Rachel Walker

Rachel Walker is Managing Director of Service Transformation for Customer Support & Advocacy at United Airlines, where she brings more than 15 years of experience spanning digital commerce, service technology, and customer support.

“I want my customers to stop starting over,” Walker says. 

Travelers still move between apps, chat, and phone support only to find themselves explaining the same problem again. Her work focuses on carrying context across those interactions so the next agent understands what has already happened and can spend less time reconstructing the issue and more time resolving it.

She approaches automation in a similar way. While experimenting with multimodal self-service, Walker found that even digitally confident travelers can want someone to “hold their hand” when a trip goes wrong. Right after, United has explored combining conversational automation with visual guidance to make self-service more helpful while giving travelers a clear path to human support when they need it.

Walker also sees the contact center as one of her clearest windows into what customers need. “That’s where we hear the voice of the customer,” she says. 

With Cresta, United has moved beyond relying on anecdotes about why people call and toward real-time conversation analytics that reveal recurring needs, friction in policies or digital experiences, and whether a change solves the problem. Those insights have informed product and self-service improvements, including one redesign that reduced live contacts for a particular inquiry by 50%.

Walker implements AI and looks for evidence of real customer and business impact, rather than what she has called “smoke and mirrors.” United now uses AI to surface conversation insights and give agents real-time assistance, summaries, and relevant information during interactions, with reported improvements of 15% in average handle time and 50% in customer response time. 

For Walker, automation should take on work that no longer requires human attention, context should follow the traveler across the journey, and every customer conversation should make the experience better. That leaves agents with more capacity for the moments that depend on judgment, reassurance, and someone who can solve the problem.