TELUS Digital says a voice agent that phones new internet customers cut early cancellations to less than half the usual rate. Here is what it did and what to check.
TELUS Digital, part of the Canadian telecom company TELUS, built an AI voice agent that phones new home internet customers soon after they sign up. Customers who got a call cancelled within 30 days at less than half the rate of other new customers. The agent made about 2,300 calls in its first trial.
TELUS found that new customers were most likely to cancel before anyone from the company had spoken to them. It also had no staff capacity to call everyone. The agent now reaches out in the customer's first 90 days. It is built on ElevenAgents, a product from the voice AI company ElevenLabs.
If a customer asks about their bill, the agent texts a one-time passcode to confirm who they are. Then it pulls live account details from TELUS systems and states only figures from that data. If verification fails or the data is missing, it sends the customer to self-serve options instead of guessing.
The agent ends the call if the customer does not want to continue. Account changes, complex troubleshooting and any request to talk to a person go to TELUS team members. A TELUS executive said this frees staff for work that needs human judgment. She also said the agent reached the right person at a rate on par with the company's best outbound agents.
The numbers come from a blog post by the vendor, ElevenLabs, and from TELUS's own trial. The comparison is against the wider group of new customers who activated service, not a strict side-by-side test. The post does not give the exact cancellation rates. It also gives no figure for customer satisfaction, which a TELUS executive called very strong.
TELUS says the trial has become the base of its plans for proactive customer care. Five more uses are in development. For other businesses, the lesson is the timing. A friendly check-in early in the relationship may keep customers from leaving, and AI can make calling every new customer affordable.
If new customers leave early at your business, an early check-in call may help, but ask for exact results and how handoffs to real people work.
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