T-Mobile to Play the Customer Care Card With Layer3 TV

Callie Field, T-Mobile's EVP of customer care, sheds more light on the company's Team of Experts program at today's Un-carrier Next event.

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Jeff Baumgartner 8/16/2018 | 1:30:55 PM

Re: Customer care It seems that they are doing more than simply throwing bodies at the solution, but thowing more dedicated, capable and able bodies at it to address one of the issues you point out -- customers want to get their issue resolved the first time and don't want to be jerked around and transfered to other reps. Whether mobile subs actually *want* a dedicated team for them is debatable, but I'd guess that they'll take an improved experience over something less so.

And too early to know if this move, despite what additional costs are involved with respect to headcount and resources, will matter from a revenue and subscriber point of view. They are probably using additional metrics, like net promoter scores, and other less tangible metrics to determine success/failure.

But it's also telling that T-Mobile will still keep the automated/IVR stuff intact. JB

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iainmorris 8/16/2018 | 7:33:31 AM

Doubt this will last it's easier to justify these investments when you are outperforming rivals, and it's notable that T-Mobile has continued to grow its headcount while all three of its main competitors are making cuts, but I don't see this as an "Uncarrier" move that its going to catch on elsewhere, and am doubtful it's going to be a long-term strategy at T-Mobile. Customers phoning care centers might not be happy when they are routed through a series of automated options, but the early feedback suggests they are pretty satisfied with more sophisticated chatbots and AI-based systems. Telenor's head of research says customers would rather use these technologies than speak with people. Maintaining large customer care teams as well as automated systems would seem to be very costly and unnecessary in the long run.

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James_B_Crawshaw 8/16/2018 | 3:27:38 AM

Customer care Do mobile subscribers want a dedicated team of 30 to 40 people for customer care? Are they going to send Christmas cards to each of them? People hate IVR but they also don't want to talk to customer care. They want no problems (billing, technical, etc) in the first instance and if there are problems they want to resolve them with a self serve app. Failing that they want a customer care rep who has access to relevant information, not someone taking note and then relaying the information upstream. Throwing bodies at customer care is not the solution.

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