TELUS Digital, a subsidiary of Canadian telecommunications group TELUS, deployed an outbound voice agent designed with ElevenAgents to call new residential internet customers during their first 90 days. According to the company, called customers cancel their 30-day subscription at a rate half that of all newly activated customers.
TELUS, with annual revenue reaching C$20 billion and 21 million customer connections, presents high-speed internet as one of its most in-demand consumer products, with 123,000 net new customers in 2025. By analyzing the first 90 days after account activation, the company identified four friction points that fueled both incoming calls and early cancellations.
Cancellations Before Any Contact
The first point concerns the first bill. The pro-rated charges for a partial month after activation make it appear higher than expected, generating a high volume of calls. Second point: low adoption of self-service tools, with many customers unaware that the MyTELUS mobile app and telus.com allow them to manage their account at any time. Customers who installed their equipment themselves, without a technician, were also more likely to leave. Finally, customers with both a fixed internet and mobile subscription were missing out on bundled discounts, having not been informed of the possibility to link their accounts.
TELUS believes most of these issues could have been addressed early with a simple follow-up call, but the necessary capacity and cost of systematically calling every new customer remained difficult to bear.
A Voice Agent for Every New Customer
The company chose to develop an outbound voice agent tasked with calling each newly activated customer in the first weeks of service. Between November 2025 and February 2026, TELUS Digital evaluated several conversational AI platforms based on five criteria: voice expressiveness and tone, flexibility of the framework for complex outbound journeys, real-time emotional modulation, security and compliance, and response latency. ElevenAgents was selected. TELUS Digital, which had already built its Fuel iX Agent Trainer tool on this platform, where new advisors train with realistic conversations, states that over 90,000 simulations had been conducted as of June 2026, resulting in a 20% reduction in onboarding time.
Jelena Bajic, Global Vice President, Global Operations Excellence at TELUS Communications, summarizes the goal: “We started from this hypothesis: reach new customers early, before frustration sets in, and you change the trajectory of that relationship.” She adds: “The quality of the interaction matters as much as the timing, and ElevenLabs gave us both.”
Identification, Authentication, and Live Billing Data
Each call follows a structured but conversational flow. The agent confirms the customer’s identity, introduces itself as an AI, and asks for consent before discussing anything regarding the account; a customer who refuses can end the call at any time. It then explains the pro-rated charges, presents MyTELUS and telus.com, and informs customers with multiple services how to link their accounts. When a customer asks a question about their bill, the agent sends a one-time SMS code, authenticates them without leaving the conversation, and then consults account data via a verified API connection. If verification fails or data is unavailable, it directs the customer to self-service channels rather than guessing. Requests for account changes, complex troubleshooting, or wishes to speak to an advisor are transferred to TELUS teams.
A Successful Test Phase
During the proof-of-concept phase, the agent made approximately 2,300 outbound calls. For every 1,000 customers reached, C$55,000 in lifetime revenue was retained. Customers gave the calls an average rating of 8.5 out of 10, and the agent reached the right person 19% of the time, a level comparable to TELUS’s best outbound telemarketers. The project, from initial contact with the provider to the first customer communication, was deployed in about six weeks.
According to Jelena Bajic, teams can now focus on solving complex problems, “where a person and real judgment make all the difference.” This proof-of-concept now serves as the basis for TELUS’s proactive customer service roadmap, with five other use cases under development.
