T-Mobile Team of Experts

I’m really excited to finally be able to share some of the concepts for a project over two years in the making — T-Mobile’s latest “Un-Carrier” move, Team of Experts.

Have you ever noticed how most companies hide where to get customer service? Have you ever noticed how it’s next to impossible to find a phone number to call? And forget about talking to a real person. The customer service industry thrives on hiding, confusion, frustration and the hopes you’ll just give up. Why? Because customer service is expensive. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars a year expensive.

T-Mobile has won JD Power’s award for best customer service 3 years in a row so their customer service is already stellar. How do you make a winning thing even better? Blow it up and totally turn the customer service model on its head. What T-Mobile did was put customer service front and center. We built and deployed (at enterprise scale) the ability to let customers TEXT customer support on their time, any time they want. No more being tied to an annoying pop-up window on your desktop computer fearing for your life that you’ll get disconnected or accidentally close it. No more clunky voice-activated phone systems. This is as easy as texting a friend.

My role as the Senior UX Design Manager for the project was to envision the what-ifs and figure out how to strip out all the extra baggage of old style customer service. The goal was to create a new way to interact with customer service that had zero learning curve.

The solution we came up with is texting directly with a care rep that looks and feels totally natural to the OS on your device. Along the way, we imagined a whole suite of widgets that the reps could drag and drop into message threads to help provide contextual information and tasks.

The result was nothing short of phenomenal. It was an industry first. It was so revolutionary that T-Mobile hosted over 50 top tech companies like Apple to see it in action at one of our local call centers. Coincidentally, immediately following there’s been serious growth mirroring our efforts like Apple Business Chat that look strikingly similar to our original concepts.

Role: Senior UX Design Manager, Experience Designer, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer

Skills Used: Identity, Graphic Design, UI, UX, XD, IA, Visual Design, Wireframes, Copywriting, Production Design, Project Management, Strategy, Product Development