Key takeaways
- Silent churn (customers who abandon digital journeys without calling, complaining or negotiating) accounted for nearly 80% of voluntary churn at a global telecom, making it their dominant retention problem.
- The problem wasn't a missing tool. Adobe Experience Platform, Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics were already in the client's ecosystem. What was needed was a real-time decisioning layer connecting customer signals to the Adobe activation stack.
- For enterprise personalization at scale, real-time means right-time. Adobe Journey Optimizer determines whether and when to send a message, and through which channel, based on behavioral pattern, recency and segment membership.
- Cart abandonment was identified as the first use case through TELUS Digital's proprietary framework, which evaluates activation opportunities based on commercial impact, data readiness and speed to value.
Silent churn can be the hardest kind to fight. There's no complaint to address or escalation to resolve. There’s only a customer who quietly stops engaging. For a global telecommunications leader managing millions of digital interactions a day, silent churn was a critical problem, not an edge case.
The challenge
Nearly 80% of voluntary customer churn for the client’s online retail offerings happened without a single support call. Customers didn't give the brand a chance to respond. They abandoned their digital journeys by leaving carts, closing apps and reducing logins. The reasons for these decisions remained private, and the data confirmed a troubling timeline:
90% of customers who displayed these abandonment behaviors made their final decision to leave within 48 hours.
The client’s existing architecture wasn't optimized for that time window. A high-value cart abandonment campaign, the kind that could intercept a subscriber about to walk away from a purchase, required a 15-day setup cycle, involving:
- IT tickets
- Disconnected spreadsheets
- Manual structured query language (SQL) pulls
- Engineers in the loop at every step
Even after a campaign was live, the system needed another 24 to 72 hours just to detect an abandonment event and trigger a response.
That math was unworkable. By the time the first recovery message could be fired, the customer who'd spent 20 minutes building that cart had already moved on.
The client partnered with TELUS Digital, specialists in Adobe and AI transformation, to build a solution.
The TELUS Digital approach
The client wasn't starting from scratch. Adobe Experience Platform, Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics were already part of its marketing infrastructure. This toolchain was built for real-time, personalized customer engagement at scale.
What the client required was a real-time bridge to take a customer's abandonment signal, identify who that person was, determine the right offer and execute through the right channel before the 48-hour window closed. An Adobe Gold Partner with over 100 enterprise implementations, TELUS Digital applied their expertise in constructing that activation layer.
The implementation team began with a full audit of the existing infrastructure, and the solution integrated three components:
Marketer studio
The team built a self-serve orchestration hub to replace the manual campaign build process. This allows marketers to configure triggers, audience criteria and offer logic through a single interface without engineering tickets or spreadsheets.
Real-time decisioning engine
Hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and connected to the Adobe stack via Event Forwarding, through Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network, this layer listens to the live digital event stream. When a subscriber with high lifetime value abandons a cart, the engine qualifies them against segment criteria and maps them to the highest-converting recovery offer in milliseconds. What was once a manual Excel offer matrix is now a fully automated decisioning layer.
New flow: Adobe Experience Platform → Journey Optimizer → Customer Journey Analytics
From GCP, resolved customer intelligence flows directly into Adobe Experience Platform. There, it's assembled into a unified profile, built from behavioral history, segment membership, channel preferences and offer eligibility. Adobe Journey Optimizer acts as the orchestration layer, evaluating whether to send a message and through which channel (and when).
In this implementation, real-time doesn't mean instant. It means right-time. Journey Optimizer evaluates timing, recency and channel fit before executing. Customer Journey Analytics closes the loop, tracking conversion, offering variant performance and channel attribution so each campaign feeds the next with sharper intelligence.
TELUS Digital evaluated use cases against its personalization model, a proprietary framework that scores activation opportunities across three dimensions: commercial impact, data readiness and speed to value. Cart abandonment cleared every bar and offered a single flow that maps the complete architecture from signal detection to closed-loop measurement.
The results
The operational shift was immediate. Campaign response time compressed from 15 days to under 60 minutes. Cart abandonment recovery conversion rates landed between 4% and 10% by intercepting customers while the intent was still live, instead of days after it had faded.
This program is projected to generate approximately $23.4 million in revenue benefit by 2028, converting what were previously silent losses into recovered sales and reinforced loyalty.
The architecture also built a foundation for what's next. With agentic AI layered into the same pipeline, the manual configuration work marketers still handle today, including audience selection, offer decisioning and timing optimization, can be progressively automated, running within defined guardrails with humans in a governance role rather than a configuration one.
From signal to delivery, we operate inside the customer's window, engaging them with personalized value at the moment that matters.
Results like these start with an honest look at what's already in place. TELUS Digital's Adobe practice has helped enterprise clients across telecom, retail and financial services close the gap between the data they have and the experiences they can deliver. If that's a conversation you need to have, reach out to our experts.
