Key takeaways
- TELUS unified agent development by treating training and quality coaching as one continuous journey rather than separate problems. This integrated approach accelerates readiness while enabling improvement with every customer interaction.
- By prioritizing realistic, AI-powered simulations, TELUS converted abstract training concepts into hands-on practice that improved role-play productivity by 75–85%, enabling more simultaneous practice and building agent confidence before live interactions.
- TELUS Digital proved AI-powered coaching works at enterprise scale, deploying Agent Quality Insights across TELUS contact centers to automatically analyze 100% of interactions and deliver personalized coaching.
- Rigorous quality standards and compliance protocols ensured that rapid AI deployment never compromised accuracy, customer experience or agent trust.
Fifteen million customers, every one of them expecting an expert
TELUS Communications is a world-leading technology company with $16 billion in annual revenue and 15.2 million customer connections. Recently recognized by Opensignal as Canada’s most-awarded wireless network provider, TELUS continues to set the standard for network quality and engineering excellence. It connects Canadians to wireless networks, high-speed internet, home security, television, healthcare and an expanding suite of business services.
When customers contact TELUS, they expect to be connected with an expert who can resolve their issue on the first interaction, no matter which service prompted them to reach out.
Meeting that expectation at scale is harder than it sounds. Every new plan, every updated service and every promotional offer is something an agent needs to understand well enough to explain, troubleshoot and, when the moment is right, sell.
For TELUS, preparing a contact center agent to support that kind of breadth took up to 10 weeks.
But breadth isn’t the only relevant complexity. Beyond effective onboarding, TELUS wanted to see continuous improvement in its contact centers. That meant they needed to draw insights from millions of interactions to improve their customer experience and agent coaching. The raw material was already there, captured in every interaction — they just needed to be intentional about how they used it.
Traditional quality monitoring relies on manual sampling, with supervisors reviewing a fraction of customer interactions and coaching agents based on what they happen to hear. At the scale TELUS operates, that approach would leave most interactions unexamined and most coaching opportunities unrealized. TELUS saw the opportunity to use AI to analyze contact center data, identify skill gaps in real time and turn every interaction into a coaching moment.
Rethinking how TELUS trains, supports and coaches its contact center agents
TELUS Digital designed a solution that follows agents from their first day of training through every customer interaction they handle. We introduced one continuous cycle to solve for both onboarding and quality monitoring so that agents are ready from day one, and improve with every customer interaction.
The rollout began with approximately 1,000 trainees across multiple contact center locations and has since scaled to 7,000 agents across TELUS’s global contact center network, expanding from new hire training to include coaching for operational agents.
- 26%Improvement in coaching efficiency
- 100%Automated interaction coverage
The most successful companies aren’t the ones that try and replace human intelligence with artificial intelligence. They’re the ones that enable their great people with that intelligence.
Accelerating agent readiness before the first interaction
Getting a new TELUS agent ready to handle the full breadth of the company’s services had historically taken up to 10 weeks. TELUS Digital reduced the nesting period and increased first contact resolution (FCR) rates with Fuel iX™ Agent Trainer, a platform that creates customizable voice and chat simulations based on actual TELUS support scenarios like billing disputes, technical troubleshooting and service activations.
The speed of improvement is notable. Role-play productivity improved by 75–85%, enabling agents to complete multiple realistic scenarios simultaneously rather than sequentially. New hire confidence improved significantly as a result, demonstrating that realistic, AI-powered practice accelerates agent readiness.
Rather than learning through trial and error on live customers, agents rehearse difficult situations in a safe environment, choosing from a range of customer personas and receiving immediate, automated feedback after each session. The system evaluates performance against custom criteria, identifying gaps in their knowledge and reinforcing the right behaviors before an agent handles a real interaction. This supports both new agent onboarding and continuous development for experienced team members.
Supervisors responsible for agent coaching benefit too. A manager’s view surfaces the results and assessments of every training session, giving team leaders a complete picture of individual performance and the information they need to develop targeted coaching plans.
Watch the Fuel iX Agent Trainer demo to see how leading contact centers are cutting training time in half with AI-powered voice and chat simulations.
Equipping agents for every customer interaction
Once agents are on the contact center floor, the challenge shifts from preparation to performance. TELUS Digital equipped TELUS agents with AI copilots designed to support them during live service interactions.
The tools empowered TELUS agents with three core capabilities:
- Real-time guidance and knowledge. Agents get instant access to accurate, up-to-date product information without breaking the flow of conversation, reducing search time and improving response accuracy.
- Contextual intelligence. The tools surface relevant customer history during interactions, enabling agents to personalize responses without asking customers to repeat themselves.
- Next-best action recommendations. AI-powered insights suggest service resolutions and sales opportunities based on customer data and context.
Together, this shifts the focus from basic operational metrics like average handle time (AHT) to maximizing the value of every minute spent with a TELUS customer.
That shift matters. An agent who resolves a customer’s issue has an opportunity to deepen customer loyalty and make personalized recommendations about additional products and services. For example, suggesting a wireless plan that better fits their usage, adding home security to an existing account or consolidating services for a lower monthly rate.
This leads to fewer repeat contacts and faster resolutions. Average handle time improved by 20% and customer satisfaction (CSAT) improved by 18%. These metrics demonstrate how preparation with Agent Trainer translates to better customer outcomes.
Once you’ve owned the call and resolved the problem the customer was experiencing, you’ve built a relationship and credibility with the customer. You’ve actually earned the right to sell to them.
Turning every interaction into a coaching opportunity
The third stage of TELUS Digital’s solution addresses what happens after each interaction ends. Agent Quality Insights uses AI to analyze 100% of TELUS customer calls and chats automatically — identifying skill gaps, flagging compliance risks and generating personalized coaching recommendations for every agent after every interaction.
Historically, supervisors could only manually review a small sample of interactions. Agent Quality Insights changed that. The result was a 26% improvement in coaching efficiency, enabling supervisors to support more agents without sacrificing coaching quality.
The system also transforms the contact center into a real-time intelligence engine. TELUS can capture product feedback, identify emerging customer issues and inform go-to-market decisions at a scale that was previously impossible.
Results that proved AI-powered contact center training at scale
By considering the entire agent journey, TELUS Digital delivered improvements that touched every dimension of contact center performance — from how quickly agents reach full proficiency to how every customer interaction is measured and improved.
Agent development and coaching
- 26% improvement in coaching efficiency, allowing contact center supervisors to scale their impact across larger teams
- Supervisors freed from manual interaction review, redirecting time toward targeted, data-driven coaching conversations
- 75–85% improvement in role-play productivity, enabling agents to complete 2-3 scenarios in 45 minutes instead of spending several hours on individual role-plays
- Improved agent experience thanks to uplift in new hire confidence, with agents describing Agent Trainer as a “game changer”
Customer experience and quality
- 100% of TELUS customer interactions automatically analyzed for quality and coaching opportunities
- 85% reduction in manual quality monitoring (and on track for 95%), freeing quality analysts to focus on higher-value activities including training quality oversight, KPI improvement initiatives, AI validation and innovation projects
- 18% CSAT improvement
- 14% customer effort score (CES) reduction
Operational performance
- 20% AHT reduction
- 23% after call work (ACW) reduction
- 2.6x productivity increase enables TELUS to handle substantially more customer interactions with existing staff, directly improving service capacity and reducing wait times without expanding headcount
- Calls per agent increased to 106-133 per day (up from 50-98), reflecting agents spending less time per call and on administrative work
Program scale and adoption
- Scaled from pilot to 7,000 agents across multiple contact centers
- Approximately 400 fully working scenarios deployed in total, split between training and production scenarios
- Multiple lines of business participating
- The contact center now improves with every interaction it handles
It’s very efficient, in terms of, we are able to leverage the best of each world. Manage the cost at the same time. Manage the best performance. On a core platform that fuels all of the other use cases.
