T-Mobile has long placed the customer at the heart of its business.
“It's embedded in the mission and vision of the company,” said Carly Rintisch, senior consumer insights manager at T-Mobile, speaking to CX Dive at Qualtrics' X4 event last month.
When it comes to providing a good digital experience, customers want a different experience than they do in person. They want to quickly and efficiently accomplish the tasks they came online for.
To meet its goal of ensuring customers can easily accomplish their task without needing to speak to a human, T-Mobile needed to mine customer data to identify, and fix, pain points. But Rintisch was running into a problem: Teams were only using part of the data available to them.
T-Mobile has a database through Qualtrics that collects all the transactions and interactions of its current customers. This behavioral data was being ignored, however, in favor of surveys.
“It's much easier to add a question to the survey,” Rintisch said. "Like, why do I need to connect it with all behavioral data if I can just add a question?”
The problem was T-Mobile was asking customers questions on information they already had access to, and the longer the survey with questions the customer felt should already be known, the less likely a customer would complete it.
T-Mobile needed to shift the mentality around behavioral data and marry it with survey data. Rintisch began meeting with other departments and talking to VPs about using the data for their needs. As more VPs began to use the behavioral data, others began to take note.
Along the way, T-Mobile revamped the survey language to be more casual.
“We changed the way that the survey was presented, because in our app, in our stores, in our website, the tone and voice of T-Mobile is — remember, we are the young carrier, underdogs,” Rintisch said. “So we don't talk very buttoned up.”
With the use of behavioral data, the survey shrank down to two minutes, instead of 10 minutes, “because we only asked what we don't know about the experience, and not what you actually did,” Rintisch said.
The business uncovered some routine problems: Customers could not find the information they needed on the website, for instance. “It tends to be the highest pain point,” she said.
But with Qualtrics’ AI, it could then follow up and ask for more specifics.
“Then the AI probes, like, ‘Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. What information were you looking for that you cannot find?’ Boom, and then we have it all there.”
Often customers were looking for benefits activation, and the insights team was able to encourage the team not to bury that information in the website.
