Dive Brief:
- T-Mobile is making steady progress on its digitalization goals, including its strategy to reduce person-to-person customer service interactions by 75%, Mike Sievert, president and CEO of T-Mobile, said on a Q3 2024 earnings call Wednesday.
- To meet that goal, the wireless carrier aims to use AI to preemptively uncover problems and either solve them or inform customers, Sievert said on a Deutsche Telekom Capital Markets Day 2024 presentation earlier this month.
- T-Mobile is also simplifying the buying experience by making the online shopping process easier. This contributed to the majority of T-Mobile branded iPhone pre-orders being digital for the first time this year, according to Sievert.
Dive Insight:
T-Mobile’s CX plans lean heavily on both internal and customer-facing AI applications to deliver better experiences across the customer lifetime, from plan browsing through issue resolution.
One common source of service interruptions, and by extension customer service calls, is network upgrades, according to Sievert. AI can help T-Mobile preemptively track where field work may cause disruptions and ensure all affected customers are informed ahead of time.
Sievert compared such disruptions to fixing a pothole-filled street without a sidewalk. The government can improve the neighborhood by tearing the pavement up to put in fresh asphalt and pedestrian walkways — but the process may generate a lot of angry calls if work starts without warning.
“That's a good deal for you, but not if they forgot to tell you it was going to happen, and you can't get home while they're working on it,” Sievert said during the Deutsche Telekom presentation.
AI is also expected to ensure human agents have the right answers on hand for customers that do call. Workers can use AI to quickly determine where the customer is located, what is causing the disruption and when service will resume.
T-Mobile has plans for customer-facing AI as well. The company is aiming to lean into the technology in its goal to handle 100% of all device upgrades digitally.
T-Mobile has lagged behind competitors in digital shopping due to its complicated plans, according to Sievert. AI can streamline the shopping experience by taking information and summarizing it in a way that’s easy for customers to understand.
“If there's one thing that AI is great at, as we all know, it's making the complicated simple and helping you understand vast amounts of complicated information, putting it right in front of you in three or four bullet points,” Sievert said.
