Industry:
Travel and Hospitality
Business Unit:
Guest Care / Contact Center,
Use Case:
Real-time agent guidance,
Conversation insights,
Coaching & onboarding,
Channel:
Voice & Chat
Key Objectives:
Real-Time Insights,
Agent Assistance,
Onboarding & Coaching,
Guest Experience,
Products:
How Alaska Airlines delivers fast, caring service at scale with Cresta
About Alaska Airlines
Alaska Airlines is in the middle of one of the most ambitious transformations in its 90+ year history. With Cresta, the airline is using AI to improve the guest experience at every layer: identifying why customers are reaching out as needs emerge, giving agents real-time guidance to resolve issues with confidence, and analyzing conversations at scale to uncover where the business should coach teams, automate support, or remove friction from the journey. The result is a more responsive customer experience, one where every conversation becomes same-day insight Alaska can use to better serve its guests.
Featured in this story:
- Todd Traynor-Corey, VP, Guest Products & Experience, Alaska Airlines
- Lori Bradshaw, Managing Director of Guest Care, Alaska Airlines
A legacy of innovation, now serving a global guest
Alaska Airlines has always been known for its innovation. From its roots as a regional carrier to its expansion into a global gateway out of Seattle, the airline has built its reputation on doing things differently, and doing them well.
That spirit of reinvention is exactly what made this moment so consequential.
"We're embarking on something that's never been done before, and so it's a time for tremendous change for our guests and for our employees," said Todd Traynor-Corey, VP of Guest Products & Experience at Alaska Airlines.
New aircraft, new destinations, new partnerships, and a rapidly-expanding international network meant the team needed to rethink how they support guests through every interaction.
The contact center sits at the heart of that experience.
"Our contact center is a critical part of delivering a great guest experience at Alaska Airlines," said Lori Bradshaw, Managing Director of Guest Care at Alaska Airlines. "We sometimes are the very first contact that a guest has with us as an organization, and so it's critical that we give them a great place to start in that caring experience to be successful in their travels."
The challenge: Caring service at the speed of change
When a business is transforming this quickly, the questions guests are asking change quickly too. Policies shift. New routes launch. Booking flows evolve. Every change ripples into the customer experience within hours.
The team needed a way to do three things at once:
- Understand what guests were calling about, in real time, not weeks later.
- Equip agents with the right knowledge in the moment, so they could deliver fast, accurate answers without digging through multiple systems.
- Onboard and continuously develop a growing agent population, including a wave of new hires, with the kind of coaching that actually moves the needle.
Without that, the risk was friction. And in travel, friction is the thing every guest is trying to avoid.
The solution
Alaska chose Cresta because the end-to-end platform connects the three things the team needed most: real-time conversation insights, in-the-moment agent assistance, and coaching that scales.
"Leveraging new technology like Cresta helps us really understand, number one, how can we ensure that our guests navigate these changes in a way that allows them to have a great travel experience," Todd said. "But two, really understand what we can do to provide our employees with the right tools and insights just in time to support our guests as they need help and support throughout that interaction."
Why Cresta
Alaska chose Cresta because the platform connects the three things the team needed most: real-time conversation insights, in-the-moment agent assistance, and coaching that scales.
"Leveraging new technology like Cresta helps us really understand, number one, how we can ensure that our guests navigate these changes in a way that allows them to have a great travel experience," Todd said. "But two, really understand what we can do to provide our employees with the right tools and insights just in time to support our guests as they need help and support throughout that interaction."
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Results
Cresta Insights
The most immediate change has been visibility. With Cresta listening to every conversation, Alaska can now spot emerging issues in real time, not weeks later, and respond the same day. The team can also measure how every change they roll out is landing with guests, giving them a new way to understand the guest experience as it unfolds.
"I think the most exciting thing is being able to see in real time why guests are contacting us. There've been numerous examples of that where, literally almost instantaneously, we saw that something was changing, and we were able to that same day get it resolved really quickly. Prior to Cresta, it would've taken us weeks to even identify that there was an issue, and then weeks after that to really pull the insights and the data to kind of articulate what the problem was. So I think that's truly remarkable."
Cresta Agent Assist
Agents now have the information they need when they need it, instead of toggling between systems while a guest waits on the line. Real-time guidance helps the team deliver faster, more customized answers on every interaction, raising both the speed and the quality of service guests receive.
"It's really important that we can deliver fast and customized service to our guests, and I see this as a big enabler in order to do that. They're going to be able to get to the information they need quickly and accurately without having to dig through multiple sources of data. It will really help them improve their quality of answers as well as their speed of answers."
Cresta Coach
With a growing agent population, the team needed a faster, more consistent way to onboard new hires and continuously develop the broader team. Cresta's AI-driven coaching gives managers the visibility and tools to focus their development time where it matters most.
"The coaching capability is going to be really good for our organization, because I think there's always ways that we can better provide support to our agents and get them what they need to continuously improve. We have a lot of new agents right now, and so tools like this can really help us get them on board more quickly and get them up to speed as they move forward."
Real-time response to a changing business
Beyond any single product, the biggest shift for Alaska has been operational. The team can now measure the guest impact of business changes the moment they go live, and adjust course in real time, instead of waiting weeks for the data to catch up.
"We are also able to, in real time, understand how changes that we're making, how they are impacting the guests. And we're using those insights to really understand the guest experience in a different way than we've ever done before."
