InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
August 9, 1999
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John Samuel, VP of marketing and former managing director of interactive marketing at American, says the airline considered building its own relationship-management system in 1997, when the project was conceived. But it opted for BroadVision's solution primarily because the vendor's One-To-One product line was already in its third release in a very young market.
Additionally, BroadVision had prior experience with the back-end integration of large legacy systems, and American wanted the new customer-relationship management system integrated with its Sabre flight- reservation system and its IBM DB2 database, which houses information about members of its AAdvantage frequent flier program.
Since the system was introduced, traffic on the site has increased five-fold to 1.7 million visitors per week, and is still climbing by about 200,000 visits per week. American forecasts online gross sales of $500 million this year.
BroadVision's One-To-One Enterprise is a midtier database-management suite of commerce applications that lets users design a Web site and create content; define in real time the customer segments, business rules, and incentives that will govern merchandising on a site; create, classify, and update site information; and cross-sell or up-sell based on customer information, such as previous purchases, items being purchased, and communities to which they belong.
Samuel gave BroadVision high marks for systems integration and on the fundamental engine driving their applications, but says the product has weaknesses BroadVision needs to address. "BroadVision focused out of the gate on the logic that allows you to apply business rules on the fly and build pages dynamically," Samuel says. "That's a hard thing to do, but once you have that capability, you find that's actually not the hard part. The back-end business processes are the hard part."
Content management, for instance, becomes even more difficult on a personalized Web site because, in essence, it's no longer one homogenous site. "You have a bunch of little sites and as much segmentation as you choose to do," Samuel says. "Managing that information becomes a lot more difficult."
It's a task that one department can't handle alone. To deliver personalized views of American Airlines based on the needs of AAdvantage members requires input from throughout the company. In part, the problem is an internal challenge that can be solved only by inspiring different departments to contribute information to the Web site. That's getting easier as the site continues to be successful, Samuel says. But a stronger back end from BroadVision would make it easier for the rest of the company to contribute content.
Photo of Samuel by Steve McAllister
American's AAdvantage
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When American Airlines Inc., an old-timer in the world of Web-site personalization, revamped its site last summer, it wanted to use information on its 35 million frequent fliers stored in an existing database to make the site more personalized. The airline turned to BroadVision's relationship-management platform, which runs on Sun Solaris, HP-UX, or Windows NT.
The surge in traffic is attributable to a variety of accomplishments, Samuel says, but anecdotal evidence suggests the personalization tools have been a factor in the traffic growth. "When we talk to customers about personalization, they say they like it and wish we would do more of it," he says. "We consider ourselves in the very early stages of learning how to capitalize on this capability and give customers the best experience, but even the attempts we've made so far have been very well received."
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