Southwest Airlines® runs end-to-end on Agentforce Service

Collaboration slowed by silos

Southwest Airlines®' core value centers on putting others first and treating everyone with respect. Their 73,000 employees bring that philosophy to life daily, from airport gate agents and flight attendants to corporate sellers and contact center reps. With more than 60,000 employees working away from a desk, essential information was often scattered across emails, text messages, CRM systems, and individual applications, making it harder to keep employees informed and aligned.

The same fragmentation affected customer-facing teams. Service reps often left their consoles to consult others, while the information needed to support travelers lived in CRM systems, individual applications, and emails.

Southwest saw an opportunity to give teams a shared view of customer, employee, and business information so they could spend less time searching and more time serving travelers.

One workspace for multiple teams

Today, Southwest runs customer and employee travel service and self-service on Salesforce's Headless 360 Platform, with Agentforce Service serving as the operational hub that connects every experience. Employees work from the same view of each traveler, following customer interactions from booking through post-trip.

“Technology should help employees focus on serving customers, not navigating systems," said Stephen Berkowitz, Senior Manager, Customer Technology. "Salesforce helps bring together information from across our technology landscape, making it easier for employees to deliver the level of service and hospitality our customers expect.”

For service reps, that means a single console with booking details, loyalty information, previous cases, and AI-generated call and case summaries, giving every rep the full story if a case changes hands. 

The same platform also powers customer self-service, employee support, and Southwest Business Assist™, where corporate travel managers can manage contracts, discounts, travel benefits, and bookings without calling a rep.

Connected by a common data layer

Agentforce Service combines information from more than 10 operational systems into a shared workspace:

• Enterprise systems: Booking information, employee data, and aircraft maintenance data flow in from third party systems.
• Operational data: Real-time flight information, booking history, loyalty activity, delays, and cancellations flow through Southwest's integrated data foundation from third-party data lakes and other enterprise systems.
• Experience Cloud: Powers the Help Center, where travelers chat with Agentforce, Southwest Business Assist™ for corporate customers, and the Employee Service Center for HR self-service. When a request requires a rep, the conversation flows into Agentforce Service, where the customer context is summarized to set the rep up for success.
• Full CRM context: Agentforce Service surfaces commercial activity from Agentforce Sales alongside every case, giving service teams the same customer and account information sellers use to manage accounts, contacts, leads, marketing engagement, and opportunities across B2B and B2C relationships.
  
  Behind the scenes, Data 360 ingests approved knowledge content and Enhanced Chat – the messaging experience connecting conversations from Southwest's website and mobile app to Agentforce Service. Conversation transcripts and metadata from previous interactions help ground their customer service agent in the same trusted information used across Southwest.

Better context, better outcomes

By bringing the information employees need into one workspace, Southwest has reduced the time teams spend switching between systems and made everyday interactions easier to manage.

Self-service portals integrated with Agentforce Service have reduced case creation by 40%, allowing more customers and employees to resolve common requests without contacting a human. Southwest's employee experience has also reduced  administrative work for the HR team by making internal information easier to access.

With more resources at their fingertips, employees can work faster and focus more of their time on delivering better customer interactions.