TELUS Digital 用 ElevenAgents 将新客户 30 天早期取消率降一半以上

TELUS Digital is a global technology service provider and a business entity of TELUS, one of Canada’s largest communications companies, with C$20 billion in annual revenue and 21 million customer connections. Using ElevenAgents, TELUS Digital built an outbound voice agent for its customers, welcoming new home internet customers in their first 90 days. 

Prior to the new agent, TELUS had found that new customers were most likely to cancel before anyone from the company had spoken to them, and outbound capacity for customer care didn’t exist. The digital agent now calls them proactively, explains their first bill, introduces self-serve tools, and prompts customers to claim bundling discounts. Among customers who received a call, 30-day cancellations were less than half the rate of the broader cohort of new customers who had activated. TELUS Digital is also a preferred implementation partner for ElevenAgents.

New internet customers were leaving before anyone had spoken to them

High-speed internet is one of TELUS’ highest-volume consumer products, adding 123,000 net new customers in 2025.

TELUS analyzed the first 90 days after a customer had activated a  residential internet account and found four friction points that compounded into inbound call volume and early churn:

• First bill confusion. Prorated charges for a partial month after customers had activated made the first bill appear higher than expected, driving a high volume of inbound calls.
• Low self-serve adoption. Many customers didn’t know the MyTELUS mobile app and telus.com were available for 24/7 account management.
• DIY install churn. Customers who installed their own equipment without a technician were more likely to leave.
• Missed bundling discounts. Customers with both home and mobile services were missing savings because no one had told them to link their accounts.

Most of these friction points could have been addressed early with a simple check-in call, but the capacity and economics of calling every new customer had proved difficult.

An outbound agent for every new customer, chosen after a structured evaluation

TELUS decided to build an outbound voice agent that would call every newly activated internet customer within their first weeks of service. The agent had to sound natural enough that customers would stay on the line. It also needed to be able to handle several tasks, including multi-step conversations that could branch on the customer’s answers, authenticate the customer and read live billing data mid-call, and meet TELUS’ security and compliance requirements for a customer-facing deployment in a regulated industry.

Between November 2025 and February 2026, TELUS Digital evaluated enterprise conversational AI platforms against five criteria: voice expressiveness and tone, agent framework flexibility for complex outbound flows, real-time emotional modulation, enterprise security and compliance, and response latency. TELUS Digital selected ElevenAgents over other vendors. Its platform produces expressive, natural speech with the low latency needed for an outbound call to feel like a conversation rather than a recording. In addition its agent framework supports branching flows, mid-call tool use, and handoff rules without custom orchestration. 

TELUS Digital also had production evidence to draw on. It had already built its Fuel iX Agent Trainer on ElevenAgents, where new contact center associates rehearse realistic customer conversations before taking live calls. As of June 2026, the platform had completed more than 90,000 simulations and reduced onboarding time by 20%. 

“We went into this pilot with a clear hypothesis: reach new customers early, before any frustration sets in, and you change the trajectory of that relationship,” said Jelena Bajic, Global Vice President, Global Operations Excellence, TELUS Communications. “The results proved it out: Early cancellations cut by more than half, along with very strong customer satisfaction, and our virtual agent connected with the right person at a rate on par with our best outbound agents. What this tells us is that the quality of the interaction matters as much as the timing, and ElevenLabs gave us both.”

A voice agent that discloses itself, authenticates the customer, and acts on live billing data

The agent was designed, integrated, and governed as a single program. Every welcome call follows a structured but conversational flow:

1. Identity confirmation and AI disclosure. The agent greets the customer, confirms their name, identifies itself as an AI, and asks for agreement to continue before any account information is discussed. A customer who declines can end the call at any point.
2. First-bill education. The agent explains prorated charges and sets expectations for future bills.
3. Self-serve setup. The agent introduces MyTELUS and telus.com for account management and bill review.
4. Bundling discount prompt. The agent tells customers with both home and mobile services how to link accounts to claim their discount.

Before ending, the agent shares a troubleshooting tip and collects a satisfaction rating.

The agent is also connected to TELUS’ billing systems. When a customer asks about their bill, the agent sends a one-time SMS passcode, authenticates the customer without leaving the call, and retrieves live account details through a verified API connection. ElevenAgents grounds its responses in the data returned, so the agent states only figures drawn from that source. If verification fails or data is unavailable, it directs the customer to self-serve channels rather than guessing.

The same framework enforces the program’s governance rules. The agent ends the call if the customer declines to continue. If there are account changes that need to be discussed, complex troubleshooting, or the customer requests to speak to a person, they are routed to TELUS team members rather than handled by the agent.

Lower early churn, high satisfaction, and a six-week launch 

During the initial proof of concept, the agent handled roughly 2,300 outbound calls. The results were auspicious:

• 30-day cancellations were less than half the rate of the broader new internet activation cohort among customers who received a welcome call.
• C$55,000 in lifetime revenue was retained per 1,000 customers connected with the agent.
• Customers rated the calls 8.5 out of 10 on average.
• The agent reached the right party on 19% of calls, consistent with TELUS’ top-performing outbound team members.
• The agent was built and live in approximately six weeks from initial vendor engagement to its first customer call. This time included security review, API integration, conversation design, voicemail scripting, and the governance and privacy review.

“Our team is now freed up to do the work that actually requires them: the complex problem-solving, the moments where a person and real judgment make all the difference. That’s not a compromise. That’s the strategy,” Bajic said.

What started as a proof of concept has become the foundation of TELUS’ proactive care roadmap, with five additional use cases now in active development. To learn more about building outbound voice agents, explore ElevenAgents.