How TELUS Digital reduced onboarding time by 20% using ElevenAgents

Mitch Laborman, vice president of product within Telus digital and I work on agent experience and what we're calling the agent experience platform. So in the contact center agent churn, how often they leave is 30 to 50% annualized. Telus digital has 70,000 contact center associates. So the hiring per year is 30 is 20 to 30,000 per year and it's also not for tenure agents. So what we needed to be able to do is to bring contact center agents up to speed as quickly as possible. A 20% reduction in how long it takes to get them proficient or ready to be on the phones is a 20% operational savings [music] times 20 to 30,000 per year. So, we did a proof of concept with a customer early in the fall and what we learned from the customer is that they wanted training and it's called speed to proficiency and you can do it with chat interactions and it was pretty known. you you have a conversation with a chatbot and the are you answering the question correctly [music] and we started to hear hear is but half of our agents answer phones so what are we going to do to simulate a phone call [music] to do the same sort of training initiative in order to build the next generation platform what we needed to do is be able to simulate real calls how long a human type [music] response is required that's typically referred to as latency Latency is how quickly that [music] when one person speaks, the other person responds. We needed that to be an enormal conversational delay and 11 labs did end to end for us, but also allowed us the capability to take it apart and [music] stitch together with other solutions if we needed to, but we didn't need to. So the top priority was what is latency, very low latency, highquality voices and voice selection. So 11 Labs um in comparison to other platforms was in the top quartile I'll call it or probably top [music] 10% of all of the platforms we evaluated for latency but there was a differentiator is that the other ones that were close in [music] latency were a black box and much more expensive and what 11 Labs allowed us to do is it had the right balance of tooling that allows us to use conversational AI which has now become your agent AI platform so that we could build directly and we can prototype and go go to market exceptionally fast. We went from selection to live in 5 months and we've gone in the last 6 months we've had 35,000 customer simulations done to with evaluations at the end. As a product person, [music] I think one of the things about 11 Labs that differentiate as well is the ability for anybody to jump into the platform itself and prototype and understand what the what the art of the possible is. And I was able to build some of my own prototypes and hand it off to engineering. So the the results are what we call the speed to provision, operational efficiency and speed to proficiency. What that means is that we can train agents in less time to get to the same level to offer the customers of our customers an equivalent satisfactory response. So measured by seesat or net promoter score will you recommend us to a friend and we are able to facilitate the ability for onboarded new agents to be ready in 20% less time. And we've also started to see reduction in churn. the agents feel more confident and comfortable. A side benefit which we were unaware was actually going to happen is in on boarding we learned through verbatims which are people you know sharing directly their feedback they liked working with an AI as opposed to a human guided coach because when they were working with a person they felt like they were being trained and judged at the same time with an AI they was able to separate those two. So within the platform we're going to branch out in two directions. We're going to focus on coaching. [music] So when I I shared uh a prototype of what we're doing now after an evaluation, you can now request the assistance of an AI voice coach which will review your evaluation and [music] give you tips on what you should have said in a multimodal way. So we present it in text [music] now and now we adding additionally the ability to have a discussion with an AI coach after the evaluation is done. I would recommend 11 Labs for partnering [music] and for also building a platform on top of I think the the approach that 11 Labs has taken to market which [music] is scalability and security as well as the API access to the capabilities 11 Labs manages to figure out the balance between a black box which is uncontrollable which some people want and [music] a complete toolkit which requires you to always write complete code. 11 Labs has been an exceptional [music] partner for us.