Powering Real-Time Personalization with a CDP for a Global Airline

About Client:

A major international airline with millions of passengers, operating a complex global network. The brand focuses on delivering seamless, personalized experiences across booking, travel, and loyalty touchpoints.

Background:

In a competitive aviation market, loyalty depends on personalized engagement. Despite valuing customer insight, the airline’s siloed data, across bookings, loyalty, and app interactions hindered personalization. Without a unified view, segmentation was basic, and communications remained generic, missing key upsell and relationship-building opportunities.

Challenge:

  • Siloed Customer Data: Key information was fragmented across operational, loyalty, and marketing platforms.
  • Inconsistent Identifiers: Duplicate customer profiles and mismatched IDs hindered unified tracking.
  • Slow Activation: Batch-driven processes made it difficult to respond to customer behavior in real-time.
  • Basic Segmentation: Limited to static attributes like demographics or historical purchases.
  • Lack of Personalization at Scale: Mass campaigns led to low engagement and missed opportunities.
  • Poor ROI Visibility: Without clear segment-level insights, personalization efforts couldn’t be properly measured.

These issues were not just technical, they directly impacted revenue, customer retention, and brand experience.

Solution:

Phase 1: Data Unification & Identity Resolution

  • Ingested real-time and batch data via Kinesis, Glue, and S3
  • Resolved identities using graph-based matching with Amazon Neptune
  • Established a unified customer data lake

Phase 2: Segmentation & Profile Enrichment

  • Created 360° profiles using Redshift/Athena
  • Enriched profiles with ML models (e.g., churn risk, next-best offer) via SageMaker
  • Stored segments in DynamoDB for low-latency access

Phase 3: Real-Time Personalization & Activation

  • Used Lambda to activate journeys in real-time
  • Delivered recommendations via Amazon Personalize
  • Orchestrated multi-channel comms with Pinpoint and SES
  • Integrated segments into existing martech tools via APIs

Analytics & Governance Layer (Cross-Cutting)

  • Amazon QuickSight provided real-time dashboards for campaign performance and segment insights.
  • AWS Lake Formation ensured secure, role-based access to unified customer data.

Phase 4: Ongoing Optimization

  • A/B testing and continuous model training via SageMaker.
  • Incorporation of new signals (e.g., customer sentiment, NPS).
  • Expansion to customer service and mobile personalization use cases.

Outcome:

  • Unified, 360° real-time customer profiles across all digital and physical touchpoints.
  • Instant creation of AI-powered segments like high-value flyers, churn risks, and dormant users.
  • Dynamic personalization of emails, app alerts, and on-site offers based on real-time behavior.
  • Improved campaign performance with higher open and click-through rates, reduced spend, and stronger ROI.
  • Significant uplift in ancillary sales through personalized cross-sell and upsell offers.
  • Service agents deliver more relevant and empathetic support with full access to customer history.

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