39 percent of customers would rather clean a toilet than deal with customer support.
Paul Allen
3x Builder | Integrator | Acquired 10,000’s + B2B + B2C Customers | $300M+ raised | Do More Faster | Radical Productivity | Bring them home now
Fifteen years ago my wife and I were so frustrated with Verizon that we switched to T-Mobile to stop the agony.
What was wrong with Verizon?
At the time we just couldn't make heads or tails of our bills. They were long, confusing documents loaded with unexplained charges. They were baffling.
We're not idiots
My wife is an Ivy League trained physician with multiple degrees. I myself was a decent student through college and grad school. Yet somehow, we found these bills inscrutable.
Almost as if they were designed to be confusing...
Each month we'd reach out to Verizon to explain the bills, but it was pointless -- just an unending maze of IVR and exhausted reps.
After years of this we switched to T-Mobile, even though they had less coverage than Verizon.
T-Mobile was immediately better
Their billing was straightforward and coverage wasn't that bad.
But 10 years later something BIG changed at T-Mobile.
One day I called customer support because my new iPhone wasn't working.
The rep answered in a cheerful tone, "Hi this is Amy with T-Mobile Support in Colorado Springs, who am I speaking with?"
(I live in Denver and this person was nearby in Colorado Springs. Not Atlanta. Not overseas. They were in Colorado.)
There was no phone tree. No wait time.
Amy was amazing. She was deeply knowledgeable. She was cheerful. She took her time. She didn't put me on hold. She asked about my day. She reassured me that she'd solve my problem.
After a few minutes, Amy added Brian, an iPhone specialist to the call. Brian was just as friendly and knowledgeable and knew how to fix my problem. Amy stayed on the line and after a couple minutes thanked me for calling T-Mobile and said goodbye.
Brian quickly fixed my issue and called back 10 minutes later to make sure it was fixed.
Five years later and I still tell everyone that I love T-Mobile
When I finished the call with Amy and Brian I told my wife how amazing the support reps were. Then I told me sister. Then my coworkers. Over the past few years I've probably told 30 others about how great T-Mobile is.
Why? Why would I tell people about my cellphone company? Because all of my previous experiences were SO BAD and because I want to spare others the pain of dealing with companies that don't get it.
I'm an unpaid evangelist for T-Mobile.
We're all desperate for human connection and help
Even before COVID, we lived in a lonely world where tech just makes us lonelier. Tech has an odd way of isolating us further from each other, and now, COVID has made it worse.
We all crave human interaction. And in the places that we really need it -- in retail experiences and customer support -- we just get more and more IVR systems, and exhausted workers struggling to make ends meet.
Great customer service is so uncommon these days that when we see it we're just blown away.
In the article below, Callie Field of T-Mobile explains how they pulled of this feat of magic at T-Mobile -- by making what they call "Un-carrier moves" and by clustering experts together in pods.
To paraphrase the article:
"By 2015, T-Mobile had made huge strides to move the entire telecom industry forward, but we hadn’t given customer care the Un-carrier treatment. The entire industry had embraced interactive voice response, or IVR, an automated system that led to a runaround of pressing buttons, yelling at bots and feeling super frustrated. (A 2018 survey revealed that 39 percent of customers would rather clean a toilet than deal with an IVR!) Carriers had randomized call routing, so any of their millions of customers might be served by any of their thousands of care agents. Performance was measured one call at a time, and companies were more concerned with shortening call time in the name of saving money than taking their time to solve customer problems."
"Around that time, my boss asked me a question about care that came from a classic disrupter point of view: Are we measuring the right thing?"
Amazing customer support is a HUGE differentiator for T-Mobile and it's the reason we've been customers 15+ years. It's also something other companies should copy.