Dive Brief:
- T-Mobile credited its customer-first mindset for the strength of its quarterly and annual results in a Q4 2024 earnings release last week. Total service revenues rose 6% year over year to $16.9 billion for the fourth quarter and 5% year over year to $66.2 billion for fiscal 2024 as a whole.
- The company added a record net 903,000 postpaid phone customers, Mike Sievert, president and CEO, said on the fourth quarter earnings call last week. The company also reported its lowest ever total postpaid churn.
- More than 50 million people downloaded the T-Life app in 2024, topping the network provider’s goal of 40 million, according to Sievert. The app launched in early 2024 and allows users to to redeem perks from the T-Mobile Tuesdays program, which includes exclusive discounts and gifts for T-Mobile customers every Tuesday. It serves as a general account management tool, too.
Dive Insight:
T-Mobile will deepen its relationship with customers and “meet them where they want us to be” to maintain its momentum, according to Sievert.
“As you know, a big part of our growth trajectory centers on tapping into digital to transform customer experiences,” Sievert said. “And we're already seeing great results from our efforts in this area.”
T-Mobile’s investments in AI to preemptively uncover problems, which aim to either solve them or inform customers, are paying off as well, according to Ulf Ewaldsson, president of technology. Not only does the process help detect potential outages, it can guide infrastructure investments.
The technology team is using AI to analyze millions of data points across the network provider’s database daily to understand customer sentiments and movement, then allocate capital where it can have the biggest impact.
“It comes to our customer centricity,” Ewaldsson said. “The whole network team has industrialized a process over the last year that gives the opportunity for us to dedicate towers, build up upgrades, everything we do to exactly where customers need it.”
The AI investments are also helping T-Mobile support customers affected by the California wildfires, according to Sievert. Whenever a damaged area is detected, the network can borrow capacity from other sectors to maintain connectivity.
The network provider’s overall customer-first mindset is paying off, according to the results of a J.D. Powers survey of more than 19,000 wireless service customers released last week.
T-Mobile took the No. 1 spot among mobile network operators for the 15th consecutive report with an overall score of 837, beating out Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which earned scores of 815 and 806, respectively. The study rated customer care across in-store experiences, phone service and digital service on a 1,000-point scale.
