Three South Korean telecoms—SK Telecom, KT, and LG Uplus—have secured top-tier recognition in the 2026 Korea Service Quality Index (KSQI), with their success explicitly tied to AI-augmented contact centre operations rather than cost reduction alone. SK Telecom earned its 14th consecutive Excellent Call Center designation by deploying AI chatbots and callbots across all centres, paired with real-time AI assistants that surface customer context for human agents; KT achieved 15 consecutive years of excellence in mobile and 12 in broadband by layering generative AI models (ChatGPT, Claude) onto its proprietary 'Genie' voicebot; LG Uplus ranked first industry-wide in the KSQI Call Center category and earned back-to-back 'Customer Delight' designations by positioning its LLM-based 'Consulting Advisor' as a tool to amplify agent empathy rather than replace it. The pattern across all three operators reveals a deliberate architectural choice: AI handles triage, data retrieval, and task execution, whilst human agents concentrate on complex problem-solving and emotional labour. This raises a critical question for teams already invested in legacy platforms—does your current stack enable this division of labour, or does it force a false choice between automation and personalisation?
The strategic implication extends beyond Korean telecoms. These operators are signalling that sustained service excellence (measured across 12–15 consecutive years) correlates with treating AI as a force multiplier for agent capability rather than a headcount reduction tool. LG Uplus's explicit framing—"not only to using AI technology as a means to reduce costs or improve efficiency, but also to enhancing the consulting environment"—directly contradicts the cost-first narrative that has driven contact centre automation for two decades. For CX leaders, this suggests that the next competitive frontier is not whether to deploy AI, but whether your organisation can architect workflows where agents spend less time on data entry and context-switching and more time on the interactions that drive customer loyalty. The question becomes whether your current vendor roadmap supports agentic AI that executes tasks autonomously (as KT's leadership explicitly mentioned) or merely surfaces recommendations to agents—a distinction that will determine whether your team can sustain multi-year service improvements or plateau after initial deployment gains.
Improved Customer Service Quality with AI... Three Major Telecoms Selected as Excellent Call Centers in KSQI 아시아경제