TELUS Digital cuts onboarding time by 20% using ElevenLabs Agents

With 70,000 contact center associates and 20,000 to 30,000 new hires a year, speed to proficiency is an operational priority. TELUS Digital reduced onboarding time by 20% using AI-powered voice simulations built on ElevenLabs Agents.

Slow onboarding, high turnover

Contact centers face systemic training challenges: ramp-up takes weeks, and attrition rates often reach 30–45%. Traditional methods - like classroom sessions, shadowing, and occasional roleplay - don’t scale, and they fail to reflect the range of real-world scenarios agents encounter.

This lack of realism and consistency results in agents entering live environments underprepared - leading to low confidence, frequent escalations, and poor customer experiences. When agents don’t feel equipped to succeed, engagement drops and turnover accelerates, creating a feedback loop that strains operations and erodes service quality over time.

AI-driven voice and chat simulations

Agent Trainer addresses these gaps head-on. It generates dynamic, lifelike simulations across voice and chat, enabling agents to practice everything from simple inquiries to complex complaints in a safe, repeatable environment.

ElevenLabs Agents deliver natural, low-latency voice interactions that sound and behave like real customers. These simulations adapt in real time, and support multilingual scenarios, helping agents build both skill and confidence faster.

Agent Trainer relies on our platform for:

• Lifelike voice simulation: ElevenLabs Text to Speech produces emotionally expressive, highly natural speech - including regional accents and dialects.
• Dynamic conversation flow: Our low-latency agents enable real-time responsiveness across voice and chat.
• Multilingual support: Train voice agents to serve global customers with localized voice AI.
• Robust APIs: Our developer tools make it easy to build and customize immersive training experiences.

Why ElevenLabs

TELUS Digital selected ElevenLabs to power its next-generation agent training platform based on three criteria: latency performance, system transparency, and speed to deployment. In benchmarking, ElevenLabs ranked in the top quartile for conversational latency while maintaining high-quality, natural voices. Competing platforms with similar latency operated as black boxes and carried significantly higher costs.

ElevenLabs provided TELUS with full control over how the system was built and integrated. The platform’s self-serve tooling enabled rapid prototyping, letting product and engineering teams test scenarios, create simulations, and iterate without bottlenecks. This allowed TELUS Digital to move from vendor selection to production in a matter of months.

ElevenLabs Agents has the right balance of tooling to allow us to build directly and go to market exceptionally fast. Anybody can jump into the platform, prototype, and understand what the art of the possible is.

- Mitch Lieberman, VP Product, Telus International

The result is a scalable, controllable platform that supports realistic voice simulations, reduces training time by 20 percent, and has already completed more than 50,000 customer simulations. The combination of low latency, transparent architecture, and flexible APIs made ElevenLabs the fastest and most economical path to deployment.

Results and Impact

• 20% faster onboarding times: Lifelike practice accelerates learning and builds confidence earlier in the process.
• Reduced churn: Improved human agent confidence is showing early signs of lowering churn.
• Higher quality customer experiences: Repetition across realistic scenarios ensures agents are well-prepared to handle inquiries better.
• Scalable training: Train unlimited agents simultaneously - no more bottlenecks from 1:1 roleplay.
• Actionable insights: Managers receive detailed performance reports to identify and address skill gaps.
• Immersive realism: Natural voice interaction makes simulations feel authentic, bridging the gap between training and live calls.

The future of employee training

This partnership goes beyond faster onboarding—it improves customer experience, increases agent retention, and boosts operational efficiency. With AI managing consistent, scalable practice, human trainers can focus on coaching and performance development.

Agent Trainer shows what’s possible when voice AI meets enterprise training: a better-prepared workforce, lower costs, and a stronger customer experience.