM
mainframe environment under IMS and DB2. BEA
WebLogic Server was employed by EDS to build a
gateway to IMS transactions, while AA.com accesses
DB2 transactions directly via Java Database Connec-
tivity (JDBC™) technology.
The architecture of ATG Relationship Management
Platform is flexible enough to handle the front-end
interfaces while routing transactions through back-
end systems such as AATMS and third-party systems
like Orbitz. This innovative architecture plays an
important role in helping AA.com sustain high traffic
and transaction rates.
ATG Relationship Management Platform is a J2EE-
compliant application framework that uses the latest
online customer relationship management
functionality and contains powerful scenario
personalization tools needed to manage complex
customer interactions over time. The ATG solution
extends profiling, reporting, and personalized con-
tent delivery capabilities and offers out-of-the-box
support for Web, e-mail, and wireless delivery, and it
can be customized for integrating other channels.
It also supports open standards such as XML and
Web services and provides linear scalability.
Consumer and business customers are able to book
travel reservations, manage accounts, and check news,
flight status, airport security updates, and more using
both wired and wireless devices. In addition, the “My
Account” feature allows customers to personalize
their home page and the information they see
throughout the site. The new AA.com relies on ATG
Relationship Management Platform in part because
of its strong personalization features.“Personalization
is at the heart of our business requirements and was
one of the key reasons we selected ATG,” Henry said.
“Personalization truly differentiates us from our
competition.”
“ATG delivers robust, high-performance e-commerce
capabilities that we truly see as a competitive advan-
tage,” said Jason Goth, Managing Architect for
Customer Technology. “With ATG, we’re able to
extend functionality that results in new revenue
opportunities without major redesigning and recoding.”
AA.com continues to provide passengers with access
to faster and more efficient check-in procedures,
flight information, fare sales, and travel planning
tools. AA.com managers continue to enhance the
site with a great deal of capabilities, including the
ability to check in for flights via AA.com, book award
travel, and support wireless access technologies.
Management is driving greater integration between
AA.com and channel reservation and airport systems,
and striving to seamlessly integrate AA.com with
traditional booking channels to simplify customer
interactions.
Measuring success
Since the re-launch, AA.com has been able to accel-
erate time-to-market through biweekly and rapid
AAdvantage reservation personalization.
April 2003. 4540002-01
© 2003 Art Technology Group, Inc. ATG, Art TechnologyGroup, the ATG logo and ClearCommerce are registeredtrademarks of Art Technology Group. Scenario Personalizationand Data Anywhere Architecture are service marks of ArtTechnology Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders. NASDAQ: ARTG
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releases of new site features. The site continues to
meet its scalability objectives. It has experienced a
nearly 25 percent increase in traffic since the launch
of the new site to average 750,000 visitors daily.
AA.com now handles up to one million unique
visitors daily, and it generates as many as 1.9
million business transactions per day.
The new architecture can support future growth
requirements while maintaining a high-degree of
availability and reliability. AA.com is currently
sustaining over 99.99 percent availability,
excluding scheduled maintenance. Site perform-
ance has increased approximately 300 percent to an
average of 1.7-second home page response times
from broadband connections. AA.com has been
able to enhance customer service. with easier
navigation, better speed, and increased stability.
American Airlines is demonstrating the initiative
and forward thinking necessary to create a competi-
tive advantage in the B2C Internet space by leveraging
the underlying state-of-the-art infrastructure.
Management realized that the technologies and
solutions appropriate five years ago are no longer the
underpinnings of a successful e-commerce strategy.
ATG Relationship Management Platform has allowed
AA.com to quickly improve its customer relationships
and it is a critical factor in helping AA.com lay a solid
foundation for long-term success.
AMERICAN AIRLINES PROFILE
Industry Travel & Leisure
Site www.aa.com
Application ATG RelationshipManagement Platform
Business Profile American, American Eagleand the AmericanConnection carriers servemore than 250 cities in 41 countries with 4,400daily flights. American's oneworld alliance ofinternational carriers offers service to 550 citiesWorldwide. Customers can find personalizednews, information and travel offers on American'saward-winning Web site, AA.com -- the best placeto check fares and book tickets online. OnlyAmerican provides More Room ThroughoutCoach for More Coach Passengers.