Development & Data Visualization
A company with more than 100 sales agents operating in three countries provides global business class travel arrangements.
**Challenges**
**Challenge 1:** Business class agents need immediate access to flight schedules, seat availability, pricing information, and booking options to create competitive offers for clients. This requires a Global Distribution System (GDS) that compiles both private and public fare data from thousands of airlines, travel agencies, and consolidators. With BC utilizing four platforms (Sabre, Apollo, Amadeus, Galileo) for this data and booking functions, they needed a centralized solution that would allow agents to search offers in real-time without navigating between all systems. While some providers, like Sabre, have well-documented APIs, others are less accommodating, offering only their own software or online platforms, resulting in non-standardized data. Our objective was to create a proprietary API system and bots for collecting, scraping, processing, and storing data in a standardized format, visualized through a user-friendly interface in real-time.
**Challenge 2:** BC runs paid marketing campaigns across 14 different networks (including social media, search, and display ads), generating over 100,000 leads each month that remain unprocessed. Aggregating data from all traffic sources along with actual leads and sales figures into a single source was a significant challenge yet essential for business success. Instead of spending months developing our own API and database system (capable of processing over 30 million events per day), we researched and discovered that Funnel.io could serve as a more efficient solution for our clients (20 times cheaper). The first step involved connecting the client's CRM platform (Salesforce) to Funnel via the public API. The second step was setting up each marketing platform to transmit data through the Funnel API. Although we needed to develop basic APIs for some lesser-known traffic sources that Funnel does not currently support, the implementation and testing process took less than two weeks. The next step was integrating Google Analytics with Funnel to gain a clearer understanding of user interactions on the website, particularly for those who do not convert and are thus missing from sales data. With Funnel.io's advanced yet user-friendly visualization tools, we only needed to create a template based on the client's marketing requirements, eliminating the need for manual data manipulation, transformation, or external storage since everything was handled internally.