Air France-KLM streamlines content operations and omnichannel strategy on Contentstack

At Air France-KLM, the company has a mission to elevate the travel experience, empowering each customer with unparalleled value, convenience, and joy. The business is dedicated to crafting seamless customer experiences that enhance every step of the journey but was challenged by legacy architecture which made it very difficult to personalize the experience, reuse and update content, and streamline digital operations. 

“Because of the complex architecture and our multichannel operations, content management had become a nightmare,” Lydie Rodrigues, Solution Manager for Content, Air France-KLM, said. “To change one word in our content could take up to two weeks, which just wasn’t an acceptable lead time. We wanted to expand the foundation and establish one single source of truth for digital content so that we could apply multi-touchpoint, multi-process reusability.”

Air France-KLM also had a clear vision in mind to establish “TRUC” — Truly Reusable User-centered Content — to support content creators and the business. “We wanted to get to a place where content can be contextualized and personalized, where it can be re-used and displayed across the customer journey,” Rodrigues said. 

Before Contentstack, the business was using multiple CMSes for different brands and wanted to reduce that down to a single source of truth. By researching different products on the market, Contentstack’s headless CMS was chosen because of its future-proof composable architecture, and its customer support — which was immediately head and shoulders above the competition. 

“We want Contentstack to be our single CMS for all places, improving the content experience and streamlining internal operations,” Schipper said. Air France-KLM chose Contentstack’s headless CMS to power all of the content across Air France and KLM websites, including Flying Blue Digital — the company’s B2C loyalty portal, Engineering and Maintenance AF KLM B2B website and Air France KLM Martinair Cargo, handling the transportation of a wide variety of products, from fresh produce and pharmaceuticals to even koalas recently flown to the Netherlands for a famous Dutch zoo.

Contentstack is also used for content across multiple intranet sites. While the migration is still in process, when it is fully complete, all of these brands will be managed in parallel with the same tool, ultimately creating a content Center of Excellence for Air France-KLM.

“We are building fundamentals so that later we can make use of the reusability and granularity of content,” Marije Bijlsma, Manager, Digital Content Team, said. “The focus right now is on getting content into the headless system, and we are maturing the vision and creating a roadmap on how we are going to reuse content and onboard more touchpoints.” 

By adopting Contentstack, Air France-KLM will be able to infuse digital throughout the entire customer journey, with a harmonized strategy for all content across websites, mobile apps, self-service kiosks at the airport, and even on in-flight screens. 

Taking advantage of the composable architecture, Air France-KLM has been able to change the way the business manages and creates content. “We have cut content into smaller pieces, using it like lego pieces to build front-end content,” Rodrigues said. “Thanks to the customized Taxonomy feature, we know what our content is about, for example, we can tag it as sustainable aviation fuel and give it a title and text, and it becomes easy to reuse the content in multiple places.” Reuse helps to avoid outdated or inaccurate content, creating a stronger customer experience. As sustainability is a core pillar of Air France-KLM’s philosophy, Contentstack supports the business in creating less new content and focusing on reusability instead.

Along the way, Air France-KLM has found a real strategic partner in Contentstack’s Technical Solutions and Support teams. "We are in touch with Contentstack support every day, and they are incredibly responsive,” Schipper said. “Either they have the answer immediately, or if it needs more elaboration, we get a rapid follow up — often within an hour or the same day.“ 

Once their migration is complete, Air France-KLM plans to leverage Contentstack to improve personalization across multiple touchpoints, leveraging the TRUC vision to make copy changes, or show or hide specific content to support loyal customers with the content that’s truly relevant to their needs. 

Key wins for Air France-KLM include: 

• From monolith to modular: Content creators are establishing a new mindset for creating, owning and governing content, with the help of robust taxonomy features and headless technology.  
• A single source of content: Air France-KLM are on their way to building a Center of Excellence for content across all touchpoints, with a single database and a consistent view across the organization.

• Simplified content operations: The business has reduced its CMSes down to just one, and started to consolidate channels so that all content comes from Contentstack for a more connected experience and quicker time-to-market. The results are anticipated to have impact on direct business metrics, with projected 50% lower development costs, 20% decrease in service line calls, and 15% reduction in translation costs.