KT's customer forum and AI education programme in rural South Korea represents a deliberate shift in engagement strategy away from metropolitan centres. The initiative, held at Okdong Elementary School in Yeongwol County, Gangwon Province, involved students, parents and teachers in what constitutes the third travelling forum session this year. The programme serves a dual purpose: gathering direct customer feedback on telecommunications service experiences in underserved regions whilst simultaneously introducing AI literacy to populations typically excluded from digital transformation narratives. This geographical expansion signals recognition that customer insights from Seoul or Busan cannot adequately represent the needs of rural users—a principle CX teams often overlook when designing feedback loops and support infrastructure.
The implications for CX professionals are twofold. First, this approach challenges the assumption that centralised ticketing systems and AI-driven support tools (whether Zendesk, Freshdesk, or proprietary solutions) can operate uniformly across geographically and demographically fragmented markets. Rural customers may have fundamentally different pain points, connectivity constraints, and expectations than urban counterparts, yet most CX platforms are optimised for high-volume, standardised interactions. Second, KT's emphasis on AI education alongside customer engagement suggests that organisations cannot simply deploy AI-powered support without building customer literacy—a gap that becomes more pronounced in regions with lower digital maturity. For teams already running agent-assisted or fully automated support systems, the question becomes whether your feedback mechanisms are actually capturing the experiences of your least-connected users, or merely amplifying the voices of those already embedded in digital ecosystems.
KT holds customer forum and AI education programme in rural South Korea Telecompaper