Who is the Client

A US-based company that operates a travel website and offers airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, and vacation packages.

The Challenge

The client’s travel website receives 10+ million unique visitors in a month, 100+ million pageviews, and many new users who create an account every day. The new users often misspell their email IDs while creating an account on the website. Although the website has multiple standard checks to ensure that only valid email IDs are entered, it was still registering invalid email IDs in the system.

The client was facing operational challenges since they were unable to send timely communication to the intended email address. Many customers were not receiving their booking confirmation emails and were reaching out to the client’s customer care number. To address those customer queries, more customer care executives had to be hired, which resulted in increased operational expense.

Also, the client was unable to share timely updates on itinerary changes from its business partners (bus services, airlines, hotels, etc.) to its customers, which was resulting in a bad user experience. They were also facing a challenge in storing and using invalid email IDs, which made the marketing campaigns ineffective, resulting in a budget waste.

The Solution

To address this challenge, we identified Kickbox API as a solution to be integrated for email address verification as it offers easy integration with web forms and marketing automation tools, guarantees 95% deliverability, and is cost-effective.

GSPANN’s team integrated Kickbox API, a third-party email validation service, that validates an email address at the point of capture and prompts a warning message if an email can’t be delivered on the entered ID.

The Kickbox API integration ensures the accuracy of all email addresses when they are captured during an account creation, booking, or alert subscription process. GSPANN finalized the architecture, developed, and tested the new feature, and created a separate service to invoke the Kickbox web service, which is exposed as a wrapper API integration layer.

For the frontend, a reusable component for email validation was created using a two-step validation process. First, it validates email addresses using the client-side validation and then utilizes Kickbox validation. The frontend has extended the existing website’s form components and added a validation capability.

It can be used on various pages across the site and can handle different user interactions based on various use cases. This feature is currently being used in the signup form, email subscription, price alert, and checkout page, and can be easily integrated on other pages in the future.

Business Impact

  • The Kickbox integration is expected to result in approximately $10,000 savings annually that were lost due to bounced emails.
  • The marketing campaign performance improved since all emails are sent only to valid email addresses.
  • The improved user experience enabled the client to capture more business opportunities.

Technologies Used

Languages. Java, JavaScript, React.js, HTML5, and CSS3
Kickbox. A tool to spawn a web server that executes source code against test code for all connected browsers
Spring Boot. An open-source Java-based framework used to create microservices and build stand-alone and production-ready Spring applications
Redis. An open-source Barkeley Software Distribution (BSD)- licensed in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker
Datadog. A monitoring service for cloud-scale applications that monitors servers, databases, and services through a SaaS-based data analytics platform
Splunk. A horizontal technology used for application management, security, compliance, as well as business and web analytics
Mashery. A TIBCO company providing API management services that enable companies to leverage web services as a distribution channel

Related Capabilities

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