When Spirit Airlines set out to enhance its Guest Care operations, their mission was clear: gain deeper visibility and more real-time actionability from every Guest conversation.
Spirit Airlines supports agents across seven global contact centers. For this lean but ambitious team, it wasn’t just about switching to a new vendor - it was about finding a partner who could meet them where they were and help them scale smarter.
That partner turned out to be Cresta.
The Challenges: Fragmented Insights and Manual Work
Prior to deploying Cresta, Spirit’s quality assurance (QA) and insights efforts were challenged by numerous manual processes and low coverage.
“We were evaluating a low percentage of total contacts,” Kristle Jones, Guest Care Quality Analyst Manager at Spirit Airlines, explained. “We wanted to be more proactive, and we needed the right tool.”
Understanding Guest sentiment in real time – especially during periods of big change across the company – was difficult.
“We were manually gathering insights from our contact centers and then trying to explain spikes or complaints to the broader business,” Kristle said. “We needed to know up front how people were responding, so we could act faster.”
Stephanie Paterson, Senior Manager of Guest Care Learning & Development and Quality Assurance at Spirit Airlines, added that this lack of visibility came at a cost.
“If you’re getting manual reports, you’re inherently getting a filter from someone with their own opinion about what’s going on. Now, we’re hearing the actual voice of the customer,” she said. “It sounds so cliche, but visibility makes all the difference.”
A Strategic Partner for Fast Transformation
Stephanie remembers exactly what stood out in those first conversations with Cresta.
“What really captured us with Cresta initially was the capabilities,” Stephanie recalled. “The ease with which the analytics were brought to life, it was kind of night and day.”
Spirit had just seven weeks to completely overhaul its quality and insights ecosystem, a timeline most teams would find daunting. While still early in their Cresta journey, Spirit’s results are already reshaping how the team approaches quality and insights. But Cresta made a commitment and delivered on it.
“Cresta understood where we were as a company, where we wanted to go, and the support we were going to require,” Stephanie said. “They took the time to learn our needs, brought in the resources, and made it clear: ‘You guys are not going to be alone.’"
Kristle, who ran point on the Cresta rollout, echoed the importance of that sense of shared ownership.
“It was a new experience for me. We had been doing everything ourselves. When I think of a true partner, I think of someone that shares that load, and that’s exactly what Cresta did.”
Visibility + Automation = Real Impact
One of the biggest early wins for the team was Cresta’s ability to automate and centralize quality evaluation. Scorecards, which used to require significant manual effort just to tune, are now built and refined automatically, freeing up critical resources to focus on strategic improvements.
Beyond QA, Cresta’s Coaching Hub is already reshaping how Spirit supports its agents. For the first time, QA teams, coaches, and supervisors are partnering in one shared workflow.
“Previously, those teams didn’t partner, leading to agents focusing on different criteria, confusion, and ultimately not the best Guest experience.” Kristle said. “Now this allows for cohesive input from all roles, and we have better visibility than we ever had before.”
Spirit has also finally gained the ability to integrate chat data alongside voice, letting them analyze Guest conversations across channels, spot trends, and act quickly.
“This is a huge win for us.” Kristle said.
Beyond ROI: Return on Effort
Efficiency matters, but so does ease of execution. For Stephanie, the real value isn’t just the ROI; it’s what she calls “return on effort.”
“How long are you spending developing or training content? Any effort you put into manual activities is time you’re taking away from other, more strategic activities,” Stephanie explained. “With Cresta, we can do more with less effort.”
Now Spirit’s HQ team spends less time gathering data and more time acting on it.
Want to learn how your team can get real-time visibility into customer conversations like Spirit Airlines? Schedule a demo today.
