IVR is popular because it drives efficiency. Simple requests are automated. Expensive human interaction is minimized. However, as self-service options have grown, basic transactional calls—balance inquiries, address changes, etc.—have slowed. Calls are now complex issues that customers can’t solve alone—and IVR models are outdated. Measuring success by efficiency alone is fundamentally a broken model that creates customer and employee frustration, and T-Mobile decided a complete reinvention was required.

Ultimately, T-Mobile realized a version of account management common in B2B settings—where a dedicated sales and service team manages a pool of customers—could work. The question was how to implement at scale across thousands of reps at dozens of locations serving 40 million customers. This required rethinking literally everything about how a call center experience works, from how calls were routed, to how people were trained, to how success was measured.

We first clearly defined the problem and made sure it met “Un-carrier” move criteria: was it truly changing the way an industry operated for the better? We then broke it down for audience-specific messaging: customers hate dealing with robots, employees hate dead end jobs, the industry spending money on the wrong things.

The creative idea focused on all the ways we could bring the experience of TEX to life. We targeted just two media (CNET for its visual storytelling and audience and Harvard Business Review for its academic credentials) to join onsite at a Customer Experience Center (CEC) for a deeply immersive experience. These two outlets were critical to bring the earned story to life. With our owned and paid channels, we hosted a live broadcast from the CEC, distributed creative media mailers, created multiple explainer videos, and conducted broad media outreach, and social media campaigns.

Putting customer experience at the center, we built a narrative around solving customer pain points and decided on a live broadcast announcement from a CEC in Charleston, SC to ground the message in the people of T-Mobile.

Our key message was that “customer service in America was fundamentally broken” and only a complete revolution could deliver change for our three audiences: customers, employees and the entire industry of call centers. We found data, including an annual National Rage Study and US Labor Department numbers to ground our arguments.

We created videos to bring the human element to life by focusing on employees and b-roll of the CEC work environment.

We turned the data into “Customer Service: The Game” boardgame for media, with a Candy Land style maze of endless loops that educated media on facts and stats about the tragic state of call center industry.

T-Mobile Team of Experts creates cross-functional groups of ~40 people who serve a set of customer accounts in a specific market. Team members are co-located, but not necessarily in the same area as their clients. A team in Chattanooga is responsible for 120,000 customers in Detroit, and a team in Charleston serves a similar number of customers in Philadelphia. However, team members are intimately familiar with the places their customers live.

To encourage collaboration and innovation, the TEX model uses a balanced scorecard that weights both individual and team performance. A dramatic departure from typical schemes for evaluating customer service agents, which measure only individual performance, encouraging reps to hoard knowledge and look out for themselves. With the emphasis on team effectiveness, tenured reps have more incentive to share best practices.

T-Mobile is investing in making customer care a true career – more training, more opportunities for advancement, more customer-focused incentives. T-Mobile even redesigned the physical spaces to foster a positive atmosphere. T-Mobile launched TEX nationwide August 2018 and actively licensed its IP for free as well as hosted a TEX Talks event to hosting 200 companies on how to make a TEX model work for their customers and employees.

Even more important than headlines or coverage metrics, our campaign had a real impact on our customers, our employees and the entire customer care industry. Since T-Mobile launched TEX nationwide, Net Promoter Scores, which measure likelihood to recommend a brand, is up to an all-time high - directly aligning with business priorities.

Team of Experts will reinvent the definition of customer service for ALL brands, because we want customers everywhere to feel appreciated and receive quality customer service. That’s why we’re offering to help other companies achieve this milestone, by licensing our IP for free and letting them tour our customer care centers to experience our culture first-hand. With resources available, any company can work toward implementing a Team of Experts approach and raise the bar when it comes to customer service.