For example, we’ve seen many stories where a T-Mobile customer was told that he or she could not buy a new phone without adding a case, a screen protector, a charger, a new line, and more. In some cases, items like these were fraudulently added to a customer’s bill without their permission. The pressure to do illegal things like that comes from the metrics. The leak shows that the T-Mobile store in question told reps to strive to add 3 accessories with each phone sold. Reps that fail to meet these goals fear that they will be written up and fired.
The anonymous corporate store manager said that the metrics increase every month regardless of whether traffic in the store dies or goals are not met. One telling comment he told me is that the only way a rep can meet all of the metrics in a given month is by resorting to fraud.
“We are basically training customers to replace our jobs while having increasing goals, with rumors of store closures, and more to deal with.”-Anonymous T-Mobile corporate store manager
The manager I spoke with also said part of the problem is that T-Mobile is a public company. As we’ve stated multiple times, once current CEO Mike Sievert replaced former CEO John Legere in 2020 when the Sprint acquisition closed, the company’s focus seemed to change from putting the customer first to putting the stockholders first. And many of those stockholders are T-Mobile executives such as Sievert. As of August 13th, the CEO owned 398,124 shares of T-Mobile valued at $93.5 million at the current stock price.
Most T-Mobile reps I’ve spoken with say that they enjoyed working for T-Mobile when Legere was running the company. The store manager I chatted with today made an interesting comparison. He said that Legere was customer-service-oriented while Sievert is goal-oriented. Being goal oriented is not necessarily bad unless you are blind to some of the things that are being done to reach those goals.
As we said, several T-Mobile reps have been telling us the same story. As long as the stock continues to make new highs, Sievert is under no pressure to change the compensation system which would make life easier for his employees and for T-Mobile customers.
