Changing Metrics to Change a Broken Industry

At T-Mobile, we’ve been saying for years that the entire wireless industry is broken, and that as the Un-carrier, we’re fixing it for good. And when it comes to customer care in wireless, we’re talking about the Mt. Everest of customer pain points. Other companies see a huge, impossible obstacle, and they settle for the status quo. We see an opportunity to be the first to get on top of a monumental challenge — and to bring the entire industry with us along the way.

I’m proud to say that according to J.D. Power, we’re definitely on top. To get there, the first and most important thing we did was redefine what success in customer care looks like.

As customers ourselves, we’re all familiar with that dreadful feeling of having to reach out to customer support. And we’re not wrong to feel that way. Once the initial sale or service is over, most companies see no obvious profit motive for righting wrongs or going above and beyond the basic transaction. Instead, they actively discourage issue resolution by bouncing customers from agent to agent until they hang up. It’s all part of a broken customer service industry that is shockingly worth billions of dollars.

“This structure,” Anthony Dukes and Yi Zhu wrote in a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, “keeps a lid on the amount of redress customers are willing to seek. In other words, by forcing customers to jump through hoops, the organization helps curb its redress payouts.”

Any normal person looks at that statement and sees a totally broken system. But somehow that’s the way most companies operate.

Under their backward approach, customer support success is measured in handle time — the number of seconds their agents spend on the phone with any individual customer. Passing off the customer from one agent to another is a good minimizing tactic. Even better is making them hang up altogether. Keep handle times low, move the customer along, save a bunch of money, and do it over and over again — that’s the name of their game.

No wonder internet, cable and wireless providers have historically been among the worst-rated industries in customer satisfaction!

Keeping in mind everything wrong with customer care, we went to work to make it right. One of the first major realizations we made is that we were measuring success all wrong. Customer happiness is the most important metric. So we spent months counting the problems our customers described and listening to their complaints and suggestions. We analyzed thousands of customer care calls and interactions. We considered the experience and feedback from our frontline care team — a team we knew was extremely capable and fully committed to customer service but lacked a clear path to truly put the customer first. We listened. And then we changed.

Employee feedback combined with a customer-centric point of view brought us an entirely different perspective — the Un-carrier perspective! We tossed out the doctrine of measuring a call as a cost and we decided to measure it as a chance to deepen customer relationships. That new point of view led us to a whole new set of metrics, all based on customer happiness. Those metrics are the basis for the proprietary care model we called Team of Experts, or TEX, and they can be boiled down to four questions:

1.     Is the customer happier?

2.     Is the customer staying with us longer?

3.     Is the customer deepening their relationship with us?

4.     Is the customer doing all of this with less effort?

The responses to these questions seem more complicated than any number you can find on a stopwatch. And to some degree they are. But there are also specific metrics that correspond to each question. And we’ve found that by getting them right — by making our customers feel more taken care of, more understood and more satisfied — we’ve made huge strides for our business.

1. A happy customer is one who recommends a company to their friends, family and social networks. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer likelihood to recommend a brand, has increased 60% since 2016.

2. Customers have joined and are staying with T-Mobile in record numbers. Our branded postpaid phone churn rate — the measure of customers lost per quarter – has dropped steadily since 2015. Earlier this year, it stood at .78%, a record low previously unprecedented at T-Mobile. 

3. Customers spend more of their wallet share with a company they feel committed to. We’ve seen a 160% increase in new lines of service added to accounts since the inception of TEX.

4. We want to do the work for our customers, not the other way around. Through spending more time ensuring that a customer is completely taken care of, we’ve seen a 37% decrease in Calls Per Postpaid Account (CPA) since 2016.

Our shift to TEX is an investment in serving customers rather than avoiding them. That drop in CPA comes as a direct result of a 45% increase in handle time since 2016, because spending more time with customers per call — and fully solving their problems — means they end up calling less frequently. Fewer calls translates to a lower cost to serve, which is down 26% since 2016. By allowing our Experts more time on the phone with customers, we’re focusing on creative troubleshooting, building stronger relationships, increasing revenue and lowering churn.

This kind of opportunity for total reinvention comes around maybe once in a generation, and I’m thrilled that T-Mobile is embracing the full potential to deliver a truly revolutionary form of care. Our customers say so, our employees say so and the industry’s most respected analysts say so. And we’re only getting better.

Metrics matter. But people are not numbers. They deserve respect, competence and empathy from the companies they interact with. That belief lies at the core of TEX — and at the core of T-Mobile across the board. And we’ve invested not only in our customers, but in our employees as well, turning our care team into a viable career path. I’ll tell you more on that in the next installment, so stay tuned.

If you or your company is interested in adopting T-Mobile’s industry-leading Customer Care model, please check out this link.