Andrea Halverson

Andrea Halverson is Director of Contact Center Experience & Innovation at Alaska Airlines, where she approaches customer care with a strong bias toward prevention. Her starting point is that a good support experience often begins before a guest ever needs to ask for help.

That thinking was shaped in part by nearly a decade at Amazon, where she worked on contact elimination for Selling Partner Support. At Alaska, she applies the same discipline by treating customer contacts as evidence of friction somewhere else in the journey. The conversation itself matters, but so does the event upstream that made the guest reach out in the first place.

Halverson stays close to those signals. She listens to calls, reads transcripts, and looks for patterns that broad metrics can miss. Some problems are large enough to require sustained work across teams. Others are small irritants that can be removed quickly. She sees value in both, and believes leaders need enough direct exposure to customer conversations to understand what sits behind the numbers.

AI has made that kind of investigation much faster. Through Alaska’s work with Cresta, Halverson can move from curiosity to insight in minutes instead of waiting for a report to answer a specific question. When Alaska changed a baggage fee, she built a dashboard to track guest sentiment almost immediately, giving her a live view of how the change was landing and what customers were saying about it.

She also pays attention to what surfaces around the stated reason for contact. A guest may call about one problem and casually mention another issue with check-in, the onboard experience, or some other part of the trip. Halverson sees those side comments as useful intelligence that can disappear unless someone is actively looking for them. 

When it comes to automation, Halverson thinks straightforward informational needs are good candidates for AI-assisted service, leaving human agents with more time for disruptions and situations that call for judgment. Her broader aim is to keep reducing unnecessary effort while making the remaining customer conversations more useful, both for the guest in the moment and for the teams responsible for improving what comes next.