Keynote Remarks by Callie Field, EVP, Customer Care, T-Mobile

What we're about is changing wireless for good, bringing radical simplicity to this industry. That's what the next phase of Uncarrier is all about. We're listening to our employees and listening to our customers and shutting up and doing what they tell us. Success comes from serving customers. We want to delight our customers and eliminate pain points in a way that makes us absolutely famous, create a professional experience unparalleled in any kind of industry, delivering happier customers who are staying longer with deeper relationships with way less effort. This is the world's leading customer satisfaction engine.

Well hello, my name is Callie Field. It's really good to be here. Thank you guys for that. As you saw from the video, whenever I'm talking to my call center employees, there's wigs involved and dancing. But I don't see any of you out there with wigs, no dancing. Okay, I'll try and adapt. No, it really is a privilege to get to be here. I was talking with Steve earlier, and something that you may not know is that I actually grew up not too terribly far from here in a little town by the name of Dalhart, Texas. And my very first job off the farm was working at XIT Wireless. And little did I know that two decades later, I would be talking to CCA and have a tremendous experience and career in wireless. So I lead customer care for T-Mobile. I've been at T-Mobile, as Steve said, for 14 years. And today, what I would like to do is share the story of the Uncarrier and how we're changing wireless for good and how we're delivering customer experiences that make us famous for customer care. But first, I want to take you back to 2013. In 2013, four years ago, all major wireless carriers were pretty much the same. We all had contracts, we all had buckets, overages, termination fees, and all other kinds of limits and restrictions. We didn't really have anything that differentiated us one from the other. And T-Mobile, we were the number four carrier, and we were just coming out of a failed merger with AT&T. We were literally bleeding customers, had zero LTE, and our employees were disenfranchised. We didn't even have the iPhone. Out of that dark place, we knew we had to change, and that's when the Uncarrier was born. The meaning of Uncarrier is simple: it just means we're no longer gonna be like the rest. We determined that we will break the rules of wireless carriers, and at the time this felt very risky. But doing nothing guaranteed that we would wither into obscurity, and if we were gonna go down, this team was gonna go down swinging. So we started with the people who mattered the most: our employees and our customers. Employees have always had a passion for our customers, and I can tell you because 14 years ago I was living in Austin, Texas, and I started as a frontline sales rep at a wireless kiosk, where I think there's still pictures of me wearing an elf costume somewhere. I paid people so they don't show up on screens like this. But I can tell you, even back then, the employees at T-Mobile always loved our customers, and we always had kind of a wild and wacky sense of what it meant to work in the wireless industry. But we wanted to be part of something bigger. And consumers, consumers neither needed nor wanted another carrier. They wanted something different. And the industry, the wireless industry, was stupid broken, and worst of all, arrogant carriers screwed their customers. It wasn't fair, and we were going to stand for it. So change represented an opportunity for us, a huge opportunity, and we captured it with the T-Mobile manifesto. This manifesto declared, 'Hey, carriers are public enemy number one. The Uncarrier is different. The world doesn't need another AT&T. Carriers inflict pain. The Uncarrier removes pain.' We became the consumer advocate in the marketplace, and anybody can get behind that cause. The Uncarrier stood for fighting for the little guy, and this idea, this manifesto, became our reason for being. We had an opportunity to change an industry for customers by solving pain points, and man, our frontline rallied around that. We listened to our customers, we heard their pain points, and we started eliminating them one by one. We listened to our employees, to the frontline reps that were in the stores and that were taking phone calls from customers, and learned what was keeping them from delighting our customers, what kind of processes and procedures were getting in the way of absolutely solving and removing roadblocks. These are only a sample of what we've done so far, but they're big, meaningful moves. And eliminating these things didn't happen overnight, and some of them were pretty risky. If you told the wireless industry that there would be no wireless contracts, people thought we were crazy. But it took out-of-the-box thinking and a willingness to challenge the status quo for us to begin to be on the side of the consumer, to solve pain points in a way that's good for customers and also makes sense for our business. We rolled out what we called signature Uncarrier moves to address these pain points, all of them focused on empowering customers through simple, honest, and effortless services. When we say we have changed wireless for good, we mean it in two ways. First of all, we've made wireless better for every customer. And second, these changes are permanent. This isn't just a promotion that we're throwing out to the marketplace only to take it back if it doesn't suit us. When we started, the rest of the industry said, 'You're crazy,' and they'd never follow our lead. And I gotta tell you, all carriers have unlimited data, all carriers have limited contracts, and today they're all copying our moves, even if their versions are kind of poor knockoffs. But most importantly, the US customers are benefiting, and customers have noticed what we've been doing, and they're coming over in droves. We've more than doubled our customers in the past few years. And not only have we changed wireless for good, but we've changed our network's story. We've worked hard, we've invested billions of dollars, and today we have America's best unlimited network. Our network powers everything that we do. We currently have 316 million pops of LTE, and we're on our way to 321 million by the end of the year. Our 600 megahertz deployment is underway. Our first sites were lit up in Q3, and before the holiday season we'll have two handsets that support 600 megahertz. Our 600 megahertz sites are also launching with 5G-ready equipment, so we're going to be able to turn on 5G with the flip of a switch and provide the first nationwide 5G network in the US. 15 quarters in a row we've had the fastest download and upload speeds, widening the gap versus the competition. We've been named number one in every category by OpenSignal, the first major provider in the whole world to sweep all of the awards. We have the fastest speeds, all with unlimited data. We have a network that's built for how customers actually use their devices. Our customers use more data than anyone else. As you can see, Verizon and AT&T's networks have struggled over the past few months if they've delivered and offered unlimited, and it's something we're really proud to say that we're outperforming. So we've had a lot of success and a lot of momentum in our business. How do we maintain that, and where do we go from here? We're gonna go back and double down our focus on the customer experience and on transforming ourselves to an experience-obsessed company, leaning heavily on simplicity and continuing to meet our customers where they are on their own terms. I want to share a holistic look of what we're doing as a brand. As you know, many brick-and-mortar stores are really struggling. Most blame online retailers like Amazon, but our customers at T-Mobile are telling us that they want a robust retail experience, so we're giving them what they want. Now we're building a ton of stores. In fact, we've opened almost 2,000 stores over the last two years and another 1,500 in MetroPCS, going from two-thirds of the country to three-thirds of the country, bringing jobs and real estate development in over 800 new cities and over 100 new markets. For example, we've opened stores in Montana, West Virginia, Ohio, Wyoming, and Nebraska, areas where we never had a store presence. And we're also beefing up capacity in our urban, high market share areas where we dominate. In the past, for example, Houston, where we've been market leaders for years, has five times more capacity this year than we did this time last year. So if we're going to be a customer-obsessed company and we're gonna meet our customers where they are, we have to radically simplify our products, products that earn the right for a digital transformation for both online and the frontline. Our store experience has got to be fresh, interesting, and fast. We're physical and digital working together. Our stores are expertise hubs, brand showrooms, and fulfillment centers that curate an unparalleled retail experience, like in our five signature stores across the country: in Times Square, you should check that one out, it's fun and the people are really nice; the Magnificent Mile in Chicago; Miami; Santa Monica Boulevard; and we will soon be opening one on the Las Vegas Strip. Our relentless pursuit to simplify the lives of our customers extends to our T-Mobile app. It's the primary touchpoint for our customers to self-serve. We make it easy to pay a bill, set up auto pay, or if you're like me, you click three clicks and you sign up for Netflix on us. It's free. And in about a day and a half, I will be going to my Netflix on my T-Mobile phone app and downloading Stranger Things because it's coming, and I can watch it on the plane. I did watch it on a plane one time and it made me scream, so I'm gonna try and do better this time. But my point is, you could have Netflix on us and you can do it simply through our app. We even have a place where you can get help in the app, schedule a time for us to call you based on your schedule and your availability, or you can use it to send text messages to your care team. Call, text, and set up an appointment. People love text messaging. In fact, if I surveyed the room, how many of you have text messaging or are on Facebook or Twitter today? I think I'd probably have a whole room with their hands in the air. We have to meet our customers where they already are. You know, a couple of years ago, my niece, she's a teenager, she said, 'Callie, what do you do?' And I said, 'Well, I run a bunch of call centers.' And she was like, 'Call centers? Like, people call?' And I was like, 'Like a million people a week, you know, like yeah, a lot of people call.' But I thought it was so funny, and her point wasn't lost on me that she probably doesn't even know what that little handset button is on her iPhone because she text messages with anybody that she cares to talk to, or she sends them pictures, so she goes to Instagram or she's on social platforms. So T-Mobile customers can send us a message and get a response from someone on our customer care team. If the customer gets busy and can't respond right away, that's cool, just pick up the conversation where you left off when you're ready. It's support on your own time, on your own terms. This isn't online chat where you're married and tied to the desktop computer. Nope, this is a real conversation with people who are here to support you when you're ready. And you know what? Our customers love it. Meeting customers where they are also includes social. We have an awesome, savvy team who engage our customers on social. What you're seeing on the screen is an amusing exchange with a personality by the name of Phenomenal E. Now, I don't know if there's big gamers in the room. Anybody big gamers? Doesn't really look like the gaming crowd, but I'll tell you, I had to look this up. Phenomenal E is a really big broadcaster in eSports. He has over 33,000 followers. And one day on Twitter, he sent out, 'Man, I'm done with AT&T. They're the Deathstar.' And I happen to have a very cool team of T-Force agents, that's my social care team, that saw that and jumped on it. And they showed their gaming cred, and they jumped in, and before you know it, Phenomenal E switched to T-Mobile. And to his 33,000 followers and fans, he said, 'Hey, check this out, you should rock magenta too.' That's one of the ways that our T-Force team has a little fun and engages with our customers in the Twittersphere. Our T-Force team goes beyond engagement to support. We started with a team of seven in 2007, and now we have more than 250 reps that offer 24/7 support on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We lead in social engagement at T-Mobile with 10 million followers out of our 70 million customers. We have 60% more social interactions than Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint. Our volume has grown from about 600,000 interactions in 2014 to well over 8 million by the end of the year. And our customers don't just love to talk with us on social media, they love loving to talk. And what I mean by that is that our social sentiment is 65% positive. Just to put that into perspective for you, the next closest is Verizon at 26%. Our asynchronous messaging experts and our cool and astute social team, that's not the only transformation that's happening in customer service. We're revolutionizing customer care. In 2016, Nielsen awarded T-Mobile as number one in overall customer satisfaction every single month of the year. And you know what? In 2017, same story. And many of you might know this, but the Net Promoter Score for the wireless industry on a scale of 1 to 100 sits at a 29, just slightly better than the airlines, and they dragged people off planes, so it's not like, you know, amazing. But T-Mobile, we're sitting at a 59. And we don't just want to be the best of the worst. We want to be in a category all of our own. We want to be famous for care. So we decided to take a note from the Uncarrier playbook and rewrite the rules of customer service. And those are: number one, we make it easy for you to connect with us. You'll never be transferred, not ever. You have a dedicated group of representatives who get it right the first time and are empowered to do so. And if you want to fix it for yourself, that's cool, we'll show you how. Wireless customer care can feel like decades in the past. When you call the other guys, you call a number and you take a number, and you want to get help as quickly as possible, but a machine transfers you, and that person can't help, so you're sent to a new one, and after explaining your issue all over again, you're sent to an entirely different department. It's an endless maze of efficiency at all cost. Not with T-Mobile. We're taking this and simplifying it to this: a care revolution centered on the customer. From the moment you become a T-Mobile customer, you have your own group of reps dedicated to you specifically, assigned to your hometown. They know your account, they get your issues. It's one simple experience where network, care, and stores can work together to serve the customers in their area, with care as the central problem-solving hub for the customer. Everything that you need to fix it the first time is right there, working together to take endless responsibility for customer care. And I got to tell you, those are my actual reps in Meridian, Idaho, and those are actual engineering field techs, and this is from our actual retail store. So they wanted me to make sure I mention that to you, that they're famous. So how do we know that our approach to the customer experience is working? We measure it in four simple ways: Are our customers happy? Are they staying longer? Are we deepening our relationship? And are they doing all of this with less effort? We have the most satisfied customers in wireless since the launch of Uncarrier. We've gone from number four, the worst in customer satisfaction, to number one. Our Net Promoter Score of 59 puts us close to Apple at 60 or other brands that we know and love like Netflix at 64 and Amazon at 66. Our customers are staying longer. Our churn is down 54% since before the Uncarrier. We went from 2.7% postpaid churn to this last quarter, which we announced two days ago, 1.23% postpaid churn. And we are deepening our relationship with our customers. Our revenue has more than doubled over that same time period. And when I talk about customer effort, we like to say this on my team: a phone call equals pain. I don't know about all of you, but our customers don't call us when something is great. I mean, occasionally they do, but not very often. Most of the time, that's because something is broken. So a call equals pain. So one of the ways we look at less effort and better experiences for our customers is, are we decreasing the amount of calls per customer? And our calls per customer are down almost 32% since before the Uncarrier. Another thing that I look at is, does a customer trust us enough in our billing processes and our procedures for accounts to set us up on autopay and prioritize T-Mobile over every other thing that they've got going on in their lives? You know, before the Uncarrier, about 4% of our customer base was set up on autopay. And this past year, 32% of our customers are set up on autopay. Another thing that we look at: if we are creating less effort for our customers and have simple products that are digitally transacted, is the kind of customer do something like an upgrade, get a new phone on the app without having to call, without having to go to the store? And this last iPhone 8 launch, we're getting ready for another one, Thank You Apple for doing it twice, but in the iPhone 8 launch, 30% of our orders, our upgrades, were done through the app, which was a first. That means I had about 10,000 reps that got to go home a couple of hours early at 2:00 AM instead of 7:00 AM. They were pretty excited. So this is just a glimpse of the things that we're working on. We have a vision for providing an experience that goes beyond our category, that continuously surprises and delights our customers. Thank you so much for allowing me to share with you a little bit of the story of the Uncarrier. I want to leave you with another video that starts to capture the vision of what we think is possible.