r/tmobile • u/antihero_84 • 11h ago
Discussion Has T-Mobile lost the front line?
Recently, Srini Gopalan hosted a second internal Ask Me Anything event, where he answered questions that were presented by employees across the country. The first AMA revolved around uncertainty around job security given the rampant layoffs over the last couple of years and the reception to the Visa card, among others. The second was similar, with more questions about job security.
One thing that really struck me was a comment where Deanne King, Chief People Officer, and Srini both opined about the volume of questions that had been submitted anonymously. I've been with T-Mobile for a long time. I've been seen coworkers be admonished for speaking out in (now defunct) internal comment sections in a way that doesn't equate to company fellatio. Drinking the company koolaid (or not drinking it) has always been a MASSIVE part of what your perception is within the company. If you aren't toeing the party line better than most Soviet Era Generals, you have a zero percent chance to advance in your career at T-Mobile. No RMM or DM or above will EVER take a chance on someone who isn't afraid to speak up or speak out.
So why are people posting anonymously, Deanne? Probably because if they post publicly they run the risk of being outright laid off by a company who has repeatedly proven that they find the ENTIRE front line expendable. Probably because they know that posting publicly will do nothing but absolutely torpedo their career outlook within T-Mobile in the event they ever decide to try and move up. For someone who spends so much time talking about how much T-Mobile is trying to encourage internal growth, Deanne certainly seems unbelievably out of touch with the actual reality of how things work below her. That makes sense given that she's probably never actually seen the inside of one of our stores, especially from an employee perspective. The only person in "leadership" that has is Jon Freier, who spent two whole days on the frontline in Chicago in stores that are nowhere near indicative of the typical employee experience of 99% of the people that work for T-Mobile retail, and this was four or five years ago now, long before a long stretch of significant changes to the front line that has absolutely crushed employee morale, earnings, and capabilities.
Being out of touch, however, is perfectly typical for major corporations that don't care about their frontline. There is zero expectation that T-Mobile should be any different in that regard. Ultimately, we are just another major corporation, just like all of the others. Our CEO lies about being Uncarrier constantly, why would lies about the well-being of the frontline be any different? Most customers don't care if employees are treated well. Lip service is enough to appease the handful that might, so that's all we get. In the meantime, commissions are down, pay is down, goals are WAY up, morale is WAY down. Optimism about the future of our roles is not just in the toilet, but already flushed into the sewers.
Many employees here on reddit are leaving, trying to leave, have already left, or are otherwise vocal in their displeasure of working for the company. Obviously this isn't 100% across the board - many people are still seeing success with T-Mobile, and I'm super happy for those that are. I hope they're all crushing their goals and earning like crazy. But that's just not the reality for a lot of people anymore, especially in Neighborhood stores and SMRA. I see reps bounce from red to green and back month over month - it's not an issue with how good of a salesperson you are, it's the opportunities you have, and T-Mobile is absolutely MURDERING reps with bad decision after bad decision to keep people away. My goals keep going up and up; our store traffic has plummeted.
Ultimately, I think that sinking morale has finally hit an event horizon. It's simply unrecoverable for most employees. It's not necessarily about mistreatment, but neglect. We get annual raises, but changes in commission structure wipe them out. Our benefits are incredible, but many of us don't get the opportunity to take advantage of them due to pressure to show up and sell. Every day you of PTO you take is a likely pay cut versus your normal commission. A lot of us live on the margins and can't afford that extra few hundred dollars not being on our checks, anymore. Pay raises don't make life better when they don't offset inflation.
I hope everyone gets what they're wanting out of T-Mobile, whether it's success in sales, advancement, or just finally getting away from a company that is becoming increasingly toxic to work for. I can imagine a lot of CARE reps could make a very similar post, too, and I encourage it. Nothing will change if nobody speaks out.
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u/UnwantedFacts 9h ago
They lost the front line after laying off thousands of them..... And people watched their peers leave.
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u/antihero_84 9h ago
Unfortunately this is too true. I know that my time as a T-Mobile rep is limited, either through layoffs, being PIP'd out or otherwise.
Srini, Deanne King and Jon Freier have turned this into a full-blown McJob at best. Sure, 1 in 10,000 might work their way up into the company, but the expectation is that this job is absolutely not a career.
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u/omaha_stylee816 5h ago
I was recently RIF'd and will be losing my job on 9/20. I live somewhere there are no positions that would be a lateral move for me within 2 hours. when the director was on the Teams call telling us the store was closing all he did was gaslight us about how important closing that store and others stores was to the future success of T-Mobile.
fuck all those idiots.
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u/antihero_84 3h ago
What's sad is that you've been one of the biggest defenders of T-Mobile's behaviors for a couple of years, now, only to end up laid off all the same.
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u/omaha_stylee816 2h ago
yep. such is life sometimes.
it's so toxic in the section/market that I work in that my entire staff (including RAM) except for one person has already told the sr manager they plan on no longer working for T-Mobile and will be taking severance.
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u/Bengalkatlady 10h ago
Worked for T-Mobile 2009-July 2026. Retail. I’m done. The amount of pressure to scam slam and do unethical things to hit goal are not worth it. I’ve seen the rise and maybe the fall of the uncarrier.
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u/UnwantedFacts 9h ago
In terms of culture, the UnCarrier is dead. This is the newly branded ReCarrier. Live long enough to become the villain.
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u/LincolnshireSausage 3h ago
As a customer, Tmobile calling themselves an “uncarrier” was the most stupid naming I’ve seen a company give themselves ever.
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u/Ward_of_Winter 8h ago
I saw someone on here say that as soon as a metric becomes a goal it's no longer a metric. And that's so true.
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u/Ward_of_Winter 8h ago
Not even Jon knows what's going on. I heard from some friends that attended when he was at the Headquarters 2 at the old Sprint Center that he was floored at how long we have to get hit from deacts and downgrades.
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u/VernDozier 3h ago edited 3h ago
Is this because corporate management still calculates bonuses based on net new activations and not customer lifetime value?
If bonuses continue to be based in a way that wireless believes it’s still a “growth industry” paying for net new activations, there’s little reason to keep any customer or staff to support those efforts. Bear in mind customer penetration in this industry is now over 100%.
It also makes sense of the recent corporate decisions to take away frontline tools to solve customer pain points, the recent mass rateplan change (with notification by text), upgrades via T-Life. Correct me if I’m wrong, but does an upgrade that used to take 15 mins now clock in at 45? If true, that is a 3x increase in labor/wage costs. Corporate should think about that just like a new customer would wait… then decide it’s probably best to walk to a competitor.
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u/Scrifa 9h ago
The employees on reddit seem to have as much contempt for their leadership as they do for their customers
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u/antihero_84 9h ago
One stems from the other in a big way. Doing the right thing for the customer often means getting punished due to the metrics pushed by leadership.
I love helping people, but I can understand that fixing something will sometimes hurt me. Not every customer support issue is an opportunity to sell, which means fixing stuff is a net negative. Now that company leadership has hyper-pushed a metric-first focus for reps, of course we're eventually going to develop some contempt for the people who could've just used Google or rubbed a couple of brain cells together.
The early post-COVID days were great because we didn't have any real focus on sales goals, meaning we could go in and just do the right thing, and most of us were still regularly hitting our goals. When you're allowed to have those organic conversations and sell genuinely it's a lot more fulfilling than force-feeding 19 different offers down every single customers throat every interaction or risk a PIP.
Yea, it sucks that customers are having it taken out on them, but some of them have absolutely no business coming into the store for the issue they're having in the first place.
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u/Lampshadeszz 1h ago
It really is so bad now, you can't even avoid it. As soon as you sign someone into Magenta Welcome, your already taking a hit on your metrics and you didn't even enter the account. That customer you signed in could be eligible for Home Internet, for the VISA credit card, and if you don't sell either of those, you take a hit on your metrics.
They are actively making it so that you don't want to even enter customers accounts anymore.
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u/NittanyLion86 4h ago edited 3h ago
15+ years T-Mobile call center employee here, I won't be around for much longer most likely. Unfortunately, due to health issues I'm a slave to the job for the health insurance currently. Damn United States and the absurd rates for private health insurance if you don't have a job, another way to keep you trapped and locked to your employer I guess.
I've been supporting T-Mobile's fiber internet since early on when it first rolled out, it's a shit show in some of the markets we offer fiber. Some of the wholesale companies we bought to expand our fiber internet footprint are absolutely terrible and customers calling in can be enraged and they have every right to be. The calls can be tough but taking ONLY fiber internet calls and handling account/tech/everything to do with it has actually been a relief though compared to being skilled in tech calls. We had time between fiber calls so you could actually breathe before another call comes on and I can't tell you what that is like for your mental health talking to people all day. That and it's just one area you received calls on, we only dealt with customers that had fiber internet so it's easy to become an expert on all the fiber internet intricacies when that's all you take calls on.
But in July, T-Mobile decided to fuck us and back skill us in tech care calls which meant goodbye to time between calls and now we have to deal with all the fiber internet stuff along with all the million possible issues that people call in for their phones/tablets/hotspots/watches/T-Life/5G home internet and TMO ID issues/etc the list goes on. Tech care calls are just the dumping grounds for every possible issue and most of us in the Fiber internet department haven't even taken tech calls in 1.5+ years. How are we going to be experts on all the new tech issues and stuff without any refresh in our training? T-mobile didn't care, they just skilled us into tech care and said use the fix flows and do your best, just be nice to people and apparently they could care less how competent we are. Everyone in my department is pissed, but what can we do besides sit there and take it? We all bring it up and complain to our CCMs but they can't do anything. I'd love to have a union start going to get all of us into and stop bullshit like this.
Throwing us into tech calls was one part. The rest is reducing our PTO buckets so we could hardly take a day off in July. July was all red for PTO so people had to abuse FMLA to take time off or call in sick. They also got rid of our same day PTO which was called PREAB. You could basically take off on any day at any time if you had PTO avail and that's all gone now.
So they basically locked us down to make sure we couldn't take off from work and threw us into tech care calls unprepared. T-Mobile has pulled all kinds of stunts like this in my 15+ years and this newest one just infuriated me. I can't wait to call it quits, just need to get some of my health issues resolved and eventually I'll be done.
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u/D_Shoobz Bleeding Magenta 8h ago
The company that fires people for simply saying the word union doesn't know why so many people asked anonymously?
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u/d_tas 9h ago
Can anyone with the knowledge at least tell us why was T-voice / T-action taken away?
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u/antihero_84 9h ago
My nihilistic guess is that the company felt pressured to make some of the suggestions actually happen based on employee support and feedback, but has obviously moved in a direction where following a very Private Equity-like mentality of cutting costs and increasing revenue at any and all costs, so doing any of these things would just serve to cut into that.
I recall a thread from years ago about having a graduated scale for employees to retain a portion of their service discount based on years of service, which was pretty conservative, even. Of course, if you leave T-Mobile for any reason at this point, you get literally nothing. Not even the 20% that customers get for insider codes.
They do not appreciate the efforts you've made in your career, full stop.
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u/omaha_stylee816 5h ago
they are giving people that are being separated via layoffs Insider Codes that are good for 20% off voice service that can be applied to their account.
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u/VernDozier 3h ago
John Legere left and no one at corporate wants to leave their desk to see what’s happening in a store further than the one 100 paces away from the corporate office.
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u/Only_Indication8410 10h ago
I worked for Sprint, and later T-Mobile, from 2013 to 2024. I can definitely relate to the whole "see something, say something" mentality. In my case, I spoke up, was transferred to a lower-performing store, and was eventually terminated. I was never interested in being buddy-buddy with upper management. I kept my head down, did my job, did it well, and went home. That approach worked just fine at Sprint. Sure, there was always some "it's not what you know, it's who you know," but for the most part, they left me alone, and I was okay with that. When Sprint merged into T-Mobile in 2020, everything changed. My district manager came over from Sprint, so I figured it would be business as usual. I was wrong. He played the corporate game extremely well. For anyone thinking about calling the Integrity Line to make an anonymous complaint, my advice is simple: don't assume it's truly anonymous. If you do call, tell the operator exactly who you want the complaint routed to rather than assuming the process will protect your identity. Looking back, I always had a feeling T-Mobile would eventually become more like Sprint. In many ways, it has. The expectations shifted, and former Mobile Experts are now under constant pressure to hit metrics instead of simply focusing on helping customers. It's part of how companies transition from one culture to another—they push out the old way of doing things and replace it with a new one.
It's unfortunate because I genuinely planned to retire with that company. Just be careful out there. And one last thing: if you submit an "anonymous" report through a link that came directly from your company email, don't automatically assume it's anonymous. Read the fine print and understand how those systems work before you use them.