- T-Mobile unveiled a new switching app designed to take the hassle out of moving from AT&T or Verizon to T-Mobile
- With “Switching Made Easy,” the process will take 15 minutes thanks to AI and the T-Life app
- Pulling this off requires some back-end technical wizardry
LAS VEGAS—T-Mobile aptly timed its big switching reveal to coincide with the Las Vegas Grand Prix (LVGP) – emphasizing the speed at which it’s ready to switch customers from Verizon and AT&T over to the T-Mobile network.
Newly installed as T-Mobile’s CEO, Srini Gopalan took the stage with T-Mobile marketing guru Mike Katz on Thursday to unveil the whole scheme. The so-called “un-carrier” calls it a major upgrade to the switching experience, making it faster and hassle-free.
But wait a minute. Isn’t porting a phone number supposed to take a matter of minutes? Yes, affirmed Techsponential President Avi Greengart. Carriers for years have been able to switch phone numbers from one carrier to another in a relatively short time. That’s not considered an “ah ha” moment.
“That part is pretty fast, no matter who you’re going from or to,” Greengart told Fierce.
The problem is the industry’s shift to family plans where multiple people are on an account with multiple phones and sometimes different service levels. That’s where it gets tricky.
“The process of moving three, four or five people from one service to another can be pretty complicated,” Greengart said.
The routine can leave someone without a phone for one hour or half a day – time that, let’s just say, an angsty teen doesn’t want to experience. That theme came up more than a few times during T-Mobile’s stage performance.
Gopalan seems to know what he’s talking about. During a CNBC appearance in September, he hinted that big changes were coming to the switching space, noting how “you’ve got to get your 17-year-old and your 19-year-old into the store. It can be a really tough process.”
On Thursday at the LVGP event, he said you’ve got to get your teenagers to go to a store and spend a Saturday afternoon going through the laborious switching process.
“That makes no sense. That's fundamentally dumb, and the ironic thing is that's the design of this. It's designed to be a horrible process,” he said. “Today, for us, is all about putting an end to this. It is about smashing the biggest customer pain point today: switching … It is about putting the customer in the driving seat.”
T-Mobile: Switching Made Easy
Under T-Mobile’s new “Switching Made Easy” theme, the process – starting December 1 – will take 15 minutes using the AI-powered Easy Switch in the T-Life app. The app will fetch details from a prospective customer’s Verizon or AT&T account, compare current phone plans and then recommend a T-Mobile plan.
The whole process is designed to be done from a person’s couch if they don’t feel like going to a store. “From my couch? With a mimosa?” said a woman in T-Mobile’s consumer focus group. Sure! “In as little as one mimosa, you could switch,” T-Mobile Consumer Group President Jon Freier quipped in a video clip of him consulting with prospective customers.
That seemed to go over well with a lot of folks in the Las Vegas audience.
As for the phone, T-Mobile customers will have up to 90 days to choose a new phone if they want to wait for a new device or a better promotion. Once they decide on a device, they can get it delivered the same day via Door Dash – depending on where they live. That service is starting at select T-Mobile stores in major cities and expanding from there.
More than T-Mo marketing
While this all sounds like a great marketing scheme for T-Mobile, it’s obviously not all accomplished through the magic of marketing. A lot of technical know-how had to make it happen.
“We had to line up a lot of our back-office systems to support it,” acknowledged T-Mobile Chief Technology Office John Saw at the end of an interview focused mostly on the tech T-Mobile is showcasing at the LVGP. (More on that tech to come in subsequent coverage.)
Fierce caught up with Chetan Sharma, founder of Chetan Sharma Consulting, who said the porting process itself is relatively easy, but “you still have to go through the manual process of getting the code, inserting the code and sometimes it does require you to go to the store or be on a call,” he said.
“It’s still the back-end systems that are waiting for data to be fed for them to crank out the whole porting process,” he said. “I think they've probably automated all of that functionality in the back end. That's how they're able to do it in 15 minutes."
It bears noting that this is T-Mobile switching customers from AT&T and Verizon to T-Mobile. Customers who want to leave T-Mobile for these other carriers will need to deal with those carriers’ respective processes.
How AT&T and Verizon respond to T-Mobile’s latest switching move remains to be seen.
“I think it's a good thing competitively for T Mobile,” Greengart concluded. “If you're already considering moving to T-Mobile, this is going to make it seem like they care about the process. It doesn't make T-Mobile inherently more desirable as a destination. For that, T-Mobile needs to continue pushing their message on network, on satellite and on freebies.”