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This “particular test sell isn’t something our customers are going to love,” explained CEO Mike Sievert
According to a report from CNET, T-Mobile has cancelled plans that would have seen selected customers shifted to more expensive mobile plans from November this year.
The Un-Carrier’s plan was revealed via leaked documents earlier this month, with the operator suggesting that customers across four of its cheaper mobile plans would be transferred to more expensive alternatives. On average, these plans would cost the customers $5–10 more than their existing tariffs.
Affected subscribers were expected to be notified of the switch around two weeks in advance, having the option to opt-out by contacting support services.
Responding to the leaked information, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert sent an email to T-Mobile staff calling the migration programme just “a very small test”, which would not affect every customer on the impacted plans.
Nonetheless, the news was poorly received by the media and customers alike, with the backlash forcing T-Mobile to walk-back the plans altogether this week.
“We tend to do tests and pilots of things quite a bit to try to figure out what’s the right answer,” said Sievert on a media and analyst call. “In this case, we had a test sell to try to understand customer interest in, and acceptance of, migrating off old legacy rate plans to something that’s higher value, for them and for us.”
Following the negative feedback, Sievert admitted that this “particular test sell isn’t something that our customers are going to love”.
But despite this negative feedback, T-Mobile insists that this kind of small-batch testing is set to continue, with the company saying this process is a key to fine-tuning customer experience. Indeed, future tests could still include arbitrarily shifting customers to more expensive plans.
“We remain very interested in rationalising our legacy rate plans,” said Sievert. “So, we’re going to stay at it.”
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