T-Mobile USA is one of the largest telecom operators in the USA, providing 5G coverage for more than 80% of Americans. Their mission is to put customers first and they’ve changed the wireless industry because of it. Sticking to their mission and making good on their promise to customers, T-Mobile is building their customer-first future with the help of community..

Enabling self-service to reduce impact on the call center

When T-Mobile initially came to inSided, the main use case was to offer a scalable solution for customers to self-serve. They wanted to give customers a way to get help with all of their questions quickly and easily. Something that, as a result, would also reduce the impact on their call center.

As we all know, customers are diverse, and so are their questions. While T-Mobile’s FAQ section could help in many cases, it didn’t provide the best experience for customers, especially in moments where an FAQ is too general to solve a question. Instead, the team at T-Mobile looked to community to provide customers with a channel where they could find more specific information easily, but would also be able to ask questions and receive answers directly from their peers. The result? 82% of support inquiries are now solved by peer-to-peer support rather than T-Mobile’s dedicated support team.

The community, as opposed to an FAQ section, is capable of serving customers’ needs much more efficiently by offering a large library of user-generated FAQs which automatically follows the demand. Plus, with excellent SEO, T-Mobile is able to amplify the reach of the content, reducing the customer effort and increasing customer satisfaction. 

The community also allows them to create and highlight content which customers want to engage with, bringing the brand closer to customers and increasing brand loyalty.

Seamless implementation and merging

Implementation is a crucial part of getting started with any new SaaS product. In T-Mobile’s case, first they needed to migrate over from their existing community platform to enable a successful relaunch. Shortly after, they also needed to merge the Sprint Community with the T-Mobile Community while ensuring a seamless transition for users.

Micheal Canady, Corporate Communications Specialist, Branding & Marketing at T-Mobile USA, explains “we knew we could count on inSided as a reliable partner to help us in bringing both worlds together. They walked us through the very complex task of combining two communities from different platforms into one, which requires expertise to overcome challenges like duplicate accounts or merging gamification experiences.”

Once the two communities had been merged, T-Mobile could start working towards building their brand image through engagement.

Building a positive brand image through engagement and advocacy

T-Mobile wanted to bring a new drive to the community to differentiate themselves from other carriers. This is one of the reasons the team has recently shifted the main focus and goal of the community from offering self-service (which still plays a vital role in the community) towards a focus on engagement and advocacy. The ambition now is to generate more positive discussions around the brand in order to foster closer customer relationships and align it with their customer-first model.

Developing an effective content strategy

With the new strategy in place, the T-Mobile team continued to explore what types of content users would engage with by holding contests to see how users responded to subjects around cutting-edge technologies like 5G, but also content around data privacy and security resonated with many customers. For example, this question around verification codes has received more than 150,000 views and perfectly demonstrates the effectiveness of a centralized content strategy.

Through better SEO performance and more extensive options around highlighting content, T-Mobile was able to boost and overachieve on various key KPIs. And the results speak for themselves with 70% organic traffic and 10% returning visitors, proving that the content offers value to users. T-Mobile managed to generate more page views than initially anticipated and were even able to retain a high amount of visits from spikes like smartphone NPIs or bigger news from T-Mobile such as around 5G.

Plus, with better content discoverability across the community, they doubled their page views to perform above the 1 million/month milestone, a trend that shows no signs of slowing down.

More engagement than ever before

The T-Mobile community is now experiencing more engagement in general with more registrations and users being active compared to their previous platform. And it shows – 96% of the content in the community is currently user-generated. They’ve managed to utilize the community to nurture brand ambassadors into super users that answer thousands of questions from other users, constantly increasing their peer-to-peer support rates. 

By using notifications effectively along with their rich content strategy, T-Mobile continues to validate their content strategy by using the built-in dashboards to understand what types of content resonates the most with their customers. Next, they aim to reach even more ambitious milestones in attracting and engaging with users to bring their customers even closer to their brand and their story.

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