Continental Airlines

Airline Boosts Efficiency, Enhances Revenue with Web Content Management Solution

Continental Airlines relied on a highly manual process for updating content on the OnePass Frequent Flyer section of Continental.com. Updates were channelled to one or two individuals, causing a backlog of work and a delay in the publication of offers from the airline’s travel partners. As a result, the company risked losing revenue opportunities. To streamline publication and create a foundation for centralized, efficient content management across the enterprise, Continental implemented a solution using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. Now, the company can publish partner offers in half the time through a process that includes automated scheduling features, built-in workflow, and sophisticated tracking capabilities. Today, content managers can handle a much higher volume of partner offers, resulting in enhanced revenue opportunities.

 

Situation

Continental Airlines [NYSE:CAL] is the fourth-largest airline in the United States—and the fifth-largest in the world—with 3,000 daily departures serving 151 domestic and 120 international destinations. In March 2008, Continental was ranked “No. 1 World's Most Admired Airline” by FORTUNE magazine for the fifth consecutive year.

With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can extend the solution to meet future needs. We’ve built a solution that can help us efficiently manage content through every point of contact with the customer. Aaron Hynes Managing Director, Technology, Continental Airlines

The airline’s frequent flyer program, OnePass, helps travelers earn miles that can be redeemed for reward travel or for bidding on travel packages and products at the OnePass Online Auction. Continental also offers opportunities for travelers to earn additional miles when they purchase goods and services from OnePass partners, including other airlines, hotels, car rental companies, and retailers. OnePass partners advertise their offers on the OnePass News & Offers section of Continental.com.

Lengthy Publication Process

Staff found that the previous process for publishing partner offers to the OnePass site was too challenging. Stacy Warren, Director of Customer Technology Solutions at Continental Airlines, recalls, “We were using a solution from Documentum, but it couldn’t support the publishing process in the way we needed. It went down a lot and required costly consulting services to maintain. We couldn’t afford those services, and we’re not in the business of doing that kind of development work in-house.”

Continental abandoned the Documentum solution and switched to a manual process. In this system, staff initiated content updates through bug-tracking software or used e-mail messages to move content from content owners, to copywriting teams, to designers, and then back to the content owner for approval. “We had numerous problems with this system,” says Aaron Hynes, Managing Director, Technology, at Continental Airlines. “The workflow was loose. We had no version control and no easy way to preview what the content would look like once published on the Web page.” Also, if any one person involved in the process was out of the office, it was difficult to complete publication. “Partner offers could easily get stalled in the hands of one individual,” says Hynes. It could take up to two weeks to publish an offer. “If one of our competitors posts an offer, we have to respond quickly with a competitive offer. In our old environment, we didn’t have the ability to do that,” explains Warren.

Multiple Locations, Inconsistent Content

Content owners also found it a challenge to update offers or remove expired offers from the site. A single offer can appear in multiple places on Continental.com, as well as in additional channels such as Web-based airport kiosks. To remove or update an offer meant tracking down each appearance of the offer on the Web site and within other channels. Some of this information was recorded using Microsoft® Office Excel® spreadsheet software, but finding each location of a published offer was largely dependent on the memory of the person who initiated the offer. “It was up to the content owner to remember each and every place the offer appeared,” says Alma Siller, Project Manager at Continental Airlines. If a content owner had left the company, it could mean hours of searching through the Web site for instances of an offer when an update was required.

Content located in multiple locations could also result in different versions of offers appearing in different places, or offers still appearing on the Web site after they had expired. Hynes says, “We have many long-time customers. Stale content or misinformation can result in customer confusion, and even mistrust.” And confused customers tend to look for help. “Confusing messages on the Web site result in a higher volume of calls to our customer care center,” says Hynes. “This can be costly.”

Need for an Integrated, Centralized System

Continental wanted a Web content management system that could integrate with its existing Web site technology. Continental.com was built using Microsoft ASP.NET 2.0, part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, and the Microsoft Visual C#® development tool. “To keep developer costs down, we needed a system that would integrate with our Visual C# and ASP.NET environment,” says Hynes. “We didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a closed system that was difficult to customize.”

Finally, Continental wanted its new solution to be able to centrally manage content across the enterprise through a number of different delivery channels. “We wanted something that would do more than just improve the process for Web updates,” says Hynes. “We wanted to change how employees viewed a piece of content—we wanted them to think of each piece of content as a product unto itself. And, we needed something that would scale to meet our content management needs well into the future—needs we haven’t even yet anticipated.”

Solution

In July 2007, after evaluating solutions from Interwoven, Stellent, and Percussion Software, Continental decided to implement a Web content management solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. “We chose SharePoint Server 2007 because it allowed us to take advantage of resources we already had in-house. Our developers are familiar with .NET technologies, which meant they could quickly develop new tools and make customizations rather than learning new technologies,” says Hynes. “Also, we wanted to have a high level of partnership with our chosen vendor.”

Gathering Support from MTC

In August 2007, Microsoft invited Continental to attend a two-day Architecture Design Session at a Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Texas. “We took this opportunity to work through our business and technical challenges,” says Hynes. “Even though we initially planned to use it for Web content management, we really wanted to know for sure that Office SharePoint Server 2007 was robust enough that it could extend into a comprehensive enterprise content management system.”

We became familiar with the new environment very quickly … if you know how to program in .NET using Visual Studio, then you know how to program in SharePoint Server 2007. Benjamin Lee Senior Manager, Technology, Continental Airlines

With the help of Microsoft Services at the MTC, Continental arrived at a high-level design for implementing a centralized content management system and a workflow process for publishing Web content. The team then embarked on a proof of concept, which used Office SharePoint Server 2007 to update partners’ base offers on the OnePass site. A base offer is a partner company’s ongoing offer—for example, a car rental company may offer 50 OnePass frequent flyer miles for each day’s car rental throughout the year, but this offer may increase to 150 miles per day during holiday travel times. If a base offer changes, Continental must change the Web content for that offer throughout the OnePass site. “We knew we had a major bottleneck in that area,” says Hynes.

The content for base offers is relatively static, but it also has a robust set of metadata associated with it that needed to be managed. “Working with base offers in the proof of concept furthered our goal of thinking about content as a product," says Hynes. "We wanted to think about each piece beyond, say, a mere expiration date, but one that had more complex layers of information associated with it.” Using Office SharePoint Server 2007, Continental can take advantage of metadata to automate content updating. For example, because metadata associated with partner offers contains expiration information, the system can remove an offer automatically at the correct time, without manual intervention. Siller adds, “Creating a process for updating base offers was a great first step for our Office SharePoint Server 2007 implementation. It was low risk in that changes are easily reversible in this area, but it also promised great potential value because base offers are a huge revenue generator for us, with lots of site exposure.”

Ease of Integration and Customization

First, Hynes’s team configured its Web and database servers for Office SharePoint Server 2007, which include HP BL40Ps servers and HP DL 580s servers running Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 Enterprise Edition. Using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 Team Suite development system, Continental developers integrated the OnePass section of the site (developed on Office SharePoint Server 2007) with the rest of Continental.com (developed on the .NET Framework). Using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, Continental customized publishing templates, called Master Pages and Page Layouts, which are provided in Office SharePoint Server 2007. Because the Continental Web site design and style guidelines are built into these templates, the company can easily maintain a consistent look and branding across the OnePass site. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, Continental will also be able to ensure that when content is updated on one page, changes will appear across the site wherever other pages display the same content.

Using Visual Studio 2005, Continental also integrated the Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment with its WorldServer translation software from SDL Enterprise Technologies. Continental relies on WorldServer to translate Web content into five different languages. Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on an open, scalable architecture with support for Web services and interoperability standards, such as XML and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Continental found that integration was a straightforward process. “Both SharePoint Server 2007 and WorldServer knew how to talk in XML. Extensive Microsoft development tools were available, so the integration wasn’t a problem,” says Hynes. Finally, Continental used Visual Studio 2005 to customize the prebuilt workflows available in Office SharePoint Server 2007.

“We became familiar with the new environment very quickly,” says Benjamin Lee, Senior Manager, Technology, at Continental Airlines. “Basically, if you know how to program in .NET using Visual Studio, then you know how to program in SharePoint Server 2007.”

To publish content to the OnePass Web site, Hynes’s team and Microsoft Services took advantage of the built-in content deployment functionality of Office SharePoint Server 2007 and also used the application’s content deployment application programming interface (API) to meet the business’s needs. Now Continental can deploy content to more than one channel at a time through a single process. For instance, a partner offer that needs to be updated on the Web site and at airport kiosks can be moved through development server, staging server, user acceptance, preproduction, and production environments—using one process.

Streamlining the Publishing Process

Hynes’s team worked closely with content owners and Web designers to fine-tune workflows, publishing templates, and metadata processes. With the help of Microsoft Services, they also performed extensive stress testing to ensure that the environment would scale properly and also finalized the configuration of administration consoles.

In May 2008, Continental began publishing partner offers to its OnePass site using Office SharePoint Server 2007. With the built-in workflow in Office SharePoint Server 2007, Continental can control the publication process from start to finish. Workflows can be defined to start automatically, and multiple workflows can be assigned to the SharePoint document libraries or lists where content is managed. Workflows trigger e-mail messages to those involved in the content review process and can also be used to escalate the process to ensure that reviewers respond in a timely manner.

To publish or update a OnePass partner offer, the content owner enters or modifies content within a document list in Office SharePoint Server 2007. The owner also specifies the languages of publication for the offer and submits the offer. This initiates a workflow process, which includes sending the document through the WorldServer translation engine. Content goes to the appropriate copy writers, designers, and then back to the content owner for approval. Once approved, content is extracted from the central Office SharePoint Server 2007 repository using built-in content deployment functionality and the content deployment API and is delivered as Web content. The templates created by the development team ensure that the content is published in a consistent manner. Before it’s published, the new Web content moves through an additional set of approval processes, which allows Continental and the partner to verify it on a Web page. Once approved, it’s sent through the staging server, to preproduction, and to the production servers for final publication.

Through this centralized content management system, content is tracked and time-stamped from its origination so that content owners can easily modify or reverse each published offer, including translated content. Content owners can also specify in advance when content is to be published and can set expiration dates so that outdated offers do not appear on the site.

Making Future Plans

Taking advantage of the authentication capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007, Continental will soon be able to provide partners with credentials and simply e-mail the partner a link to the staging area within the SharePoint site to approve content.

As part of its goal to create a comprehensive enterprise content management system, Continental also plans to transition other areas of Continental.com to Office SharePoint Server 2007, extending this publication process and reusing the same content to send to other channels, such as the Web-based airport kiosks, electronic statements, e-mail offers, direct mail campaigns, and online flight check-in.

Benefits

With its new, automated content management solution, Continental Airlines is able to publish partner offers faster and with fewer errors. Because of this, Web production productivity has increased, paving the way for higher revenues. Continental easily integrated Office SharePoint Server 2007 into its existing development environment and used its extensibility to expand the solution to help meet future content management needs.

By using Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have vastly increased the volume of partner offers we can handle. Alma Siller Project Manager, Continental Airlines

Time to Market Reduced by 50

Percent With centralized, automated content publishing capabilities, Continental has eliminated the backlog that used to slow the publication process. “We’re realizing tremendous efficiency benefits,” says Warren. “In our old environment, it simply took too long to publish an offer. Our merchandising team is pressing hard to respond to competitors’ offers so that we can maintain market share, and with Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can quickly respond with equal offers of our own.” It used to take a content owner at Continental up to two weeks to publish a single offer. Now, multiple offers can be published by one owner, in less than a week.

Working efficiently is critical in today’s business environment. “We’re operating with fewer resources than we used to,” says Warren. “And yet, keeping our marketing activity high is more important than ever. With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have an automated solution that helps us get more done with fewer hands.”

Enhanced Revenue

Faster time to market, as well as a bigger pipeline for partner offers, enhances revenues generated by the OnePass program. “The more offers we can publish, the more customers we can reach, which means the more revenue we can generate through our partner program. By using Office SharePoint Server 2007, we have vastly increased the volume of partner offers we can handle,” says Siller. “We can turn multiple offers on and off at a much faster pace, whereas in the past we were limited to publishing one or two offers at a time. One of our retail partner managers was able to get three offers up and going in one week. We can now accommodate last-minute offers with minimal turnaround time. With the holidays approaching and offer volume increasing, this enhanced speed is critical.”

Warren adds, “The Office SharePoint Server 2007 solution also sets the stage for serving dynamic content that’s customized for each visitor to the site.” For instance, Continental can use its new system to deliver a more personalized customer experience by providing Web content appropriate to each customer’s participation level in the OnePass program.

Consistent Communications

Now, content owners can reuse existing content when they modify offers, because partners’ base offers are centrally located and managed within Office SharePoint Server 2007. “Reusing existing content and publishing approved content in multiple places through one system, reduces errors that may result from keying in the same offer multiple times in different locations,” says Siller. “It allows us to form a deeper connection with the customer because we are producing the same tone, look, and feel across the board. We’re relating to the customer as one team, one Continental, with one voice.”

With Office SharePoint Server 2007, Continental can also view a history of all changes made to a partner offer or other Web content. “This is an important piece for our legal department,” says Siller. “If a customer contacts us with confusion about an offer, we can look up that offer and see how it read on any given day. Then, we can make an informed decision about how to proceed.” The new system also helps strengthen partner relationships. “With the old system, we risked upsetting the relationship with the partner if the partner’s offer wasn’t published in time. With the new automated system, this is no longer a risk.”

Easy Integration and Extensibility

With the help of Microsoft, Continental was able to connect its new Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment with its existing Web site technologies, including the WorldServer translation software and the ASP.NET areas of Continental.com. “Because Office SharePoint Server 2007 is built on ASP.NET, we were able to share our existing code base and allow our SharePoint Server 2007–based Web sites to live alongside our other Web applications. The open nature of the environment also gives us ability to share our content with other business units, helping to streamline projects across the organization,” says Jason Deere, Senior Developer at Continental Airlines.

Hynes adds, “With Office SharePoint Server 2007, we can extend the solution to meet future needs. We’ve built a solution that can help us efficiently manage content through every point of contact with the customer. But most importantly, with the extensibility of SharePoint Server 2007, we can extend our solution to accommodate future needs and future points of contact with the customer that we haven’t even thought of yet.”

 

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For more information about Continental Airlines products and services, call (800) 523-3273 or visit the Web site at:
www.continental.com