Nearly 20 years ago, TELUS International was established to provide customer service support for its parent company, a major Canadian telecom company. From its lone site in Manila, the company also supported a limited number of additional clients in the North American market. However, word spread quickly about the small company delivering exceptional results, and as demand for its services increased, company leaders decided to capitalize on its potential.
Thoughtfully, and over time, TELUS International expanded its geographic footprint across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and Central America, simultaneously deepening its technology stack and digital capabilities and recruiting top talent.
Now, as 2024 begins to wind down, the company is starting something new: TELUS International is now TELUS Digital Experience (TELUS Digital), a rebrand that reflects the company’s commitment to providing digital-first experiences across every service it delivers to its clients.
“Over the course of our two decades in business, the customer service industry has changed dramatically, moving from a predominant focus on call centers, to 24/7 omnichannel support across a multitude of channels and devices, to what we see today, which is brands leveraging AI, data, and analytics to craft seamless, personalized, and cost-effective experiences across the customer journey,” says president of TELUS Digital Customer Experience, Jason Macdonnell.
He says the rebrand isn’t about changing the direction of the company, but rather to better reflect what the company is already doing. “We’re so clearly a digital-focused company, and it was time our company name said so,” he says.
DISRUPTING WITHOUT BEING DISRUPTED
TELUS Digital has built a reputation for accurately predicting key market and technology shifts, including the gravitational pull of artificial intelligence and the criticality of high-quality data to fuel innovative and customized products, services, experiences, and solutions.
A series of prescient acquisitions helped scale up the business and paved the path to its initial public offering in 2021, becoming the largest technology IPO in the history of the TSX, with a dual listing on the New York Stock Exchange. “Going public was a key milestone of our growth journey, but it couldn’t have happened without the groundwork we laid to become such a force in the technology space,” says Macdonnell.
He says the company’s market strategy has kept TELUS Digital ahead of its clients’ changing needs for digital transformation and high-tech services, as well as changing consumer expectations.
In 2018, it acquired Xavient Digital to gain expertise in IT consulting, software development, and managed services as well as comprehensive digital transformation services, including cloud computing, DevOps, and automation, effectively broadening its portfolio beyond customer experience. A year later, the acquisition of Competence Call Center expanded its existing content moderation services.
The company’s acquisitions of Lionbridge AI and Playment followed. Collectively they contributed end-to-end data capabilities to provide the high-quality AI training datasets at scale needed to power AI algorithms, machine learning, large language models (LLM), and computer vision applications such as autonomous driving. TELUS International also welcomed world-class product and engineering teams focused on R&D and a crowd-sourced global AI community of more than one million contributors from these integrations.
The 2023 acquisition of WillowTree, now a TELUS Digital Company, added key front-end design and build capabilities, such as mobile and web development expertise as well as UX/UI design, software engineering, and backend system integration to further reinforce its ability to create customer-centric digital solutions, improve user engagement, and become a full-service digital product provider.
Tobias Dengel, president of TELUS Digital Solutions and founder of WillowTree, joined the company’s leadership team as part of the acquisition. “The integration of our companies’ capabilities has created a powerful ecosystem and differentiated value proposition for clients, addressing today’s biggest pain points when it comes to adopting AI-based solutions,” he says. “We’re well positioned to address our clients’ challenges actualizing AI goals, their uncertainties about AI regulations and governance, and their lack of internal AI expertise.”
The company is also making large strides in voice technology, an area of expertise for Dengel, who says they are using it to help reduce customer effort and create better customer experiences for several brands they support. “It’s a simple fact: people speak faster than they type, and voice interfaces allow users to complete tasks more quickly compared to typing, which reduces friction in customer interactions.”
He emphasizes that voice tech, particularly in combination with generative AI, is poised to revolutionize customer experience. For example, in a multimodal environment, users can make a request or ask a question verbally and get text or image responses in return on their device to streamline common tasks like booking a flight, ordering a pizza, or using self-serve customer support tools.
Dengel also highlights voice tech’s role in broadening accessibility, ensuring that customers with disabilities or difficulties navigating traditional interfaces can benefit from these solutions.
THE BRAND BEHIND THE BRANDS
TELUS International has long been the first point of contact that customers have with many brands, whether on a phone call, in a chat, on asynchronous messaging, or through interactions with a human-centric AI-powered bot.
“We have always put customers first in everything we do, and it’s a privilege to be a trusted partner to brands that are creating disruptive and standout experiences for their end customers and employees,” says Macdonnell. “As brand ambassadors for our clients’ products and services, and the engineers digitally transforming their operations and internal processes, we are by the side of major brands to help them build customer loyalty, engage employees, drive efficiencies, increase wallet share, and grow their top and bottom lines.”
Over time, the company has shown the success of its end-to-end offering in the market.
“Many of our client relationships that started with a single program have evolved into multi-solution engagements,” says Macdonnell. “The fact that we provide an average of 18 programs per client and have an average client tenure of nine years for our top 10 clients is a testament to the realization of our strategy.”
TELUS Digital’s rebrand comes on the heels of the launch of Fuel iX in April. The company’s proprietary enterprise-grade generative AI (GenAI) engine has ushered in a new era in which TELUS Digital is now selling technology products and software as a service (SaaS) that complement its portfolio of managed services.
“Fuel iX helps businesses upgrade their GenAI from pilots to production scale and empowers them to deploy customized solutions faster and manage the tech responsibly,” says Dengel.
One way it does that is by providing access to an extensive library of more than 100 LLMs and multiple clouds, so users can compare models and settings to find an ideal fit. This vendor-agnostic approach gives enterprises the flexibility to change models to best suit their needs at any given time, effectively future-proofing their GenAI investments.
“Simply put, Fuel iX is a comprehensive set of tools that let companies interested in GenAI do it the right way—strategically, responsibly, securely, and with continuous human oversight,” says Dengel. “That’s the best and the fastest way to get sustainable returns on investment.”
A LEGACY OF HUMAN-CENTRIC INNOVATION
The company’s caring culture since day one is a clear representation of its human-centric values that have continued to guide its actions and how it positions itself in a crowded marketplace.
“A human-first tech company might seem increasingly rare,” says Dengel. “But tech and humanity don’t have to be in conflict. At TELUS Digital, we make the choice every single day to bring humanity into our tech.”
Dengel says the company’s people play a variety of critical frontline roles to help minimize the negative effects of tech on society, in areas ranging from content moderation on social media platforms, message boards, and gaming forums, to annotating and localizing data.
The company’s Humanity-in-the-loop principles, launched alongside the rebrand, provide important perspective and guidance on how the company designs, develops, and deploys AI and similarly powerful technologies. This includes being mindful of who is and isn’t in the room when decisions are made, creating pathways for diversity, and rethinking what ROI means in the age of AI to account for the holistic costs to people and the planet.
“The choices we make today will have extraordinary impacts on the future, so we need humans at the heart of AI to make sure it is solving real-world problems—not perpetuating new ones,” Dengel says.
BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE
Having transitioned over the past two decades from its humble beginning of providing contact center support to now successfully executing complex and multifaceted digital transformation and AI-enabled projects for clients, Macdonnell says the rebrand to TELUS Digital reflects that seismic shift and motivates its global team of more than 75,000 employees to remain focused on the journey ahead.
“We’re signaling to the industry that we’re here to stay and will continue to dig in, do the work, and put in the time to remain an undisputed expert source on crafting exceptional and enduring customer experiences with the promise of humanity,” he says.
TELUS Digital is stepping into its future armed with the knowledge and intel that only comes from decades of experience. “We’re continuing to reimagine our products, services, and solutions to address unmet needs, propel leading-edge innovation, and disrupt the market,” says Macdonnell. “This new chapter will be our company’s most exciting one yet.”
Jason Macdonnell is president of TELUS Digital Customer Experience. Tobias Dengel is president of TELUS Digital Solutions and founder and president of WillowTree, a TELUS Digital Company.