John Legere on T-Mobile

2 minutes estimated reading time

John Legere knows how to work his crowd, a technology CEO channelling Lenny Bruce with a mix of common sense and expletive strewn humour. Beneath that showmanship is an interesting analysis from the inside of what its like to run a modern cellular carrier business.

Outtakes from John Legere

Interesting the way he talks about his clash of personality personality with his parent company as John Legere vs. T-Mobile
At the time T-Mobile was winning share from Sprint, AT&T and Verizon
The video is on YouTube so may not be available for all readers.
Historically acquisitions was about spectrum, it now seems to be about industry consolidation
Legere on the difference of Global Crossing and T-Mobile. He was looking to adapt as a personality to his younger tech savvy consumer base. CEOs are generally a monoculture.
He uses social media for insights on customer experience and brand health
Customer care calls gives him a lot of insight about customer experience
All of the ‘Uncarrier’ positioning and moves were inspired by customer service calls and the experiences that customers have in the interactive voice systems. Uncarrier started with ‘how you buy’ and then went on to ‘how you use’
T-Mobile benefitted from being able to move fast and their competitors reluctance to change their services
Apple iPhone 6 ‘Bendgate’. It wasn’t a real story according to Legere and hadn’t dented demand for the iPhone on T-Mobile
Legere felt that the tasks he needed to address going into T-Mobile were: improving the network, getting spectrum, reinvigorate the T-Mobile brand and get the iPhone on T-Mobile. Store traffic was incomplete, customers wouldn’t go to a cellphone store unless they had the full range of devices.
Before Legere arrived people wouldn’t even mention T-Mobile in terms of the data capability & network speed
Apple drove a lot of quality focus on Wi-Fi and VoLTE calling
Amazon missed out on its Fire phone (and later tablets). The company didn’t think about it in terms of service bundling with all the other assets like Amazon Fresh and Amazon Prime
On Windows Mobile – stop the charade that cellular networks are OEM manufacturers. Legere would have liked Windows Mobile and Amazon to be successful if customers want them