The airline industry experiences both turbulence and opportunity in the face of challenging conditions. For LATAM Airlines, a 2016 merger between industry leaders, Lan Chile and TAM Linhas Aéreas of Brazil, was the path to increasing competitive advantage and strengthening the business against unpredictability.

Just as COVID-19 started, LATAM was focusing their efforts on rebuilding their customer-facing digital platform and realized that the effort was not only technical but cultural. “It has been more than a technological change, it's also been a change in the way that we work and the way people relate,” according to Sergio Cárcamo Jara, Business Expert Digital Marketing at LATAM Airlines. As LATAM redeveloped their platform, they had the opportunity to streamline login and digitally shape the kinds of interactions they wanted customers to have.

30+ Million Profiles Centralized for Simplified Login Experiences

At a technical level, the merger of LAN and TAM meant merging customer databases and unifying the login structure with a centralized source of truth and a single login solution. Prior to 2017, TAM had a third-party identity solution that did not work reliably. LAN used a homegrown solution. Trying to consolidate these two flows surfaced data fragmentation that would be more effective if unified.

“We had two distinct databases before, and now we are creating a third one, which will be the single source of all customer data, centralized and connected in one place,” says Cárcamo. “Until recently, our client databases housed only customer-loyalty program data, but now we have expanded this to include the entire customer and user base, which contains more than 30 million profiles.” 

For LATAM, unifying login experiences was also a priority as a part of maintaining control of their identity system and data. Initially, each product, subproduct, app, and internal application required separate logins, even if data came from the same database. These silos led to a high level of complexity with different interfaces for every app, five different types of encryption being used, and no unified structure for login. 

To be able to distill the login experience and make it work for each user type, whether a loyalty customer, a ticket purchaser, or internal LATAM user, the team needed to bring data together to create a single source of truth. “The implementation of every product that required login was done as a custom job, even if they drew on the same source. Until 2018, there were at least 15 different implementations,” according to Claudio Mattioli, Technical Manager, Globant.

Creating New User Experiences – Up To 30x Faster

With Auth0, the team was able to streamline and control the login experience with Auth0 Rules, gaining the ability to leverage Auth0’s extensibility for future features. “Having Auth0 Rules has helped us to standardize the scheme that is delivered to the user, enabling us to obtain different sources of data and standardizing in a single element,” explains Francisco Gargiulo, Technical Lead, Login Team, LATAM Airlines

In addition, “the Universal Login feature allows us to use our own login design within the Auth0 platform, which enables very fast and immediate deployment,” according to Gargiulo. Likewise, it has now become “simple to develop a new app, including the client login. The difference is, we can stand up a new app in as little as an hour or two – up to 30 times faster.”

Maximizing ROI and Making Customers’ Lives Easier With Auth0

Auth0 was key to making the merger work on a technical level, helping LATAM get the most from uniting the two airlines. Moving forward, they will continue to maximize that ROI and focus on adding more features that make customer experiences better.

“Now that we have our logins with Auth0, we can focus on more identity projects and innovating around ways to make life easier for users, such as applying biometrics, social media, your email or whatever the user wants,” says Juan Escalona, Digital Product Lead, LATAM Airlines.

The data gathering process has been carried out with the highest standards of personal data treatment, making responsible use of the information and ensuring its protection, in compliance with the current regulations of the countries in which LATAM Airlines operates.