We previously covered T-Mobile’s plans to upgrade legacy customers to newer plans without asking first, then the subsequent backtracking where CEO Mike Sievert said it was just a “small test”. Now Sievert has confirmed the entire thing is scrapped, at least in their current form.
During the Q3 2023 Earnings Call, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert confirmed that the initial planned migrations will no longer be happening (and never actually began), and also claiming the backlash was due to the “erroneous context” surrounding the leaked documents.
“We tend to do tests and pilots of things quite a bit to try to figure out what’s the right answer. In this case we had a test cell to try to understand customer interest in and acceptance of migrating off old legacy rate plans to something that’s higher value for them and for us.
And we had planned to test and did some training around that. And then it leaked, and it leaked as if it was a broad national thing, and it kind of wasn’t. Now, I don’t know that we have to do that test because we did get plenty of feedback thanks to the erroneous context of the leak, and I think we’ve learned that particular test cell isn’t something that our customers are going to love.”
CEO Mike Sievert, at 25:14
Somewhat worryingly, though, President of Marketing, Strategy, and Products at T-Mobile Mike Katz followed that up by saying they’re still going to continue these “tests”.
We conduct tests and pilots all the time. And we will continue to do so because we still think there’s opportunities both to deliver more value for customers in a bunch of different ways… So I would expect to see more of those kinds of tests from us.
President Mike Katz, at 28:03
Sievert then agreed, once again confirming the previous test will no longer be done, but also saying they “remain very interested in rationalizing our legacy rate plans”.
Yeah, you know, although that particular test cell doesn’t need to be executed now we remain very interested in rationalizing our legacy rate plans for IT purposes, simplification purposes, revenue realization purposes, customer satisfaction and retention purposes. So we’re going to stay at it. But that particular idea is, you know, we’ll probably do something different.
CEO Mike Sievert, at 28:30
Seemingly, it appears the public won this time, and T-Mobile realized customers aren’t going to take such moves laying down.
It’s clear T-Mobile wants to do something about the customers on older plans paying less for their service, though. They may pretend that it’s for the benefit of the customer, but we can read between the lines here. We can only hope the company will continue to at least allow customers to say no to migrations to newer, more expensive, plans. Only time will tell.
