TEX Tech: How Technology Helps T-Mobile Perfect Customer Care

If you’ve been following my recent posts, by now you know that T-Mobile has built so many innovations into our Team of Experts model that we changed the entire landscape of customer care. New success metrics, new retention and promotion strategies, an increased commitment to customer and employee happiness — Team of Experts involves equal amounts of big-picture disruption and finely tuned detail.

As powerful as Team of Experts is, it requires entirely new software and applications to function at its highest potential. Thanks to Care’s close partnership with T-Mobile’s Product & Technology organization, we’ve built a strong foundation — new monitoring systems, new forms of messaging, emerging artificial intelligence — that’s helping us take a giant leap away from the status quo. We’ve already created some amazing stuff, and as technology evolves, we have more in store. And it’s all in service of improving the human connection.

See, at most companies, tech forms a barrier between customers and the people who are supposed to take care of them. That’s why most customer service calls begin with a complex automated phone tree — known as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) — that takes forever to tick off numerical options when most people simply want to cut to the chase and speak to a human. It usually ends with the customer so frustrated they hang up altogether, preferring to live with the problem than deal with the IVR.

We built Team of Experts to work differently. We’re not throwing bots or automation at our customers to cut costs. Instead we’re using technology to put more power in the hands of our Experts, bringing them closer to customers than ever before. Because Team of Experts is built on a simple truth: Humans are much better at solving complex problems than machines.

When a customer calls T-Mobile, they’re connected to a member of their Team of Experts (or they can press 1 if they’d rather stay with the automated system). That’s it. No IVR, no gatekeeper, no runaround. The customer doesn’t have to lift a finger to reach a person on the other end of the line. We flipped the standard of customer engagement and connected the customer to the Expert right off the bat.

We get that customers are busy. They don’t always have time to talk on the phone with customer support. That’s why we built a function within the T-Mobile app and website that allows them to schedule a call. Just tell us the time that works best for you and we’ll call you then. We even went one step further as one of the first companies to offer asynchronous messaging. We figured that, because most of all phone interactions between friends and family occur via text, interactions with our company should be no different. Unlike traditional session-based communications, asynchronous messaging lets customers start a conversation with an Expert and keep it going on their own time, picking up wherever they leave off. Need to step away for a meeting? No problem; we'll be there waiting for you. Got distracted and forgot about your text exchange? It doesn’t end until you want it to, and you can resume with your team — often even the same team member — wherever you are.

It’s crazy that this is a revolutionary idea, but that’s why customers love Team of Experts. And that’s why T-Mobile’s Net Promoter Score (or NPS, which measures the willingness of a customer to recommend a brand to their friends and family) has risen to industry-leading heights.

These customer-facing advances are just the beginning. Thinking about where our tech will take us in the future gets pretty next-level. We’re working on features for our Experts that will allow them to excel way beyond the current capabilities of their roles.

You know JARVIS, the disembodied AI that’s basically Iron Man’s super-smart robot assistant? That’s how we like to think about the tools we’re rolling out for our Experts. Every superhero needs their JARVIS to help them save the world, and every T-Mobile expert needs their own AI to help them serve their customers as efficiently as possible.

It starts with our proprietary customer management tool, called Atlas. For the modern care worker, juggling browser windows, software and apps can be dizzying, but Atlas will bring everything they need into a single system, built with micro-apps that are easy to customize. Further down the road, Atlas will be a dynamic desktop interface that adapts to the individual needs of the Expert and customer, powered by T-Mobile’s in-house AI. If the most common call from a specific market is about an outage, Atlas will serve the Expert information about coverage and repair times. In other markets, Atlas will serve Experts other relevant information. 

AI is already being used by our Experts today in another system still in development, called Expert Assist. In its final form, Expert Assist will process conversations in real time, providing the Expert with relevant data points and previous account events to help address the customer’s concerns. Say a customer is calling about the free Netflix service provided by their T-Mobile service plan. Expert Assist understands the call is about media, then automatically serves up the relevant information to the Expert. Expert Assist solves that age-old problem of putting a customer on hold while an Expert searches for information. But rather than replace the human element, it enhances it, taking care of the mundane tasks so our Experts are free to focus on customers and ensure they are properly taken care of.  

We’re also working on a feature called Next Best Action, which is a form of predictive care. The idea is that once our Expert addresses the customer’s initial need, AI will analyze their historical data and suggest the next best action to surprise and delight them. Maybe it’s a product or service they’re not currently taking advantage of, like T-Mobile Tuesdays or Mobile Without Borders. Maybe it’s a brand-new discount on the new phone model they’ve been shopping for. The idea is to ensure the customer is making the most of their account and every last benefit that T-Mobile offers, adding value where they don’t even know it exists.

The ultimate goal is more elegant, fluid interactions — between Retail, Care and Engineering, on the web and in the T-Mobile app. No more constraints, only incredible experiences. When we say, “T-Mobile is famous for care,” this customer-experience obsession is what we’re talking about. We’ve been heading down this road since we launched the Un-Carrier era, and the further we go, the more our track record speaks for us and the more opportunities we see ahead.

So now there’s only one question: Are you with us?

If you or your company is interested in adopting T-Mobile’s industry-leading Customer Care model, let us know!