AT&T exec provides 3 ways to stay dialed in on customer obsession
He wouldn’t have known it as the time, but John C. Miller’s early work as a candy striper at a Texas hospital in its mid-teens gave him an early lead on forging a successful career in delivering outstanding customer experiences.
The vice-president of Consumer & Retail Solutions at A&T was in Nashville on Wednesday to receive the 2025 Customer-Obsessed Leadership Award at Forrester’s CX North America conference. Being a candy striper, he said, made him realize how powerful a passion for customers can become.
“It was that service to the patients that made me really happy,” he said. “Later, it was those early jobs where customers would say, ‘You made this better for me. Leadership is about aligning that passion to the core values of the brand promise in terms of how to deliver amazing service.”
Miller shared a number of tactics that put this passion into practice, including:
Apply the ‘Adopt A Highway’ approach
Miller pointed to programs whereby everyday people can “adopt” a highway and take on keeping it clean. This helps drive ownership within communities and reinforces the human impact when trash gets thrown onto the road, he said. A&T has borrowed from this concept and applied it in two dimensions.
Miller said employees now take part in an Adopt a Store program, where they see for themselves how CX comes to life across its more than 5,000 stores. The Adapt A Center program is similar, where employees shadow the more than 50,000 people who work in its contact centers by listening to calls and recordings to hear first-hand what customers are saying about AT&T.
“We had a full turnaround” since these programs were introduced, Miller said. “Our quality increased exponentially, employee satisfaction doubled within six months and customer experiences were much, much better.”
Reward the “Yeses”
Most employees in contact centers and service operations have full authority to tell customers “No.” On the flip side, they often need to go up at least one level of management to make an exception to a policy to take an unusual step to address a customer issue.
Miller said AT&T has not only given its employees more leeway in saying “Yes” to customer requests, but compensating them in real-time for the result. Rather than waiting for an end-of year bonus, for example, the company runs what it calls Connection Awards, where they can receive a portion of their bonus early or time off.
Close the knowledge gaps
In his first year with AT&T, Miller admitted he had trouble getting his team to implement certain best practices, despite repeated requests. He eventually realized they fully didn’t understand those practices. Some might suggest he should have replaced those employees with those who have the necessary skills, but he opted to bring in contractors to sit along side and teach them.
The program, which was dubbed See One, Do One, Teach One, encourages employees to not only apply what they learn themselves but pass on their learnings to other teams.
“It became this viral thing where we had a lot more ownership and then when people understood what to do, we were able to turn things around pretty quickly. It wasn’t a lack of desire, it was a lack of knowledge.”
For Miller, the full impact of the culture change at AT&T became apparent when the team was conducting sessions to develop new features and fixes to its various products and services. Suddenly, he said, employees were referring to these by the names of specific customers who had requested them.
“They would say, ‘No, that’s not feature number one – that’s Cloe’s feature,’” he said. “I knew we owned it when we would talk about something we were doing and the team would begin chanting “Cloe-e, Cloe-e, CLO-E.”
