Ep. 235: Jon Freier | From Near Death to NPS Disrupter: T-Mobile’s Journey to Customer Leadership
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Release Date: 06/20/2024
Ep. 256: Mike Milliron | “We Made It Cool to Care”: From CX Resistance to Results
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 256: What turns CX skeptics into advocates? A listening engine that makes caring for those you serve the gold standard. At IMG Academy, a private sports academy and boarding school in Florida, Chief Operating Officer Mike Milliron led the launch of a centralized experience team. “Not interested,” said everyone from athletics, academics, athletic development, and student life. Why? IMG Academy’s culture initially prized local control. “Owners of experience,” says Mike, is how teams saw themselves. Mike and his team persisted. They built a real-time listening program with...
info_outline
Ep. 255: Jason Guardino and Karen San | How Turning 18 Can Break Your Relationship With Healthcare
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 255: One of healthcare’s biggest blind spots? When patients turn 18. It’s the moment they age out of pediatrics and fall headfirst into a system designed to prioritize older, sicker adults. Physicians, stretched thin, reserve energy for complex cases, giving young adults shorter visits and less attention. That means early signs of medical trouble, like anxiety or preventive needs, go missed. Jason Guardino and Karen San, care experience experts at The Permanente Medical Group, are addressing this massive and often invisible problem head-on. The Permanente Medical Group found...
info_outline
Ep. 254: Gurdeep Pall | The Internet Side of the AI Battle: Why Walled Gardens Fail
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 254: What if the future of AI in customer experience is built not by giant platforms but by small, reusable, open source AI agents? Gurdeep Pall, President of AI Strategy at Qualtrics, believes open, modular AI agents will outmaneuver big tech’s locked-down systems. In this conversation from the X4 Summit, Gurdeep argues that “experience agents”—task-specific bots that can plug into any stack—will give companies more control, better performance, and real freedom. Closed AI platforms promise convenience, but they trap businesses in rigid walled gardens. Gurdeep argues that...
info_outline
Ep. 253: Mathieu Staniulis & Séverine Clairet | Blinded by Pride: Inside a 125-Year-Old Co-Op’s Return to Customer-Centricity
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 253: Desjardins thought its cooperative roots made it member-first by default. Then members started leaving. Desjardins is a 125-year-old financial co-op based in Quebec. It has deep community ties and a proud history. But that pride masked a painful truth: Members no longer saw it as customer-centric. The organization believed its cooperative structure guaranteed loyalty—until low NPS scores and rising member churn showed otherwise. Mathieu Staniulis and Séverine Clairet recount how Desjardins confronted its own mythology, restructured governance, and began treating feedback as a...
info_outline
Ep. 252: Erin Wallace | The Data Doesn’t Care How Good You Think You Are
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 252: Most CX maturity assessments ask how you think you're doing. This one demands proof. Erin Wallace, director of client engagement at MyCX from Bain & Company, is helping to lead a fundamental shift in how companies measure CX maturity. Most tools rely on perception-based self-assessments that reward self-promotion over progress. The Customer Experience Roadmap and Accreditation (CXRA) demands verifiable proof—evidence against 55 global, industry-backed standards. It's not always comfortable, but it’s often the turning point. Bain’s CXRA challenges the internal echo...
info_outline
Ep. 251: Mike Valanzola | Many Voices, No Shared Truth: How Dell Revitalized Its Customer Feedback System with Help from the CXRA
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 251: In 2018, Dell set out to do something big: turn customer feedback into a system that could not only provide insights, but help set priorities and run the business. They had the data. They had the intent. But they made a compromise that many organizations settle on: Rather than enforce one unified approach to customer feedback, they allowed each team to build its own. While this helped with initial adoption and change management, it also led to fragmentation—multiple tools, different methods, no shared truth. And it got worse over time. Real progress ultimately would require...
info_outline
Ep. 250: Sean McEntire | A Decade of Discipline: From NPS Pilot to Outer Loop Powerhouse
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 250: Comcast solved the age-old problem of how to make employee suggestions a powerful, reliable source of value-driving improvements at scale. Sean McEntire, Comcast’s Vice President of Customer Strategy and Operations, explains how the Outer Loop channels every employee elevation—no matter how small—through a disciplined screen, assigns a named owner, and tracks progress in public view. Ninety thousand teammates now feed a single pipeline that forces scattered ideas into accountable hands and verified fixes, solving 7,000 customer pain points so far. A frontline...
info_outline
Ep. 249: Scott Taber | Why Four Seasons Turned Guests Away
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 249: When “revenge travel” brought guests roaring back to Four Seasons Hotels, they capped occupancy, turning away guests and revenue. Scott Taber, senior vice president of global hospitality, describes the Four Seasons philosophy: No points, no perks. Just great properties, individual recognition, personal service, and an emphasis on making sure the first five minutes after check-in are spectacular. That belief was put to the test when the world started traveling again and labor gaps persisted at the end of the pandemic. The company had a choice: chase revenue or protect intimacy....
info_outline
Ep. 248: Utibe Bassey | Restoring Power, Recharging Customer Experience
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 248: At Dominion Energy, keeping the lights on isn’t just a priority—it’s the single biggest driver of customer experience. But as customer expectations continue to evolve, the bar keeps rising. Customers don’t just want to know when their power will be back, they want to know why it is out. And they expect that experience to be as seamless, informed, and intuitive as downloading and using their favorite mobile apps. Meeting those expectations requires transparency, empathy, and a companywide commitment to service. In this episode, Utibe Bassey, vice president of customer...
info_outline
Ep. 247: Mari Cross | These B2B Customers Don’t Buy Features. They Buy Outcomes.
Customer Confidential: Untold Stories of Earned Growth
Episode 247: What if customers achieve real results—but don’t know it? Most vendors sell functionality. Mari Cross wants customers to see impact—in their own numbers, in real time. Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor, is dismantling a common illusion: that delivering software features equals delivering value. Infor sells enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools, but Mari's focus is on proving business outcomes. She built a system where customers define the results that matter, track them through the product itself, and act on them with confidence. Her team isn’t there to rescue...
info_outlineEpisode 235: In 2012, T-Mobile lost nearly two million customers. Its revenue fell precipitously. Its situation seemed hopeless. Then came a new CEO with an audacious plan and a penchant for F-bombs.
Jon Freier, president of T-Mobile’s US Consumer Group, joins host Rob Markey to share his firsthand account of the remarkable corporate turnaround. Jon describes the “Un-carrier” strategy, from its risky beginnings to its industry-reshaping impact. He shares how T-Mobile broke the mold, challenged conventions, and ultimately won over customers by putting their needs first.
According to Jon, “The whole premise of the Un-carrier movement was about fixing a stupid, broken, arrogant industry.”
Under the leadership of new CEO John Legere, T-Mobile used data-driven insights to uncover the “bad profits” that dominated the mobile telecom industry in the US at the time. Determined to not only turn the company around but to change the industry, T-Mobile made a huge bet on customer value and what we at Bain now call Earned Growth: the idea that forgoing bad profits to deliver more value to customers would not only reduce churn but ultimately attract new customers through word of mouth.
Jon shares some of T-Mobile’s biggest game-changing innovations. He lays out bets on dramatic changes to handset pricing and contract renewal terms, a daring move from high-priced “buckets” of limited data to unlimited plans, repricing international roaming, and the innovative T-Mobile Tuesdays rewards program. He also highlights the impact of the “Team of Experts” customer service model.
The results have been eye-popping. T-Mobile reestablished customer growth, received the highest ranking in the telecommunications & media Internet sector regarding NPS rankings (as measured by Bain’s NPS Prism telecom benchmarking), and has outperformed the stock market by many multiples.
Guest: Jon Freier, President, T-Mobile US Consumer Group
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
Give us feedback:
We’d love to hear from you. Help us enhance your podcast experience by providing feedback here in our listener survey. https://bit.ly/CCPodcastFeedback
Want to get in touch? Send a note to host Rob Markey: https://www.robmarkey.com/contact-rob
Additional resources:
T-Mobile’s CEO on Winning Market Share by Trash-Talking Rivals
Reinventing Customer Service: How T-Mobile achieved record levels of quality and productivity
Time-stamped list of topics covered:
[2:29] The dire state of T-Mobile in 2012
[6:00] John Legere’s arrival and the birth of the “Un-carrier” strategy
[10:36] Breaking down the old telecom model: from contracts to transparency
[16:28] Early signs of success and the importance of leading indicators
[19:17] Overcoming internal skepticism and building organizational buy-in
[21:51] T-Mobile’s unique approach to customer service and the “Team of Experts”
[24:27] Using data to anticipate customer needs and personalize experiences
[28:14] Frontline Connect: Immersing leaders in the customer experience
[30:12] T-Mobile’s winning loyalty plays: unlimited data, T-Mobile Tuesdays, and Simple Global
[33:27] Lessons learned and the future of customer loyalty in telecom
Time-stamped list of notable quotes:
[3:14] “We were losing two million customers a year … Revenues were going down, costs were going up, and earnings were plummeting.”
[3:40] “Hopeless, that would be the word I would use in 2012. We’re just stuck.”
[5:59] “In walks a new CEO named John Legere ... dropping F-bombs in a very large all-employee meeting, and you’re like, ‘Did he just say what I thought he just said?’”
[12:21] “If you treat customers great and you treat them better than your competitors, guess what? They’ll stay.”
[14:31] “The biggest risk is doing exactly the same [thing]. Where our business was, it needed a bold shakeup.”
[15:28] “You might not have to be perfect right out of the gate, but you have to be absolutely committed to steering decisions … That’s where the visibility of metrics and the overall management system is critical to be able to steer to the outcomes you’re looking for.”
[16:07] “We just decided to have customers win first. Our employees win second, and then our shareholders ultimately winning after that.”
[29:19] “I have the saying, at T-Mobile, that there’s two types of people. One, those who serve customers. And two, those who serve those who serve customers. And you’re in one of those two buckets. And if you don’t buy into the culture, you’ll never find the time to do it.”