T-Mobile is no longer going forward with its “small-scale test” to automatically move legacy customers to newer, more expensive plans.
T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert confirmed on a Wednesday call with investors that it no longer needs proceed with it “because I think we’ve got plenty of feedback.
“We’ve learned that particular test cell isn’t something that our customers are going to love,” he added.
Screenshots that detailed plans for a forced migration leaked onto Reddit earlier this month, and were confirmed by Cord Cutters News and other outlets. The revelation sparked a massive backlash, with legacy customers proactively flooding customer service with requests to opt out of the program — which actually never started. Here’s a breakdown of everything we know about the initiative.
A week later, the company started calling it a “small-scale test” and pushed back the starting date. Now, Sievert is said the test will no longer proceed.
“We had planned it as a test cell, and then we aren’t doing it,” he said.
But T-Mobile will continue to try new things and conduct more pilot programs, said Mike Katz, president of marketing, innovation and experience, on the same call. “We still think there’s opportunities both to deliver more value for customers in a bunch of different ways, but also look for opportunities to simplify our overall portfolio,” he said.
T-Mobile has a particularly wide range of different plans thanks to its various aggressive “Un-carrier” promotions, some of which span back a decade. Sievert teased that he was “very interested” in shaking up those legacy plans to simplify things, boost its revenue, as well as raise customer satisfaction and retention.
“So we’re going to stay at it,” he said. “But that particular idea is — we’ll probably do something different.”
The company earlier reported its third-quarter results, adding 557,000 5G home internet customers.
Photo credit: T-Mobile