How Bluegrass Digital helped Kenya Airways improve their website experience

Kenya Airways’ new website provides improved functionality and a more seamless user experience.  Kenya’s national carrier, Kenya Airways (KQ), recently unveiled its new look website. The site aims to provide visitors with a more user-friendly experience by providing improved navigation and functionality. 

The Booking Experience

The booking experience on the airline’s previous website was hard to navigate and didn’t allow customers to quickly and intuitively find and book the best deals for their destination criteria. Enlisting the help of Bluegrass Digital, a digital solutions company with offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London, they were better able to manage digital activity and customer experience across every touchpoint on the customers’ buying journey. This was done using the Optimizely CMS, an enterprise digital experience platform (DXP) that offers a wide range of functionality including geolocation services, content intelligence and recommendations to the personalization of content based on chosen criteria, A/B testing, search indexing and so much more.

In action, KQ’s new website can identify where a particular user is browsing from and then present them with different promotional banners and content based on deals the airline might be running at the time when the user is planning to travel. In addition, the new website delivers improved search functionality like instant “predictive” search and content recommendations. Another major benefit of the new site is Optimizely’s multilingual and multi-currency functionality, which makes it possible to provide website content to customers based on their language and location.

Bluegrass had to gather information and run extensive fact-finding workshops inorder to deliver level functionality

According to the Bluegrass team, in order to deliver this level functionality, they had to gather information and run extensive fact-finding workshops. This was to ensure that they fully understood the problem they were trying to solve. Bluegrass also analyzed historical customer support data to highlight potential pain points. 

This process revealed that customers didn’t know how to rectify errors when something went wrong while booking a flight and that they weren’t sure who to contact if they needed to communicate directly with airline because the relevant contact information was hard to find. Taking things a step further, they also conducted user interviews and hosted workshops with real customers to identify key challenges and obstacles faced when booking a flight. Furthermore, the Bluegrass team scoped out everything, including all third-party integrations and developed relationships with these third-party stakeholders to ensure that the new website had everything needed for these integrations to run smoothly. Some of these integrations include a calendar widget that gives customers an idea of pricing for their chosen dates before they even hit the Search button. As well as a Google Maps integration, which makes it possible for customers to view the airline’s different destinations on a map and book directly from this map view. 

Based on all the information they collected, Bluegrass created fully interactive and clickable wireframes and prototypes that it put in front of the client and tested out with real customers to find out if its new designs allowed customers to better solve the problems they were struggling with. 

Today, the redesigned website is fast-loading, mobile-friendly, location-intelligent, and more intuitive and interactive. Website performance has improved significantly, bringing a more than 100% increase in load speeds and increasing the rate of conversion. The online booking journey can be started in three different areas on the website – from the homepage, deals page or route planner — and offers a proactive way for customers to confirm their travel requirements.

While it is still early days, Bluegrass and KQ plan to take these learnings further – updating and improving site functionality, including integrating the airline’s new Asante Rewards loyalty programme into the new site design.

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