How TELUS is powering growth and productivity with Google

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Alyson Butler, Director of Team Member Experiences at TELUS, a communications technology company with more than 20 million customer connections. TELUS has integrated ChromeOS, Google Workspace, Chrome Enterprise Premium, and Cameyo to support its transformation into a globally recognized technology leader.

Thirty-five years ago, TELUS started out by providing telecommunication services to Canadians. More than three decades later, we’re still connecting people and the data they need, but we’ve grown into a large, diversified company offering a full range of innovative digital solutions for IT, healthcare, customer experience and agriculture.

As Director of Team Member Experiences at TELUS, I lead the teams responsible for managing the global digital workplace experience for nearly 60,000 team members worldwide. Our mission is to unlock their productivity in a secure way, ensuring they feel like a connected part of the team, while protecting our internal and customer data. This can be especially challenging with a distributed workforce. What may have sounded impossible before, was achievable with Google. We created an enterprise computing stack with ChromeOS, Google Workspace, Cameyo, and Chrome Enterprise Premium. This new solution made our login speed three times faster than our previous setup — a crucial improvement for our customer agents. The tech stack simplified our security and management while unlocking business benefits like higher productivity, cost-per-call savings, and improved customer satisfaction.

Workspace established a strong foundation

Our digital journey began in 2018 with a mission to transform our distributed workforce. We knew that cloud apps with built-in security were the way forward. By migrating to Google Workspace, we immediately improved productivity, enhanced the end-user experience, and took advantage of its robust, natively built-in security and compliance features.

Workspace quickly became an end-to-end solution for us. Our teams create files in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, and store them in Google Drive, where the automatic version control ensures seamless collaboration.

We connect on Chat, manage approvals and workflows in Gmail, and use Google Meet to connect virtually. Google Calendar is our workhorse for planning and scheduling, allowing us to view other team members’ schedules, set up events, and send email invites — all from one tab. The benefits of Google Workspace allowed us to fundamentally rethink our end-user computing strategy.

With growth from acquisitions, we built a cloud platform

To address our technical debt and remove past complexities, we needed a platform that could support our growth from acquisitions while improving our security posture and team member experience. Seeing the positive results with Google Workspace, we were inspired to test other Google solutions to support our growth. We anticipated that a combination of ChromeOS, Cameyo, and Chrome Enterprise Premium would help us reap the benefits of browser-based computing, including simplified management and improved security.

We deployed ChromeOS in our call centers, allowing us to move away from our costly legacy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solution. However, we still needed to provide access to important contact center software.

After evaluating several virtualization products, Cameyo clearly outperformed the others and offered the significant cost savings we needed. By choosing ChromeOS with Cameyo, we achieved a major digital transformation, cutting operational expenses and avoiding a $15 million infrastructure refresh. The transition also accelerated performance and simplified our IT management. What's more, our call center team members have found the Cameyo platform incredibly easy to use. Today, more than 100 applications flow through it. Looking ahead, we expect this solution to yield a significantly lower total cost of ownership compared to our previous solution.

This journey led us to what we now call the TELUS Desktop Stream: a zero-trust, browser-based app streaming solution built with ChromeOS, Chrome Enterprise Premium, and Cameyo. Cameyo is crucial because it allows all our applications, whether cloud-based or not, to run directly through a browser. This gives us confidence that we can continue to provide our teams with the necessary tools while reaping the benefits of cloud-based end-user computing.

Unlocking business-wide benefits

At every stage of our digital transformation, we’ve seen benefits beyond cost savings. For example, my IT team appreciates Chrome Enterprise Premium for its ability to streamline our Chrome browser management across our entire device fleet. They also love how Cameyo enables TELUS Desktop Stream to scale application access instantly, supporting the flexible workforce we need to serve customers worldwide.

Chrome Enterprise Premium gave us the security protection we needed for a distributed workforce and a growing business. With extra security features such as context-aware access controls and data loss protection, we are more secure as an organization, even with eliminating the need of VPN’s for team members leveraging virtual access.

ChromeOS helped us deliver the speed that team members requested for their productivity solutions. Login times are three times faster in ChromeOS compared with our old Windows operating system. And today, team members talk about how much faster it is to work within ChromeOS, integrated with Chrome Enterprise and Cameyo, compared with the previous slow VDI solution with annoying lags and inconsistent latency.

In the TELUS call center, the combined solutions have directly delivered greater efficiency by allowing us to handle more calls per hour. The integration has been really powerful, having a real impact on productivity, and by extension, the levels of service and engagement we can bring to our customers.

When employees are satisfied, customers are satisfied

Our ongoing Google deployment is helping us achieve our goal to thrive. We believe that when employees are empowered with intuitive, friction-less experiences, they become not just more productive but more satisfied as well. With Google, we are now set up for the future with a web based tech stack that is agile enough to securely support our growth, while keeping our teams productive and engaged.