I do wonder how John Legere feels now that T-Mobile has undone almost everything he stood for

If I said that the John Legere era of T-Mobile was one of the best things that has ever happened to a telecommunications company, I would be massively understating just how much Legere did as CEO.

He took T-Mobile and made it the “un-carrier”. The company saw explosive growth under Legere’s unconventional and often criticized leadership. T-Mobile was able to turn things around drastically, going toe-to-toe with AT&T and Verizon and shaking up the entire industry.

Which is why, as I watch T-Mobile adopt one anti-consumer policy after another, I am left wondering how John Legere feels about the company today. He hasn’t made any public statements about the modern un-carrier undoing all of his work, but surely he must have some opinions?

Or perhaps he’s just content knowing that he did an excellent job and retired with a huge pile of money to sleep on.

How John Legere made the un-carrier a force to be reckoned with

A brief history lesson, before we talk about the modern T-Mobile. Legere transformed the company into a juggernaut using a combination of aggressive marketing and completely upending how the industry used to work.

With his un-carrier schtick, Legere took everything that customers hated about AT&T, Verizon, and MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) and turned it upside down. No more lengthy contracts, no more exorbitant termination fees, and no more confusing bills.

With T-Mobile offering to pay off the aforementioned termination fees for people switching to the un-carrier, it wasn’t long before hordes of new subscribers started joining T-Mobile. Perks that are still around, like T-Mobile Tuesdays, further helped attract customers once the initial un-carrier strategy had paid off.

John Legere stepped down as CEO of T-Mobile in 2020 and Mike Sievert took over. Soon after, public perception of T-Mobile began going downhill and it’s been accelerating ever since.

T-Mobile is undoing another Legere-era commitment

Aside from ignoring price-lock guarantees and sneaking in price hikes every now and then in a myriad of ways, T-Mobile has also been introducing changes to its customer support network. Changes that, in most people’s eyes, aren’t good ones.

We’re all aware of the T-Life app being forced on T-Mobile’s customer base. The company wants you to do everything via the app and, to help encourage that, stores are being closed down and employees are being laid off.

Well, in a similar vein, T-Mobile is replacing even more human customer service staff with AI instead. As of now, around 40 percent of customer support calls at T-Mobile are being handled by AI agents.

The un-carrier has reduced customer service calls handled by human representatives by 55 percent. Jon Freier — COO at T-Mobile — has very recently mentioned that the company aims to take this number up to 75 percent by the end of next year.

Freier also slipped in that T-Mobile has been making great progress in this regard, which brings us back to the aforementioned layoffs.

This is not what Legere wanted for T-Mobile

Legere’s entire thing was replacing the frustrating customer experience with something that users had a much easier time navigating and understanding. I do not think for one second that, were he still around, John Legere would have ever allowed the company to transition to the T-Life app for all of its operations while replacing staff with bots.

Not a single day goes by without some T-Mobile customer expressing their frustration at the T-Life app or the AI-managed customer service experience on an online forum or blog. This is not the un-carrier that people signed up for so many years ago.

You might not have any problems with T-Mobile or T-Life, but that doesn’t mean that countless others have had just a smooth an experience as well. In fact, some customers have actually left T-Mobile for a competitor ever since the un-carrier’s transition into being an all-digital carrier began.

John Legere would not have wanted his customers left arguing with a bot that refused to admit there was a problem from T-Mobile’s side. Nor would he have wanted to shut down stores and forced customers to handle everything themselves using an app that either works semi-decently or not at all.

T-Mobile is lucky that its coverage and reliability are strong enough to retain customers. Because otherwise, I presume that a lot more people would have been considering taking their business elsewhere.

T-Mobile has been taking questionable steps:

• T-Mobile is reversing a Legere-era strategy
• T-Mobile dilutes its best perk

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