KPN partners with McKinsey to reinvent customer service through agentic AI
KPN is transforming its customer service operations with digital agents that work seamlessly alongside human employees. The AI-powered approach enables the largest telecommunications provider in the Netherlands to operate more efficiently while delivering a faster experience for customers.
The transformation from a ‘traditional’ contact center to an AI-powered one was delivered in partnership with McKinsey & Company and its AI arm, QuantumBlack. According to KPN, the new operating model, which sees a network of specialized agents take over AI-friendly tasks under the supervision of humans, has resulted in better quality and efficiency, with an 86% adoption success rate among the employee base.
Reimagining customer interactions
KPN has long been an early adopter of emerging technologies, making it a natural step for the telecom and ICT provider to embrace the rise of agentic AI to improve how it handles the roughly five million customer calls it receives each year.
Working alongside McKinsey & Company, the project team began by analyzing large volumes of chat logs and call transcripts to identify the most common reasons customers get in touch. These interactions were then clustered into recurring customer needs, creating a structured foundation for AI-driven service delivery. The analysis extended well beyond traditional text-based automation, incorporating dynamic voice-to-voice conversations to better capture the complexity and context of real customer interactions.
The goal of this analysis was to find the best way to simplify processes. KPN made sure to keep humans in the loop at key moments, like when customers move to a new home. This resulted in a clear set of focus areas for the AI agents, including customer verification, order status inquiries, technician appointment management, and internet troubleshooting.
“We wanted to make this next step toward the future. We see AI as a way to support more natural interaction with customers, while ensuring that human support remains available when it matters most,” said Jörg Kramer, KPN’s chief of customer and commercial operations.
Elevating operations with agentic AI
To support AI-driven voice conversations at scale, the project team built a centralized platform that connects directly to core telecommunications systems. One of the main requirements for the team was keeping response times below two seconds per turn. Because typical human conversations have gaps of under one second, minimizing latency was critical to ensure the interactions did not feel artificial.
The platform also supports a feature that allows customers to interrupt mid-sentence while the system maintains context. In tying these elements together, KPN chose an integrated platform over isolated tools, making the technology reusable for future use cases across the company.
Operating at a large scale requires strict quality control. The project team introduced guardrails to ensure the digital agents stay within defined boundaries, alongside automated checks and human-led testing. Every morning, the team reviews transcripts from up to 100 real customer calls to find edge cases, updates the prompts in the afternoon, and releases the upgrades by the evening.
Preparing the workforce for this shift was just as critical as developing the technology. As AI agents took over routine tasks like customer verification, a specialized task force updated operating procedures and training programs to help employees transition into more complex, empathy-driven problem-solving. Frontline employees participated heavily in testing, which was an important part of the high success rate.
“KPN saw that agentic AI could fundamentally reshape and reimagine how customer service is delivered,” said Ruben Schaubroeck, senior partner at McKinsey & Company. “It allows them to orchestrate entire journeys around outcomes while keeping human experts focused where they add the most value.”
Scaling across the enterprise
The transformation is already delivering tangible results by reducing handling times and resolving issues efficiently without needing technician visits. Customers have responded positively, with early data showing a customer satisfaction score of 83, which is comparable to human-handled calls.
KPN has set an ambition for agentic AI to handle 10% to 20% of customer service calls by 2027. Through its collaboration with McKinsey & Company, KPN did not just deploy a one-time solution – the company built the in-house capabilities needed to design and scale new AI tools independently across the enterprise.
“Many organizations are still exploring the potential of agentic AI, while KPN is already integrating it into how work gets done every day. That kind of alignment between strategy, technology, and execution is what allows these programs to scale and deliver real impact,” said Dirk Hofland, associate partner at McKinsey & Company.
By transitioning from basic chatbots to autonomous voice agents, KPN is effectively breaking through the widespread AI paradox where extensive technology experimentation has historically failed to yield a material financial impact.
According to McKinsey, this milestone signals a fundamental shift in how organizations approach AI transformation. “Organizations must reset their AI transformation approaches from scattered initiatives to strategic programs; from use cases to business processes; from siloed AI teams to cross-functional transformation squads; and from experimentation to industrialized, scalable delivery.”
McKinsey adds that the move toward agentic organizations represents a new operating paradigm in which companies must fundamentally rethink their business models and workflows with an AI-first mindset, rather than relying on traditional, isolated automation initiatives.
