T-Mobile $DTE (-0,29%)
$TMUS (-0,09%) cleverly timed the announcement of its big switch to coincide with the Las Vegas Grand Prix (LVGP) - underscoring the speed with which it is ready to take customers from Verizon $VZ (-0,19%) and AT&T $T (-0,12%) to the T-Mobile network.
Newly appointed T-Mobile CEO Srini Gopalan took the stage with T-Mobile marketing guru Mike Katz to unveil the entire plan. The so-called "Un-carrier" describes this as a significant improvement to the switch, which is now faster and less complicated.
But wait a minute. Doesn't porting a phone number only take a few minutes? Yes, confirmed Avi Greengart, President of Techsponential. For years, wireless carriers have been able to transfer phone numbers from one carrier to another in a relatively short amount of time. This is nothing special.
"That part is pretty quick, no matter who you're coming from and who you're switching to," Greengart told Fierce.
The problem is the industry's shift to family contracts, where multiple people are on one account with multiple phones and sometimes different services. That's where it gets tricky.
"Switching three, four or five people from one service to another can be quite complicated," Greengart said.
This process can leave someone without a phone for an hour or half a day - a time that, let's just say, a nervous teenager wouldn't want to experience.
》Gopalan seems to know what he's talking about《
During an appearance on CNBC in September, he hinted that big changes are coming in the area of switching providers.
He also noted that you have to get your teenagers to go to a store and spend a Saturday afternoon going through the arduous switching process.
"That makes no sense. It's fundamentally stupid, and the ironic thing is that's exactly what's intended. The process is designed to be horrible," he said. "Today for us is about putting an end to it. It's about removing the biggest pain point for customers: switching ... It's about putting customers in the driving seat."
Switching made easy - under T-Mobile's new motto "Switching Made Easy", the process will take just 15 minutes from December 1 if you use the AI-powered Easy Switch feature in the T-Life app.
The app retrieves data from a potential customer's Verizon or AT&T account, compares current wireless plans and then recommends a T-Mobile plan.
The entire process is designed to be done from the couch if you don't feel like going to a store. "From my couch? With a Mimosa?" asked one woman in T-Mobile's consumer focus group. Of course! "In just one Mimosa, you could switch," joked Jon Freier, President of T-Mobile Consumer Group, in a video clip advising potential customers.
As for the phone, T-Mobile customers have up to 90 days to choose a new phone if they want to wait for a new device or a better deal.
Once they have chosen a device, they can have it delivered the same day via Door Dash - depending on where they live. This service will initially be launched in selected T-Mobile stores in major cities and will be expanded from there.
》More than just T-Mobile marketing《
While this all sounds like a great marketing strategy for T-Mobile, of course it can't be achieved through the magic of marketing alone. It took a lot of technical know-how to make it happen.
"We had to tune a lot of our back-office systems to support this," admitted John Saw, chief technology officer at T-Mobile, at the end of an interview that focused mainly on the technology T-Mobile is showcasing at LVGP. (Read more about this technology in the coverage below).
Fierce met with Chetan Sharma, founder of Chetan Sharma Consulting, who explained that while the porting process itself is relatively simple, "you still have to go through the manual process of getting the code, entering it, and sometimes you even have to go to the store or make a phone call to do it," he said.
"It's still the back-end systems waiting for data to be entered to do the whole porting process," he said. "I think they've probably automated all those functions on the back end. So they can do it in 15 minutes."
It should be noted that these are customers switching from AT&T and Verizon to T-Mobile. Customers who want to leave T-Mobile for these other carriers will have to deal with those carriers' respective processes.
How AT&T and Verizon will react to T-Mobile's recent switch remains to be seen.
