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Delivering better experiences in the largest loyalty program in Brazil

The Smiles travel platform and loyalty program enable seamless experiences for users, robust content management for the internal team, and great integration capabilities.
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Logo
100+
Service partners
15M+
CUSTOMER
28M+
MONTHLY PAGEVIEWS
46%
CONVERsION RATE ON PERSONALIZED SHOWCASE
Outline
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Key Takeaways

  • Autonomy for non-technical teams. Several content publications and promotions, already prepared for mobile devices, are published daily both by digital agencies that provide services to Smiles and by the Marketing team, making them less dependent on the IT team.
  • Consistent user experiences. Customers can now browse the Smiles website on any mobile device or web platform with the same standard of experience and visual appeal. 
  • A robust portal. The integration capabilities of the Liferay platform have elevated the site to the next level, connecting to the company's CRM, providing a solution for user authentication (Auth0), and utilizing machine learning for the recommendation of personalized offers.

Background

Smiles is GOL's loyalty program, with the most comprehensive travel platform in Brazil. With more than 25 years of history and more than 15 million customers, the company has also been operating in Argentina since 2019. In addition to GOL, 60+ airlines that fly together to more than 1,600 destinations are part of the program. 

Smiles offers opportunities for all customers to travel more and provides various ways to accumulate miles practically and safely, using miles as a connecting link with users. To this end, the program brings together around 100 partners from the world of tourism, entertainment, and retail, from banks and credit card companies to the main retailers in Brazil, hotels, car rental, experiences, insurance and gas stations, and more. 

Challenges

After their IPO, Smiles needed to adapt operations to meet growing demand due to the increased investment and consolidation of the program.The sheer size of the portal meant that it needed new technology to cope with the high volume of visits during promotional periods. 

Although Smiles had existing tools they could have made work, the complexity of managing different software and solutions would have required more time and effort from the Smiles team while still not offering better customer experiences. 

Desafios

Smiles wanted a new solution that would:
  1. Respond quickly to market demands
  2. Allow internal content updates in an agile and consistent manner 
  3. Support additional portal traffic during peak periods and keep it stable
  4. Deliver better user experiences, whether logged in or not, on desktop devices or smartphones
Our old platform no longer met Smiles' needs. The partnership with Liferay provided the agility, practicality, systems integration, and stability we were looking for.
Nei Henckes,
Technology director | smiles

Implementation

Differentiating factors in Liferay's digital experience platform, Liferay DXP, were decisive in achieving the Loyalty Program's transformation process, such as compatibility with the cloud, Liferay's powerful CMS, high customization and integration power through the robust headless layer of the Liferay platform, and the management and creation of digital experiences for users. 

The development and implementation of the project took a total of five months. The project was developed with a service-based integration architecture, integrating with Service Bus, which would allow the scheduling and purchase of tickets for several other airlines around the world. 
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Results

The new Smiles Portal hosted on Liferay DXP allows customers to buy air tickets, request points, check their mileage balance, find their history, and complete other tasks. From 2017 to 2023, the portal has received 28 million monthly pageviews (approximately 10 times more than in the previous portal) and more than 5 million monthly sessions, positively impacting the revenue generated and the relationship with the end customer.

And that's not all. The new site has provided:
  1. Greater stability at times of peak access, providing a more consistent experience for everyone.
  2. New UX for customers with a consistent experience for logged-in and non-logged-in users and a natural transition between public and private areas of the portal.
  3. A robust CMS to give non-technical teams autonomy to publish and manage content throughout the site.
  4. Flight search for users not yet logged in, overcoming a limitation of the previous technology platform.
  5.  A recommendation window with personalized product and service offers according to the customer's profile based on integration with machine learning. This change has resulted in a 46% increase in the conversion rate. 
  6. Integration with Auth0 for user and login authentication and the company's CRM platform. IT is now more agile, improving go-to-market times.