Heathrow is the UK’s primary international hub, Europe’s busiest airport, and the world’s most connected, serving 84 million passengers in 2025.

Challenge

Heathrow were looking to replace their existing telephony solution with a state-of-the-art offering from Amazon Connect.  The solution needed to support their customer service team with direct integration through to Salesforce. It should enable opportunities to improve the customer experience and operational efficiency.

What we did

Alscient built a solution using Service Cloud Voice with Partner Telephony from Amazon Connect with generative AI capabilities further provided by Agentforce.

We initially worked with Heathrow on the refinement of the user stories and provided a technical design which explained how the requirements would be met. Following sign-off of the technical design we then built out the required functionality over a series of delivery sprints. After each sprint a Show & Tell session was held that demonstrated the capability and provided a mechanism to incorporate feedback.

Following build, the solution underwent system testing and then training was provided on usage of the solution. UAT support was then provided to fully ensure the system fully met internal requirements. Following successful completion of UAT, the solution was promoted to the live environment and their existing customer service teams switched across onto the new telephony platform.

Results

The solution was delivered over a four-month period and the following key benefits have been realised.

Free-form flight information lookup via natural language   
Callers can ask questions in plain language (e.g. “can you tell me the gate BA123 departing today is leaving from”), with Agentforce interpreting intent and retrieving real-time flight data via APIs brokered through Agentforce, removing the need for rigid IVR menus.

Improved call routing through contextual intelligence
Service Cloud Voice surfaces relevant customer context directly to agents reducing transfers and automatically allowing the agent to see past customer call history.

Caller context is maintained which aids call escalation
When escalation is required, the full conversation context (flight query, caller intent) is available in Salesforce, eliminating the need for callers to repeat themselves and for customer service agents to switch between applications.

Improved passenger experience during peak times
During peak times, passengers can quickly obtain relevant flight and airport information without waiting for an agent to be available, improving customer satisfaction.

Scalable, API-driven architecture
Integration with partner systems allows the solution to scale and adapt as services evolve.

Improved the IVR

We made key changes to the IVR to help the customer find the information they needed as well as making sure the customer could get to the right team if they were unable to self-serve.

Key Benefits
Key benefits included a robust cloud hosted contact centre solution which now enables Heathrow to manage the technology solution in-house. The solution also provides greater flexibility with simplified maintenance and improves the agent experience by being able to surface calls directly in Salesforce. The Amazon Connect solution also provides the basis for being able to take advantage of generative AI capabilities across AWS and Salesforce to further improve the customer experience.