Air India today announced a major technology upgrade and design refresh to its website www.airindia.com, with the objective of providing its domestic and global customers with an easy-to-use, informative digital channel. The significant experience redesign of the website was planned and executed by Air India’s in-house design and content teams based in Kochi and Gurugram in India and Silicon Valley in the USA. The experience management, digital marketing, analytics and personalisation technology upgrades rolled out on the airline’s website are expected to contribute to a significant improvement in customer experience. This will also lead to an increase in the aggregate value and share of direct-channel revenues for the airline while contributing to the airline’s efforts to provide customers with efficient pre and post-flight support.
Air India’s Vihaan.AI transformation program envisions a rapid increase in the airline’s customer base driven by improvements in operational efficiencies across the board and a significant fleet expansion made possible by the airline’s historic order of 470 new aircraft. The airline’s website is a key component of serving this burgeoning customer base effectively and thereby increasing its direct-channel revenues. The technology re-platforming of the website will enable the rapid rollout of new customer-friendly features which was not possible with the two-decades-old technologies used earlier. It is also expected to lead to user-perceptible improvements in the performance of the website in areas ranging from time-to-load to perceived response time while making the website accessible to users with vision or hearing disabilities. Since nearly two-thirds of the airline’s website traffic comes from mobile devices, the website is designed to be mobile-friendly, accessible, and as intuitive on the smaller screens of mobiles as it is on a computer. The company has applied its ‘cloud-only’ principle to its website, with no on-premise components in the system’s architecture.
“In our mission to digitally delight our customers at every touchpoint, our website plays a central starring role. It is an important medium using which we share our products with customers, help them get inspired by the destinations we serve, book their journeys with ease, and provide outstanding pre-flight and post-flight service. In our quest for the best technological solutions for building our website and the associated suite of digital marketing tools, we have deployed a set of comprehensive and well-integrated set of solutions from the world’s best technology companies that we believe will bring to life the beautiful designs of our in-house designers and provide a pleasing and easy-to-use digital channel for our valued customers,” said Air India’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer, Dr. Satya Ramaswamy. “This website upgrade we have launched now is just the first in a series of design, content and feature improvements we have planned for the coming months that will culminate in what we believe will be a clear global leadership position for Air India’s digital direct channels,” he added.
Coinciding with the launch of the new website is the change of Air India’s URL to www.airindia.com This change from the earlier ‘.in’ domain URL is consistent with the ambition of the airline to transform into a truly global airline based in India that attracts travellers from countries and cultures around the world. Along with the technology and design upgrade of its website, Air India has also implemented a minor design refresh of its mobile app. The company is working on a major upgrade to its mobile app that is expected to go live towards the end of the year.
