British Airways regains platform stability and unifies data sources for a 360° customer view
British Airways’ CPM platform struggled to keep up with data demands, causing performance bottlenecks, unplanned downtime, and poor visibility into customers across key touchpoints.
Showoff’s in-depth review of the platform offered technical expertise, architectural improvements, and database optimisations to streamline development and free up customer data.
With unified data sources, stabilised performance, and enriched customer data sets, British Airways now has a 360° view of customers to guide marketing, prioritise product developments, and provide a great experience for passengers.
Created a comprehensive report with new technical standards
Stabilised system performance and availability
Unified data sources for a 360° customer view
“[Showoff’s] senior resources have been integrated into the internal team here in BA. They are trusted advisors in dealing with highly technical data issues to create a 360 view of our customers.”
— David Watson, Head of CRM Transformation, British Airways
Outages compounded? Flights grounded.
Flying 45+ million people from A to B isn’t all comfy seats and in-flight snacks for British Airways (BA). Behind the scenes, BA’s Customer Profile Manager (CPM), responsible for customer details and flight bookings, was overwhelmed by a continuous flow of new customer data.
At best, customers were locked out of BA’s platform or couldn’t complete bookings – and in severe instances, flight details were completely lost.
Compounding the issue, BA’s service team was slow to respond to complaints because customer information was stored across dozens of disconnected systems, often with different or conflicting details.
BA needed help, and fast. Reaching out to Salesforce, BA was referred to Showoff.
Delivering a flight plan for BA
To understand the extent of BA’s CPM issues, Showoff assembled a team of internal and third-party architects and developers to analyse BA’s infrastructure, databases, data-intensive applications, cloud spend, and knowledge silos.
This involved putting experts at the centre of BA’s operations to find out what was working, what needed improvement, and the steps needed to boost performance and resolve technical issues. “[Showoff’s] senior resources have been integrated into the internal team here in BA,” explains David Watson, Head of CRM Transformation, British Airways.
Based on the technical review, Showoff and the team formed a plan to improve the architecture, code, and processes of BA’s CPM by centralising its data. Showoff produced a comprehensive 70-page report outlining suggested fixes and providing direction on new technical standards like code conventions, quality and assurance, dev ops, and more.
“... [Showoff] really helped us start optimising our back-office systems and untangling the data mess that it’s created,” says David.
A first-class customer experience
Showoff helped British Airways regain stability and performance from its mission-critical CPM system by reconciling disparate datasets and removing unnecessary data environments — for a single source of truth.
With all data now available in one centralised location, the services team has all the contextual information it needs to respond to and resolve customer queries fast.
On the operations side, after analysing cloud infrastructure costs, the team identified maintenance, performance, and data lifecycle tweaks that had the potential to cut operating expenses by 30% annually.
And other teams are now making the most of BA’s new data-enabled approach, too. Showoff’s efforts have enabled the BA marketing team to introduce personalised promotions to attract new flyers and re-engage past customers.
Now, from booking to baggage claim, every customer touchpoint is a new opportunity to provide an exceptional experience.