T-Mobile Continues To Walk Back On Forced Plan Migrations

In T-Mobile’s earnings call earlier today, CEO Mike Sievert reiterated that the company is walking away from forced plan migrations and associated price increases.

By the way, that was sort of not very accurately reported. So let me just kind of clear it up…we tend to do tests and pilots of things quite a bit to try to figure out what’s the right answer. In this case, we had a test cell 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. And we had planned to test and did some training around that. And then it leaked. And it leaked as if it was a broad national thing, and it kind of wasn’t.

Now I don’t know that we still have to do that test cell because, to your point, we did get plenty of feedback thanks to the erroneous context of the leak. And I think we’ve learned that particular test cell isn’t something that our customers are going to love.

Now exactly none have rolled out. So even to your question that we recently rolled out, we didn’t. We had planned it. We had planned it as a test cell and then we aren’t doing it because I think we’ve got plenty of feedback.

Every company has bad ideas. T-Mobile put a stop to this bad idea before it adversely affected customers. Maybe that says something positive about T-Mobile. On the other hand, the suggestion that this was just a small test is frustratingly evasive.

A test was only going to take place because T-Mobile considered making forced plan migrations “a broad national thing.”

Other Changes To Legacy Plans

Sievert later hinted that T-Mobile is still considering eventual adjustments to legacy plans:

We remain very interested in rationalizing our legacy rate plans for IT purposes, simplification purposes, revenue realization purposes, customer satisfaction and retention purposes. So we’re going to stay at it. But that particular idea is — we’ll probably do something different. Good. Okay.

That use of “rationalizing” confused me. Apparently, there’s a business meaning of the term that’s something like “adjusting products and reorganizing things to increase efficiency”.

If T-Mobile moves forward with changes to legacy plans, I hope they’ll go about it a bit more honestly.