What It Means to Care

When T-Mobile finds strength in vulnerability, we become a better company.

By Callie Field, Executive Vice President of Customer Care, T-Mobile

As Executive Vice President of Customer Care for T-Mobile, I naturally find myself thinking about what it means to care. Here at the Un-carrier, caring revolves around providing the best possible experiences to our customers. But given all we faced in 2020 — as a company, as a country and as individuals — the very notion of care has taken on new meaning for me.

Care is not only creating a safe, inclusive workplace for employees — something we have been recognized for with countless articles, awards and industry accolades. It is not only providing immediate human-to-human support to customers, like we do with our innovative Team of Experts model. It is not only solving pain points across the wireless industry, like we have done with every one of our Un-carrier moves.

Care is all of those things, but it is also more.

T-Mobile merged with Sprint last year, and together we recently created a new manifesto that starts with a basic premise: We love our customers. And guided by our values as a company, we are working as one team to deliver on our mission, vision and purpose.

We aim to be #1 in customer choice and #1 in customers’ hearts. Getting there involves putting people first, treating them right and changing the rules in their favor. It means constantly asking ourselves if we can do better and being open to feedback if we fall short. All of this arises from embracing the next level of care — the kind that comes from being vulnerable.

Being vulnerable speaks to this moment in history, and it paves the way for learning and improving like nothing else can.

T-Mobile is the perfect laboratory for an exploration of vulnerability. Our leaders realized years ago that listening to employee feedback — positive and negative — builds trust and leads to growth. They found strength in being open and being vulnerable. Our #BeYou philosophy has long encouraged our employees to bring their full selves to work, and being true to yourself is one more form of vulnerability. It leads to trust: trust in yourself, your colleagues and your customers. Trust empowers us to try new things and push beyond our self-perceived limitations, and it all comes from being vulnerable.

Sharing complex emotions, asking for help, admitting setbacks, listening to others, providing support no matter the cost — these are crucial steps to becoming a better version of ourselves. They are also the factors that lead to us becoming a stronger company. If we had been uncomfortable with embracing our vulnerability, T-Mobile would have risked stumbling in the face of COVID-19 challenges and failing our customers. Instead we recognized a paradigm-shifting event as it was unfolding and pivoted our operations accordingly.

To be honest, I was worried last year when we traded our culture of in-person collaboration for working from home in response to the pandemic. Our 14,000 Care team members talk to more than 3 million customers every week, and working seamlessly as a team is critical to their performance.

The sudden change in how we work all but forced vulnerability upon us. During countless video calls with thousands of Care employees, I have seen puppies in laps, parakeets on shoulders and children popping up to ask for help from their parents/teachers. These moments of intimacy bring us into each other’s living rooms and home offices — and closer together in ways we never predicted. They keep us grounded as a company with a beating heart. One that sees people over numbers. One that celebrates our differences, because we are better together than we are apart.

And you know what? People noticed! By the close of 2020, we had boosted our Net Promoter Score and added more than 5.5 million new customers — the most in a single year in company history. And in early February we once again received J.D. Power’s No. 1 spot for customer care in wireless, giving us a record-breaking 21 J.D. Power awards total. All this during a pandemic year when 75% of Americans surveyed said that their customer service from other companies has gotten worse.

Maybe most important of all, vulnerability is key to T-Mobile’s equity efforts. To support our country’s massive movement for social justice, we must fully understand this crisis, and once again, vulnerability is key.

As executive sponsor of T-Mobile’s Multicultural Alliance, I’ve been listening to employees of color and hearing their concerns about race relations in the workplace. Listening requires vulnerability from everyone involved. And I’ve been trying to break through my own privilege by self-educating. I’m passionate about doing this work because there is so much insight we can learn from those who have not been heard before.

That goes for T-Mobile, too. We’re listening and learning together. Over the last 18 months, we convened our 13-member External Diversity and Inclusion Council to help us identify blind spots and hold us accountable to our diversity, equity and inclusion commitments. We hosted Black community leaders like professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Both spoke to thousands of T-Mobile employees at our Talking with Trailblazers events. These brilliant people offer us valuable perspectives that will help improve the quality of our work and our workplace, which in turn will improve the quality of the customer experience we provide.

The upheavals of last year altered many aspects of how we live our lives, but in 2021, caring continues to be part of my job. It’s also the best way to relate to one another as people. My team will continue to connect customers to their world, and in the process we’ll create a more caring world to live in.