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15%
improvement in average handle time
50%
improvement in customer response time
Industry:
Travel and Hospitality
Business Unit:
Customer Support / Global Contact Centers,
Use Case:
Real-time agent guidance,
Conversation Intelligence,
AI-powered analytics,
Channel:
Voice & Chat
Key Objectives:
Transform guest experience,
Real-time insights on customer contacts,
Free agents to focus on high-value conversations,
Move from anecdotal to data-driven decisions,
Products:
How United Airlines Uses Cresta to Deliver Real-Time Insights, Faster Service, and a More Human Customer Experience
About United Airlines
United Airlines is one of the largest airlines in the world, connecting millions of customers across a global network every year. Behind that scale is a customer support organization charged with one of the most important jobs in the business: being the human voice of United when customers need help, whether that's a routine question or a moment that could define their trip.
That organization is in the middle of a long-term transformation, one focused on rethinking what customer support should look like for the next decade and beyond.
"My team's mission is to look at how do we want to transform our customer support experience to help customers for the next 10 to 20 years," said Rachel Walker, Managing Director of Service Transformation.
Featured in this story:
- Rachel Walker, Managing Director, Service Transformation, United Airlines
- Asif Majeed, Sr. Manager, Global Contact Centers CX, Performance & Analytics, United Airlines
- Brandy Maxwell, Sr. Manager, Customer Insights & Policy Execution, United Airlines
The challenge: An anecdotal view of a real-time business
The customer support center sits in a uniquely valuable position inside United. It's where the company hears, in the most direct way possible, what customers are experiencing.
"The customer support center is extremely valuable because that's where we hear the voice of the customer," Rachel said.
But hearing the voice of the customer and acting on it at scale are two different things. Before Cresta, United's view of what customers were calling about, why, and how the team should respond was largely anecdotal.
"Before Cresta, most of the information that was close to real time was anecdotal," Rachel said. "It really wasn't quantifiable."
That gap lead to real consequences when the business needed to move fast.
"When we had real-time events, we really weren't able to easily get to the information and understand what our customer's needs were so that we could make quick policy decisions that benefited both our customers and United Airlines," said Brandy Maxwell.
At the same time, the agent experience was evolving. As routine inquiries moved into self-service, the calls that did make it to an agent were getting harder.
"As basic transactions are being automated for our customers, our agents are receiving more complex inquiries and requests from our customers," said Asif Majeed.
United needed a way to bring real-time intelligence into both sides of that equation: giving the business a live view of customer needs, and giving agents the tools to handle increasingly complex conversations with confidence.
The solution
United partnered with Cresta to bring AI-powered intelligence into every customer conversation. The deployment spans three connected capabilities working together:
- Cresta Insights and AI Analyst give the Customer Insights and Policy Execution team a real-time view of what customers are saying, what they need, and how the business should respond.
- Cresta Agent Assist gives agents in-the-moment support through hints, auto-summarization, knowledge-based assist, and suggested responses, so they can focus on the customer instead of the system.
- A platform built for transformation, not just a tool, that connects what United is learning from customer conversations to the operational decisions the business makes every day.
Why Cresta
For Rachel, the test of any technology partnership is whether it delivers something the business can actually point to. With Cresta, that answer came quickly.
"I would say Cresta's impact in United Airlines has helped us see that conversational AI is real and we're seeing real results from it," Rachel said. "It's not just smoke and mirrors, it's not just one use case. We've actually seen real results that have had true business impact."
For Asif, the measure is even simpler.
"When I think about Cresta, I think about surpassing the ROI that I had expected," he said.
What's next: more energy, more bandwidth, more human moments
For Rachel and the Service Transformation team, the work isn't just about efficiency. It's about freeing agents to be the part of United that customers remember.
"Because that's what most customers really remember, how somebody made them feel and that connection they had, they felt heard and that somebody was able to solve that for them," Rachel said. "We're trying to give those agents more energy and bigger bandwidth to do those things."
That's the promise behind everything United is building with Cresta: customer experience where agents have the tools to focus on what matters most, and a business that can hear and act on the voice of the customer in real time.
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Results
Cresta Insights and AI Analyst
For Brandy's team, the shift from anecdote to real-time data has been transformational. Customer Insights and Policy Execution can now move from question to answer in minutes, surfacing what customers actually need and feeding that intelligence directly into the decisions United makes every day.
"Cresta has been a game changer for our Insights-to-Action program for a few different reasons. Number one, that we're able to easily get to our customer insights and what their needs are. Number two, that we're able to better understand real-time events and what we need to do to help our customers through those real-time events. And number three, we're able to improve our product based off of the information that we're hearing from both our customers and our agents in the conversations that we're reviewing."
Real-time action on real-time events
The biggest unlock has been the ability to act in the moment. When something is happening in the business, the team can see it, understand it, and respond, instead of waiting for the data to catch up.
"What Cresta has enabled us to do now that we couldn't do before is real-time analytics, real-time insights that we can action on quickly and see the result right away."
Cresta Agent Assist
As customer conversations grow more complex, United is equipping agents with the in-the-moment support they need to handle every call with confidence. The measurable impact has been significant: 15% improvement in average handle time, which translated into a 50% improvement in customer response time, all while raising the quality of the interaction itself.
"Some of the measurable impacts that we have seen since we have deployed Cresta are 15% improvement in handle time, which has led to 50% improvement in customer response time. This is all in addition to less typing, better grammar, and more consistent responses to our customers."
Faster self-service for routine needs
When customer insights revealed a high-volume contact type that didn't actually require an agent, United was able to act on it, building a self-service path that customers actually preferred.
"We saw a 50% reduction in the contacts for that contact type because customers were able to easily go see what they needed to do and make the decision on their own without speaking to an agent."
Decisions backed by real data
Across every team using Cresta, the same shift has played out: decisions that used to lean on assumptions now rest on a real picture of what customers are saying.
"When we moved to Cresta, we were able to stop making assumptions, use real data to understand our customer needs, and then make decisions based off of that real data."
