T-Mobile USA

Today, 20,000 T-Mobile retail employees rely on their Jive-powered community every day for the information they need to do their jobs—helping T-Mobile cut costs, increase sales, and provide that very important differentiating customer experience that helps them stand out in a very competitive marketplace.

When time is of the essence, T-Mobile sales depends on Jive

As the competition in the mobile phone market continues to heat up, companies like T-Mobile know they have to work smarter and faster. Typically, two types of people walk into a T-Mobile retail outlets: those who want troubleshooting help ("Why doesn't my device do X?"), and those who come in to evaluate and purchase a product or service.

It's a conundrum: the more time retail employees spend troubleshooting issues, the less time they spend selling devices and services, which hurts sales. Yet, to sacrifice service for sales hurts sales as well in the long run. Could Jive help T-Mobile cut down the time they spent not just on troubleshooting but on closing the sale as well? Could Jive help them deliver better customer service faster?

Yes, it turns out, Jive can.

T-Mobile strategy

Leverage Social Business synergies across all customer facing operations
T-Mobile's strategy with their Jive platform, which they call T-Community, is to connect the dots between their Customer Care operations, their B2B operations, and their retail sales operations by consolidating and centralizing the information about products, services, pricing, policies, troubleshooting— everything that pertains to the frontline of their business—onto Jive. Before Jive, a retail sales rep could log into as many as eight different systems to find the information they needed. On Jive, it's all there for the asking.

T-Mobile reports they successfully achieved these three primary objectives in rolling out Jive to their retail outlets:

• Arm their field sales reps with the right answer, fast.
• Provide better support for a consultative sale.
• Speed up customer "onboarding" without sacrificing service.

When a new customer signs up, T-Mobile reps don't just give them the device and let them leave. They help them set up voicemail, upload their contacts, and get them comfortable with the basic features of the device. This approach leads to happy customers, fewer returns, and fewer calls into Customer Care. Onboarding information and discussions on T-Community, coupled with access to the Customer Care database, helps sales reps do this more efficiently to maximize the time they spend on sales.

T-Community is very open

Very little content is "private" or "secret"
Like many companies, T-Mobile initially leaned towards keeping a sizable chunk of information published on T-Community under wraps. However, after consideration, T-Mobile's management realized that most of the information on T-Community could be shared with no risk to the business, and they made the decision to lock down less information and promote transparency.

Monday at T-Mobile is publication day for new policies, which are addressed in about 20 blogs. Monday typically kicks off discussions around those policies as well as other issues that percolate up. Sales Enablement takes advantages of the active participation on T-Community to help them develop sales tools. A lively discussion around mobile broadband that was used to generate sales material, for example, grew from a question from sales enablement ("What challenges do you have selling this product?"). Associates are also encouraged to post the "hardest question of the week" to get feedback on how they handled the issue.

Corporate uses their Jive-powered T-Community to address questions about processes and business issues. Corporate also uses T-Community for training, most recently on how to reduce the customer "walk-out" rate, an issue that rises when retail stores are particularly busy.

Real ROI, every day

Millions of dollars in savings
T-Mobile uses Jive to communicate with their retail stores on upcoming phone launches and program changes, such as a weekend pricing special for Father's Day. Jive serves as a centralized communication channel between corporate and store managers on merchandizing, new policies, and store performance. Corporate pushes messages to the store managers via Jive; managers use Jive to report store performance and track inventory.

T-Mobile also uses Jive to identify issues prior to a new product launch. For example, before the launch of their game-changing device, the My Touch Slide, T-Mobile gave the new devices to hundreds employees and used Jive to gather feedback, report problems, and strategize on selling tactics.

By providing a transparent environment where all of these conversations, insights, and experiences could be shared in real time, T-Mobile uncovered and catalogued 52 known issues, which improved the initial experience for their customers, and made the My Touch Slide one of their most successful launches ever.

T-Mobile also reports that knowledge scores of their support reps are up 30% because of increased knowledge sharing in Jive. With smarter support reps, they have seen a 2% reduction in issues requiring more than one call to resolve. Conservatively estimated, this 2% improvement equates to millions of operational savings per year.

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

Download our Customer Service Resource Kit and learn more about customer and support communities
Watch our video demos and see Jive in action
See all of our case studies