Carnival Cruise Lines is a recognized leader in the cruise industry, with a fleet of 14 modern ships offering more than 300 cruises to more than 400 ports in 28 countries and territories around the world.
Challenges
Carnival Cruise Line’s website was struggling to support a quality customer experience due to rapid growth and changes among its customers. More than 90 percent of its guests were checking in online using a decade-old web application with an average time to complete the process of 41 minutes. With up to 5,000 guests registering each day, online check-in had become the single largest driver of customer support calls. Another major challenge was the increased use of mobile devices by Carnival Cruise Line’s customers. In just four years, the share of CCL’s website traffic from mobile devices had grown from near-zero to 38 percent. In addition, because of the way the site was built, it was difficult for the IT team to change page designs, modify business rules, or support phone and tablet-based browsers. CCL recognized the need to improve the customer experience on its own website as well as for its luxury sister line, Holland American. The company wanted to make the check-in process easier, faster, and more responsive across all end user medium.
The Solution
CCL hired Akvarr to design and build the new online check-in application. Akvarr provided a Scrum and UI team that worked onsite in collaboration with CCL IT staff and stakeholders. The project was divided into three phases: first, Akvarr analyzed CCL’s complex technology infrastructure to determine the best solution design. Next, we consulted with stakeholders to evolve the responsive design using prototyping tools that allowed for rapid iterations. Finally, the complete application was developed, tested and deployed in a series of two-week sprints. The new online check-in application was delivered as a responsive, scalable, single-page application supported by service layers. To ensure success, our team based its approach on these key factors: an agile, iterative development, interactive prototyping, AngularJS, and RESTful services.
Result
The revamped online check-in was first released on CCL’s website for immediate and positive reviews. Based on the success of the upgraded website, the new app was also rolled out just two weeks later. The cruise line’s call center, prepared to handle a sudden influx of customer calls, instead the launch was determined a non-event for the support team. With an updated UX and responsive design, guests moved easily through the check-in process, with flawless performance.
The benefit of our Angular-based architecture was confirmed again a few weeks later, when CCL deployed new branding across its website. Updating the logo and marketing messages for the entire check-in application was a simple matter of replacing a few image and text files. CCL saw an immediate business impact from the new application in the form of dramatically reduced demand on the customer support desk. Measurable benefits included:
- Calls related to account login dropped by 70% in the first month.
- Issues related to accepting the cruise contract online were reduced by more than 75%.
- The new application almost completely eliminated calls related to the guest check-in process.
