1. What are some ideas on creating a successful "team" to handle customer service calls?2. How can you reduce and prevent "social loafing" on teams?3. What mobile phone service do you use? Why? Are you happy with their service? Monthly cost
I'IIULIIUHIU qu [JU- TDvlobile Headquarters, Believue, Washington, USA. In the past six years, TMobile has grown from 33 million to 86 million customers, increasing its share of the US wireless market from 10 to 16.4 percent. The company achieved this remarkable growth by responding with an \"uncarrier\" strategy that re rrroved key restrictions found in competitors' wire less services. TMobile was the first to eliminate restrictive, expensive two-year contracts and to offer unlimited minutes, texts and data. Exorbitant roarrring charges for international plans? T Mobile charges a meager 20 cents per rnimrte for international calls, while providing unlimited intenratiorral data and texts at no extra charge in 210 countries. Moreover, with large shares of US international calls (35 percent) and US international travel (55 percent) going to Mexico turd Can- ada, TMobile consolidated all three countries into one North American market in which access to data plans, 4C LTE fast connections, and calling are included at no extra cost. Finally, are low data caps preventing music and streaming video on your phone? T Mobile One introduced unlimited data, with music and IID video streaming. TMobile then crrt the price of its unlimited plans by including sales taxes and regulatory fees in the advertised prices (not in addition to), and by reducing plans $5 a month if customers used autopay and by 810 a month when a phone uses less than 2GB a month. Brrt one place where TMobile hadn't surpassed competitors was customer senice. TMobile has 17 customer care (call) centers across the United States, with 10,600 customer care employees. A typical call center is row alter row of call center employees working in cubicles, following a prewritten script of prompts and responses, all with the clock ticking to keep calls as short as possible. Forty percent of calls are transferred to someone else for resolution because the first call center repre- sentative lacks the training, data, or authority to solve the customers problem. Supervisors roam on foot, helping out on calls in which customers ask to speak to a manager. Overall, the \"rst-call resolution rate,\" a standard industry measure of perfor mance, is about 40 percent, meaning that 60 percent of customers are dissatised the first time they call seeking help with a problem. Furthermore, since calls are randomly assigned to available call reps, calling back requires starting over by going through the entire problem again. Call reps are also dissatised imagine only solving customer problems 40 percent of the time. The average turnover rate in the industry is 27 percent a year. But at TMobile, call center rep turnover was much higher at 42 percent. TMobile tried addressing these issues by automating as many simple and repetitive tasks (address changes, unused data balamces, changing credit card information for billing, etc.) as possible, pushing them to automated call systems, or the rrruclr improved and simplified customer app and website. That worked But the unanticipated consequence was that T Mobile call center reps were left dealing with a v ariety of complex problems that they couldn teasily solve. You told your top management team that T Mobile 5 call centers were a pain point lor customers, that this was an issue for all service industries, and that we had to fix them because customers and call center reps were so lnrstrated. You have given this a lot of thought. What you have tentatively decided to do may strike sorrre people as radical, but the rrrore you think about it, the rrrore you are convinced that it is the right decision. You are thinking about eliminating the traditional call center model based on individual representatives and replacing it with \"customer representative" teams. You tell your top managers, \"We might just want to consider using teams.\" As you look around the room, you cam sense mixed reactions. One top manager says, \"I just don't know. Where I used to work, we switched to teams and the employee turnover rate, which was low single digits, quickly jumped to nearly 25 percent.\" You responded, \"I understand your reluctance. Teams an be tricky But, they hold a lot of promise, too. If done right, both customer and employee satisfaction should rise, while costs decrease. But, you're right. Lots of companies have failed when switching to teams." Let's think about this. First, does it make sense for us to use teams? \"so, what kind of teams should we use, tradi tional work groups with little autonomy who report to managers, or, self-managing teams that have complete authority to make decisions and solve problems on their own. In other words, if we go with teams, do we get a little bit wet or do we jump all the way in the water? Also, what should the teams look like (i.e., who should be on the teams)? If not teams, how do we run our customer service centers better? Second, how should people who work on teams be trained and evaluated to achieve our twin goals of decreasing phone transfers turd maximizing customer happiness? We've got to nd a way to encourage individual initiative, while at the same time encouraging people to work together on teams. Third, how should the teams be created and their work structured? Do we need to carefully screen current call reps for team work, should we hire new people for teams, or should we just roll out the teams with all of our current reps and see what happens? Teams are expensive, so should customers have 24-hour access or just enough to cover all four time zones in the country, say 7 am. to .9 p.111? [low important is it to balance costs with customer satisfaction? Finally, should the teams be virtual or physically located together? What are the advantages and disadvantages of each? If you were T-Mobile's CEO, what would you do
