T-Mobile - Customer Service Executive of the Year
Company: T-Mobile , Bellevue, WA
Company Description: As America's Un-Carrier the new T-Mobile is redefining the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services through leading product and innovation. Since merging with Sprint in 2020, the Company also has the first & largest 5G network available, delivering outstanding wireless experiences for customers unwilling to compromise on quality and value. Headquarters are based in Bellevue, WA.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Executive of the Year
Nomination Title: Callie Field
As Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Experience Officer, Callie Field has thought a lot about what it means to care – as a company, as a country and as individuals – especially during the past year.
She leads more than 30,000 customer experience-obsessed experts and is best known for rewriting the rules of customer service through her signature Team of Experts (TEX) model, which prides itself on a culture of in-person collaboration. The model has garnered six patents and has been studied by more than 100 companies around the world!
https://hbr.org/2018/11/reinventing-customer-service
In response to COVID-19, Callie shifted the TEX model to working from home for 92% of frontline Customer Care employees – in only 20 days! And she did so while uniting two different Customer Care teams following the historic merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, and amid one of the largest social justice movements in U.S. history.
In March 2020, the pandemic caused call wait times to jump from just 90 seconds to hours. Thanks to Callie’s steady leadership and collaboration with teams across the company, her employees were able to remotely handle more than 4.5 million customer contacts in the first month alone. Many of these calls were centered around supporting customers through hardship payment plans.
Moving Experts from call centers to a remote setting required an immense amount of work across teams, including increasing server capacity, rolling out a new call routing system and setting up VPN access so employees could continue to remotely assist customers without interruption. Experts who were used to collaborating with their teams in person were introduced to digital tools such as Slack and WebEx to help maintain the smooth customer support experience that T-Mobile is known for offering.
Despite the unforeseen setbacks and challenges, Callie remains relentless in her pursuit to help the company become #1 in customer choice and in customers’ hearts. Her passion for creating a best-in-class customer experience begins with empowering employees to deliver big commitments to T-Mobile customers:
We will make it easy to connect with us.
-You will never have to repeat yourself – ever.
-You have a team of experts who get it right the first time.
-If you’d rather fix it yourself and never call us, we’ll show you how.
Ultimately, Callie treats her Experts as business owners and encourages them to make decisions that benefit the customer, as well as T-Mobile’s bottom line.
She firmly believes that when you put the customer first, customer care doesn’t have to be a cost center – it can be a profit driver. And her strategy is working: T-Mobile’s Net Promoter Score has improved 8 points year over year and is in the top 5% of industry benchmarks, with 50% fewer detractors.
As the executive sponsor of T-Mobile’s Multicultural Alliance, one of the company’s 10 Employee Resource Groups, Callie is committed to encouraging an open dialogue across the company and inviting everyone to bring their true selves to work. In addition to regularly holding virtual town halls with her teams to discuss what’s on their minds, she also has weekly discussions with her extended leadership (director+) team, as well as monthly all hands meetings with all employee managers and above. In these meetings, her goal is to celebrate the work they do and reiterate the values and culture that make T-Mobile famous for Care.
Callie is also a regular host of the company’s Talking with Trailblazers events. The series opens up important conversations for employees about using one’s voice for good and standing united against injustice. External guests have included Black community leaders like professor Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Common, award-winning hip-hop artist and actor.
Callie is always searching for brilliant people, perspectives, books and podcasts. She shares takeaways to improve the quality of her Customer Care team’s work, whichstrengthens the quality of the customer experience they provide.
How Callie Field measures success:
Happy customers
-NPS up 68% since 2016
-In top 5% of industry benchmarks, with 50% fewer detractors
-Top in J.D. Power 7 times in a row
-Led HarrisX polling CSR service satisfaction every quarter for last 4 years
Customers staying longer
-From 2015-2019, lowered postpaid phone churn from 1.39% to 0.89%
-In 2020, Magenta base had lowest churn in industry
Consumer relationships
-Care activations up 4 times with TEX
-Buying more and calling less in 2020 – contacts per account down 13% YoY (driven by TEX, collection holds, self-service, AutoPay and launch improvements); activations up 157% YoY
Effortless resolutions
-TEX cut calls per account in half
-Reduced cost to serve per CSR by 1/3+
Nimble Experts
Work-from-home deployment to >95% of internal