Knowing Neville - A Couple Stories

Neville Ray: The Man, The Myth, The Legend

Like many of you who have posted here, I too have been fortunate to have known Neville Ray . He has made a difference in my life.

I thought I would share a couple of stories about Neville for fun, for fond recollection (as fallible as mine may be; pre-apologies to anyone cited erroneously), and for forcing me to write something longer form. But mostly I am writing this as parables of appreciation, offering a glimpse into his character as partial insight and explanation for the prolific acclaim we see in social media and tech press.

The Man

In the early aughts, I was a market researcher for VoiceStream, soon T-Mobile. (s/o to Ed Clarke (MBA) and Cheryl Corbin .) One of my responsibilities was the Customer Satisfaction tracking study, a longitudinal quant effort measuring customer experience across many dimensions of customer touch points. Of course, “coverage” and “network performance” were important aspects of the study (and highly predictive of customer churn, which I’ll go a little deeper on in a bit).

To flesh out insights of the customer network experience and unpack the underlying interpretation of the coverage and network questions in the study, I arranged a handful of customer focus groups – qual – across the country. First stop, New York City.

In the back room behind the one-way mirror stocked with the typical fare of focus group facilities, Chinese take-out, peanut M&Ms and York Peppermint Patties (my go-to), I was joined by the local engineering leadership Christian H. and Neville Ray. (I think one more engineer from the regional RF team was also there – maybe Tareq Amin . Tim Wong may have been visiting the market too and joined the session.)

The focus group participants were recruited and screened to include just T-Mobile customers who were “somewhat dissatisfied” or “neutral” about their experience with the T-Mobile network. In other words, the session was basically designed for customers to complain about their service. (“Very dissatisfied” were not recruited – I wanted something constructive to come from the research.) It is no shocking admission that T-Mobile’s network had better days ahead (hello, spectrum), and the team of engineers eating Kung Pao behind the one-way mirror took the scalding feedback rather personally. (They wanted to know where each person lived so they could go fix the problem. Privacy prevailed.)

The next morning, I drove to the regional HQ in Parsippany, NJ, to present findings from the Customer Satisfaction tracking study about the local market network customer experience – Coverage Satisfaction (CovSat) – to a broader audience of network engineers. Later Neville called me into his office to drill me with questions about the research, the insights, and how it can be applied. This stood out to me in twos ways: (1) this technology VP saw value in what this research manager was saying (which was, “Your baby is ugly.”) – titles didn’t matter; and (2) he genuinely cared about the customer and wanted to get better, of course for the business but for them especially.

The next couple years I continued down the rabbit hole of network customer experience. I learned about spectrum, propagation, capacity, site density, capex. I learned about network performance (AFR, blocks, MOU/drop and other metrics from the RAN health index; s/o Grant Castle ). With the inputs of network coverage, network performance and customer experience (independent variables), I was able to develop a model which, market by market, could, with some accuracy (proven correlation), predict customer churn (dependent variable). Multiply customers churning by CLV and one could suggest and economic investment model.

Around the same time, customer loyalty in the form of Net Promoter Score (NPS) was coming into fashion. With the help of TNS (s/o Lisa A. Tortora ; Tracy Wellens ) we overhauled the Customer Tracking study to take advantage of NPS as well as re-crafting the network section of the research to leverage the customer insights learned in the focused groups and to align the questions to represent the network coverage and performance KPIs. Further, with competitor benchmarks on NPS and carrier market shares (by market), we could model and size the dissatisfied competitors’ customers. So now, besides having a model for retention, we now had an approach for acquisition.

Speaking of rabbit holes… Neville. This story is about Neville. He continued to be supportive and interested in my research and synthesis of insights to where I eventually was an embedded customer and competitive insights researcher on his first team. Neville was so serious about the importance of the network customer experience that CovSat became, for a time, a component of bonus compensation for the Engineering and Operations organization. Thinks about that for a second – a customer experience metric based on survey feedback, because of its key role in a model of customer retention and acquisition, affected how people got paid.

The Man. So now we come to the short version of this long story -- the story I tell people when talking about Neville is this. Each quarter I’d meet with Neville to study CovSat. The trends, seasonality, build, performance, outages… All this fed our discussion about what bonus target thresholds to set for the coming quarter (ie, top 2 box “very” or “somewhat satisfied” with T-Mobiles network performance and coverage). Here’s the part I’ll never forget – Neville thought through these targets not only in terms of delivering on a customer promise, but also in terms of employees paying their mortgages and their kids’ tuitions. In other words, here’s this guy at the top of our organization, probably with few or no material needs weighing on his mind, yet still he understood the expectations of the bill-paying customers and our frontline techs and providing for their families. Empathy like that in a leader is something someone might write about.

The Myth

When T-Mobile was still small enough, still in the aught years, the leadership team for Engineering and Operations would gather annually. Again, as I was an honorary engineer now on Neville’s first team, my support for the network customer experience would put me on the itinerary. I’d been on a few of these annual trips by this time, and along the way learned it to be a best practice to ride on the same bus as Neville – this time literally. (s/o is in order at this point, Kelly DiGregorio and Michele Welcome , they know). And this time, and location, this bus was in Denver.

For the evening activity we were headed out…rather, headed up to Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater for dinner and drinks. To set the context a bit more, this being an annual leadership meeting meant an annual kickoff to the year, which, in turn meant the beginning of the year… See where this is going? ?Which, in turn, meant Denver in the middle of winter. Everyone knows Denver is Mile High City (elev 5,279’). Red Rocks is 6,450’.

At Red Rocks, we’d barely swirled the ice of our first cocktail when the snow set in. In fact, some transport hadn't yet made it up the sloping drive, and wouldn’t. Our bus, being one of the earliest to arrive, chained up and made its way back down.

We carefully made it through the snow, then the slush, and then on wet tarmac it was time to remove the chains. The driver removed one set without trouble, but the chain on the front right tire must have been fouled. The driver struggled for some time, to no avail. If only we had some engineers… hey! (This next part, I might be fuzzy in the specific details of this recollection, or it was the altitude, or maybe I did more than swirled the ice of my cocktail.) We had no less the engineering talents of the likes of Brian King , Dave Mayo , and Chris Hillabrant on our bus. Certainly others too. Singularly or in some combination, attempts were made by our Tier 2 team, but still to no avail.

Tier 3 - The Myth. At length, Neville rises (arises?) from his seat and descended the steps of the bus. He just looks at the chains, and the chains fell off! Really – this happened. After a brief stunned silence and a few snickers, someone quipped, “Why didn’t you do that in the first place?” To which Neville replied, “It wouldn’t have been a teachable moment.”

?

The Legend

I don’t have a third story of my own for this section. You already know it… from the ashes of the AT&T failed acquisition, Metro PCS, 700 MHz, BIA, and Sprint. All of these? Hello, spectrum. Hello, layer cake.

Going from worst to first.

Going out on top.

Doing it the right way.

That’s how one becomes Legend.

Hip! Hip! Neville!

Hooray!

Kerry