Southwest Airlines, Director IT Data Enterprise for Customers and Commercials: Pandemic Strengthened Technology Teams, Improving Collaboration

(US and Canada) Ravi Shankar, Senior VP and Chief Marketing Officer, Denodo, talks to France Grenot, Director IT Data Enterprise for Customers and Commercials at Southwest Airlines, about enterprise management, data, and customers. 

Grenot has substantial experience in enterprise architecture. She started her professional career in the airline industry in Europe. She came to the U.S. to support Southwest Airlines in changing its reservation systems around 10 years ago, and later joined the air carrier as an enterprise architect. Director of data for customers and commercials, Grenot handles the airline’s reservations, bookings, and enterprise management, which includes people, finances, and all-around data. She is currently helping airlines employees learn how to access data to better serve their customers. 

Grenot, discussing the pandemic and the challenges faced by the travel industry — particularly the airlines  — emphasizes that those challenges are not entirely over. The first thing they had to consider regarding technology was how they could support Southwest employees at headquarters and call centers. During restrictions, the airlines allowed some new Microsoft products overnight so that teams could collaborate and work remotely.  

She recalls how caring Southwest agents and crews provided excellent, friendly customer service, even when there were only a few passengers on a plane — a time when it would have been easy for the team to lose their smiles. But they never did. That brought about the Southwest salesforce promise launched for customers and employees. The salesforce aligned with their marketing, business, and customer service colleagues and accomplished wonderful things as an agile, core partnership.

"These things made us stronger as a technology team, enabling us to adapt more quickly to what’s going on and collaborate more with colleagues,” So despite a difficult time, it was a great experience, Grenot concludes.

More from Southwest Airlines

• Southwest Airlines, Director, IT Data Enterprise & Customer & Commercial: We are Moving Towards an Event-Driven Architecture