BlackBerry PlayBook debuts with a showcase demo app from Universal Mind
Universal Mind Helps Wireless Communications Giant Deliver Industry-leading Customer Experience
Customer call times reduced by 8–10 seconds over more than 220 million calls a year, resulting in significant ROI.
Challenge
Despite having won the J.D. Power Customer Service Champion award 9 times in 11 years, T-Mobile wanted to further enhance its reputation for delivering exceptional customer experience. So the wireless giant launched a large-scale strategic effort to revolutionize the way its retail and phone-based reps service customers in facilitating purchases and providing information about its mobile devices, communication plans, and services.
T-Mobile engaged Universal Mind to help design and develop QuikView, a leading-edge application that would help sales and service reps do a better, faster job of finding customers’ account information, answering their questions, and selling them the right products and services.
The challenges were daunting. QuikView needed to tie together several legacy systems and multiple backend databases with a single application that would serve as a front-end presentation layer facilitating sales and support across all of their retails stores and call centers—more than 35,000 users handling upwards of 220 million transactions annually. And they needed to create a system so easy to use it required almost no training.
Process
Providing its technology and delivery expertise to a global team made up of T-Mobile’s in-house talent and partners working around the globe, Universal Mind embedded project leads in various Agile teams in order to manage the business and development teams, leading efforts to build the core application framework and architecture, develop features, and optimize an existing codebase, as well as ensuring the team met it’s commitments, timeline, and schedule. The agency even provided training, coaching, and mentorship for teams.
QuikView was designed to elegantly bring together all relevant customer, product, and service information from T-Mobile’s various legacy applications in one screen. The agency architected the enterprise-class application for stability as well as extensibility, so that T-Mobile could rapidly update functionality any time they brought new products, services, and promotions to market.
And by providing expertise in Agile development methodologies, Universal Mind enabled the larger implementation team to break a very long-term, complex project into easily achievable milestones.
Results
QuikView has delivered tremendous ROI for T-Mobile. The application has eliminated the need for extensive employee training, sped up support response times, made employees and resellers more effective at service and sales, and greatly improved the T-Mobile customer experience.
“Previously if you went into a retail store, there were some transactions that a rep had to call Customer Care to solve,” says Marcel Deller, Vice President of Development at T-Mobile. “QuikView has reduced that by about 16,000 calls per month.” Deller also reports that the average time it takes a rep to handle a customer call has been reduced by 8–10 seconds—a significant savings considering that T-Mobile handles more than 220 million such calls a year. T-Mobile was able to realize such a strong savings that the company realized a return on investment in under two years.
T-Mobile couldn’t be more satisfied with its partnership with Universal Mind. “QuikView has been a great success story,” says Deller.
