Inside T-Mobile’s ‘uncarrier’ approach to CX
Jon Freier just wanted to see T-Mobile get off the list.
Back in 2009, the telecom giant was in one of those rankings of companies most likely to disappear based on the poor quality of their performance. It was a Hall of Shame that included Radio Shack, Blockbuster and others. As the president of T-Mobile’s consumer group shared at Forrester’s CX North America event in Nashville last week, however, the worst was still to come.
“We were kind of lost. We were subscale,” Frier told the audience in a session where T-Mobile was being celebrated, along with grocery chain Albertson’s, for winning a Forrester award in customer-obsessed leadership. “We missed a little bit of a technology wave at the end of the 2000s and we were going through an acquisition attempt by AT&T that ultimately failed, and we were left in a place where we were careening down in terms of customer losses.”
In 2012, for instance, T-Mobile lost two million of its then-29 million customer base. Those challenges have since led Freier – who has been with the brand for approximately 30 years – to develop a customer experience (CX) strategy based on what he called “uncarrier” behavior.
“We were saying that this business is a stupid, broken, arrogant industry that traps customers, that treats customers wrong, that gouges customers every single chance you get,” he said, ticking off high fees for overseas calling and poorly-developed contracts among the challenges. “The only way that we were going to be able to take this company forward is to declare war on this broken industry and turn this entire company into a company that has customer centricity.”
Here are a few examples of what that looks like today:
Regular town halls with no punches pulled
Freier said T-Mobile has an employee town hall meeting about once every two weeks, and can include more than 600 people coming forward with questions – and criticisms.
“I’m on trial during the Q and A,” he said. “It’s definitely prosecution time, because if you’re going to be all about customer centricity, then you have to be about having a culture where, if you’re not getting it right, that it’s okay for your employees, your frontline employees, to challenge you.”
Employees will raise examples where T-Mobile is not living up to its “uncarrier” values, for instance, or share what’s being done to support colleagues. The latter is about recognizing the indirect impact on CX, Freier explained.
“I have a saying within our company that there’s two types of people: those who serve customers and those who serve those who serve customers. And 30 years ago, I was in the first bucket, and for the last 27 years or so, I’ve been in the last bucket. And our whole ethos as a company is to have a management team and a leadership team that is sweating, taking care of the people serve our customers.”
A ‘total experience’ operating model
T-Mobile can’t be completely decentralized, Freier explained, without running the risk of what he described as “general manager fiefdoms” popping up and creating CX inconsistencies. The operating model the company has landed on recognizes that product/service offers and promotions should be national, but retail and care teams should act more locally.
“We call it the total experience, which is basically a big, fancy name for how do we keep aligned around a common geography, whether that be right here in Nashville or perhaps Tennessee,” he said. “The goal is to get everybody – our retail teams, our customer care teams and our network teams – focused on that particular geography where they are solving issues on behalf of customers, and then pushing on the headquarters resources to get them the programs and the tools and the resources that they need to further solve the customer problems.”
The result is that key metrics, such as contacts per account, have never been lower in T-Mobile’s history, Freier said, while its Net Promoter Score (NPS) has never been higher.
‘Don’t ask, just do it’ thinking
Freier acknowledged that many CX leaders are struggling against an internal culture that’s resistant to change, which can go all the way up to the CEO level. His advice was to be unapologetic in pushing for CX improvements, and not necessarily even asking permission first.
“It’s amazing how people in organizations just kind of fall in line, you know, because it’s not like we’re doing anything controversial,” he said. “If you’re obsessing over customers, and you’re promoting the service and the products that you have to make customers lives better, to enrich customers lives, and that somehow runs a foul to your company, I’d suggest you’re in the wrong company.”
The CX North America session featuring T-Mobile and Albertson’s (which has enough good ideas to be a story in itself) is well worth watching and is available on-demand to registered attendees.
