Helloworld + Magnolia
How Magnolia helped Helloworld move from maintenance mode to building great customer experiences
About the customer
Helloworld Travel Limited is a travel distribution company headquartered in Australia that provides international and domestic travel products and services to clients worldwide. With significant retail travel brands, including Helloworld Travel – the Travel Professionals, HLO has more than 2,378 members in Australia and New Zealand across its retail networks. This scale and variety inevitably lead to complex content requirements.
MIS Studio
Magnolia Implementation Specialists (MIS) is a team of dedicated professionals and architects serving up pure Magnolia CMS implementation, integration, front-end & back-end services, and best-practice consultancy with respect to the entire digital experience ecosystem.
Challenges:
- Limited functionality: Their monolithic DXP lacked core modern functionality such as personalization
- Cost: The licence and implementation costs to update their sites to the new version of their DXP would have jeopardised the project’s ROI
- Usability: Helloworld’s editors were unhappy using the core interface of their site’s existing DXP and didn’t feel that the new versions offered a substantial improvement.
- Integrations: The nature of the travel industry means that their sites had to support many integrations to suppliers’ APIs, eg. for flight bookings
Benefits:
- Functionality: With Magnolia, Helloworld has the tools it needs to compete both today and in the future, including personalisation
- Flexibility: Powerful multi-site capability supports a range of microsites for each of their agencies, empowering them to build better digital customer experiences
- Usability: In Magnolia’s unified authoring experience, branches can create themselves, increasing the speed of delivery and decreasing the need for central IT support
- Value: Not only was Magnolia cheaper than their current implementation, DXCloud infrastructure means that they no longer need to dedicate resources to routine development and admin operations
- Implementation: Helloworld was able to migrate to Magnolia in only three months, which saved even more costs by sunsetting their site’s former DXP solution sooner than expected
The Challenge
When Helloworld implemented its DXP in the early 2010s, all sites and agent stores were managed by the Helloworld head office. This meant that they weren’t able to give individual agents the freedom they wanted over their own microsites.
However, the Covid pandemic had a huge impact on Helloworld in terms of personnel, priorities, and funding. As they worked to improve their digital customer experience, they found their old DXP was a major roadblock. The huge costs of maintaining it and keeping it secure had limited their ability to implement new features or be as customer-focused as they wanted to be.
“Magnolia not only gave us more tools at a lower price, but finally gave us the flexibility to support over 2,300 independent agents to create unique and engaging microsites that let them stand out. It's not an upgrade; it’s a game-changer.”
The Result
After a thorough evaluation process, Helloworld found that Magnolia not only offered more functionality and flexibility than their existing system, but it also lowered their licensing costs and greatly increased their ROI. In addition, they were able to migrate their content in only three months.
“Switching DXP is a daunting prospect, but Magnolia’s technology and expertise meant we could migrate in only three months. Now it’s done, we have a long-term platform to keep improving what we deliver for our customers.”
