Continental Airlines stands out from its competition through a commitment to superior customer service and a forward-thinking approach to technology. When it came time to update its call center reservations system, Continental and its partner Infusion Development chose the Microsoft® Silverlight™ browser plug-in to build the new reservations solution as a rich Internet application. The new system provides improved functionality and workflow for call center agents, which enables them to deliver better customer service and satisfaction. With the new solution, Continental saves money by consolidating servers and databases that currently sit in call centers around the world. By choosing Silverlight, the company also has reduced development and deployment time, simplified application management, and made it easy to integrate the new system with Continental’s existing Web services.
Situation
Houston, Texas–based Continental Airlines has a strong tradition of service excellence in the airline industry, as evidenced by its selection as FORTUNE magazine’s “No. 1 World’s Most Admired Airline” six years in a row. The international carrier serves 265 airports on five continents with 351 jets and more than 2,750 daily departures. Continental and its regional partners carried approximately 65 million passengers in 2008, and the company has more than 43,000 employees.
One way that Continental stays ahead of its competition is through forward-thinking investments in technology. “The airline space is not known for innovation when it comes to technology,” says Aaron Hynes, Managing Director of E-Commerce Technology at Continental Airlines. “So we’ve taken the approach that any technology we develop must be strategic in nature. That means being at the forefront of new technologies and new solutions to make sure we’re ahead of the curve.”
As part of its reservations system, Continental maintains a network of 11 international and four domestic customer service call centers where agents help customers book new flights and troubleshoot existing reservations. The call centers have a total staff of 2,700 agents, with 500 to as many as 1,100 concurrent users processing around 60,000 calls a day. To supplement the agents in the call centers, Continental also employs remote agents, who process customer calls from home using a connection based on licensed Citrix software.
Traditionally, agents have done their work using a dedicated client application developed in-house. In 2008, Continental decided that it was time to replace the system. “Our existing application was reaching end of life,” says Jeff Mathew, Senior Manager in Technology at Continental Airlines. “It still works, but it took us too long to develop and deploy new builds, and it was hard for us to integrate with newer Web services. It took us four weeks to deploy a new build, and in a rapidly changing market, that’s just not acceptable. Maintenance and support had become a pain as well, and we were having trouble finding developers to work on the older technology.”
Continental began looking at new technologies with which to build a new call center portal that would satisfy the following requirements:
- Easy to develop, deploy, and support new software for call centers and remote agents
- Low-bandwidth requirements for call centers and remote users with limited connections
- Easy to integrate with other Web services and technologies
- Fast, responsive, and simple for agents to use with minimal training
- Flexible and extensible for future development and responsiveness to business needs
- Take advantage of existing technology skills
- Deliver a user experience that optimizes agent time
Solution
After clarifying its technological needs and gaining initial vision and planning assistance from Microsoft, Continental enlisted Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner Infusion Development to help develop a prototype of the new reservations system. The team chose the Microsoft Silverlight™ browser plug-in as the development platform for the new solution. Silverlight features, such as cross-platform capability, robust data compression, and asynchronous communication meant that the new application could do things other Web applications cannot.
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Silverlight speeds our time-to-market, increases the return on our investment in existing services, and provides our agents with better functionality, which helps them better serve our customers. |
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Aaron Hynes
Managing Director of E-Commerce Technology, Continental Airlines |
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“From our perspective, call center agents are our customers, and they’re really power users,” says Hynes. “We needed to be able to go beyond the normal limitations of what Web applications have been able to provide. Silverlight is a modern technology, and we can use it to deliver a rich experience that feels like a thick-client application. At the same time, we can keep management and costs centralized and more quickly deploy software to react to changing business needs.”
The partnership with Infusion was a key part of the development process. “Infusion was involved from the very beginning,” says Hynes. “They did the design for the user interface [UI], and they delivered Extensible Application Markup Language [XAML] files for us to integrate into our back-end services. What they designed was great. Because of their design expertise, they added many great UI features we hadn’t thought of. Having XAML as the backbone for Silverlight allowed their designers and our developers to work in parallel, which sped up development.”
Continental developers found that Silverlight was a perfect addition to their existing investment in Microsoft technologies. Using it has helped them move toward a software-plus-services model of delivery. “We have a strong base of experience with the Microsoft .NET Framework, especially the C# programming language,” says Mathew. “Because Silverlight supports multiple languages, including C#, we could take advantage of our existing Microsoft investment and experience and easily extend it out to the Web. We can also give our application a richer feel and a stronger user experience.”
Adds Hynes, “I can’t overestimate how important .NET has been in terms of providing a common platform that we can standardize on across the enterprise. It works for basically any layer in the stack of our development, and that consistent underlying technology really speeds up our development. Another key for us is the continued growth and investment Microsoft has put into the platform and the tools.”
Continental believes that its choice to develop the new reservations system as a rich Internet application using Silverlight will benefit the company, its employees, and its customers. “Silverlight speeds our time-to-market, increases the return on our investment in existing services, and provides our agents with better functionality, which helps them better serve our customers,” says Hynes.
Benefits
By choosing a flexible and developer-friendly platform such as Silverlight on which to build its new reservations system, Continental has positioned itself to continue as a technology leader in the airline industry. With its Silverlight-based solution, Continental can reduce costs, manage customer calls more efficiently, and provide its customers with a better experience when interacting with Continental Airlines.
Easier Development, Deployment, and Support
Using Silverlight, Continental developers have significantly reduced the amount of time necessary to produce and deploy new builds. “Developing for the Web helps us increase our reach and simplify our deployment,” says Mathew. “It’s basically a one-touch deployment now in the sense that we push the new build out to the servers and everybody gets
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Figure 1. The Silverlight-based reservations system provides agents with accurate
flight information. |
the benefit of a brand-new release with no waiting.”
Continental also found that developing in Silverlight allowed it to separate the design process from code development, so the efforts could proceed in parallel. “One of the things I truly enjoyed about working with Silverlight was being able to decouple the business logic from the user interface,” says Mathew. “We didn’t have to wait for the design to be done, and Infusion didn’t have to wait for us to be done. They delivered the XAML files for the interface, and we could integrate them when we were ready.”
Continental expects that the new system will be significantly easier to support and maintain than the previous one. “That is definitely a quantifiable savings for us. We will be able to centralize our servers and databases and bring it all in-house,” says Mathew. “That will make them a lot easier to maintain, and it will save us all the remote service required to keep those machines up and running in the field.”
Adaptable to Low-Bandwidth Situations and Multiple Platforms
Using the asynchronous communication features and data compression available in Silverlight, Continental is finding it easier to work with remote agents and call centers in areas where the broadband infrastructure may not be robust, giving the company more choices in planning its customer service pool. By using Silverlight in conjunction with Internet Information Services 7,
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We’ve taken the approach that any technology we develop must be strategic in nature. That means being at the forefront of new technologies and new solutions to make sure we’re ahead of the curve. |
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Aaron Hynes
Managing Director of E-Commerce Technology, Continental Airlines |
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Continental can take advantage of Smooth Streaming to optimize the data transmission rate for users with low-bandwidth connections or less-powerful computers. The company is also examining the out-of-browser (OOB) application possibilities in Silverlight 3 as an additional tool for overcoming bandwidth and connection difficulties. “Being able to run an application out of the browser also gives it a more professional feel,” notes Mathew. “And it also creates a more consistent experience for users.”
Continental also benefits from the ubiquity of the Silverlight plug-in. Because Silverlight runs on multiple platforms, including Windows®, Macintosh, and Linux, Continental now has even more flexibility when it comes to using remote workers. “We used to have a list of minimum hardware requirements,” says Mathew. “But Silverlight runs on multiple operating systems and browsers, so we can enroll more people in the remote agent program without worrying about those technical issues.”
Decreased Costs and Increased Productivity
By moving to a Web-based reservations system built on Silverlight, Continental can eliminate some of the costs associated with remote agents. “The deployment options that Silverlight provides allow us to make changes in the infrastructure required to support workers at home and around the world,” says Mathew. “And these days anything you can do to save money is really a plus.”
Also, by developing a new system with a more flexible workflow and faster response times, Continental gives all agents a more robust tool with which to do their jobs. With 60,000 calls processed a day, even a small reduction in average call time will result in significant productivity savings. With the new streamlined workflow, agents can spend more of that call time addressing customer needs, rather than interacting with the application.
Powerful Software for Customer Service
Continental has worked very hard to ensure that agents will have a superior user experience. “Our business model has definitely changed since we developed our current reservations system,” says Mathew. “Our call center agents handle a lot more customer support calls. Our new Silverlight-based system gives agents much more flexibility in their workflow within the system. Agent perception is key, and we want them to have a fast, responsive, consistent application.”
Using the capabilities of Silverlight, Continental also is improving the information available to agents during a call. In addition to data entered by the customer through the phone menu, agents can also receive alerts and information about fare specials. With the previous application, customers who had visited continental.com sometimes had more information than the agents did, but the new Silverlight-based system gives agents access to all of the same fare data that is externalized to customers (Figure 1). “We want to make sure every person is informed,” says Ferdy Khater, Staff Vice President of Systems Development at Continental Airlines. “Whether you look at the Web, flip open your cell phone, or call one of our agents, we want to make sure that the customer is always getting the same answer. That instills trust.”
About Microsoft Silverlight
Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web and for mobile devices. Visual Studio® and Expression Blend™ fully support Silverlight for application development. Highlights of Silverlight functionality include:
- Enhanced media display capabilities
- Out-of-browser (OOB) support, allowing Web applications to work on the desktop
- 3-D graphics support, graphics processor unit (GPU) acceleration, and support for the H.264 video format
- Many features to support rich internet application (RIA) development productivity
- Smooth streaming capabilities providing dynamic bitrate optimization to account for bandwidth or CPU limitations
- Browser ubiquity, with support for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux platforms
In order to fully integrate all the .NET developer tools, Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer Express will support a fully editable and interactive designer for Silverlight.
For More Information, and Silverlight resources, visit:
www.microsoft.com/silverlight
www.silverlight.net
Microsoft .NET
Microsoft .NET is software that connects people, information, systems, and devices through the use of Web services. Web services are a combination of protocols that enable computers to work together by exchanging messages. Web services are based on the standard protocols of XML, SOAP, and WSDL, which allow them to interoperate across platforms and programming languages.
.NET is integrated across Microsoft products and services, providing the ability to quickly build, deploy, manage, and use connected, secure solutions with Web services. These solutions provide agile business integration and the promise of information anytime, anywhere, on any device.
For more information about Microsoft .NET, please visit the Web site at:
www.microsoft.com/net
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Infusion Development products and services, call (713) 865-1762 or visit the Web site at:
www.infusion.com
For more information about Continental Airlines services, visit the Web site at:
www.continental.com
