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T-Mobile To Lay Off 1,900 Customer Service Call Center Employees

Posted: March 23, 2012

T-Mobile Layoffs

T-Mobile USA announced on Friday that it would lay off 1,900 call center employees in an effort to drastically cut costs at the struggling wireless carrier.

Company officials also announced that other “restructuring” would arrive before July in order to “optimize operations” although executives have not specifically said whether additional layoffs would be part of those plans.

In a prepared statement T-Mobile USA CEO Philipp Humm announced:

“These are not easy steps to take, but they are necessary to realize efficiency in order to invest for growth.”

While T-Mobile USA is still a profitable business it has had to invest billions of dollars in 4G technologies in order to play catch up to Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and Sprint Wireless.

T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom tried to sell the company to AT&T in 2011 for $39 billion but that merger failed to pass regulatory approval.

In attempting to control prices the US wireless carrier will eliminate 7 call centers, taking the total number of centers from 24 to 17 over the next three months. When combined with the recent layoff announcement 3,300 positions will be lost in certain areas. Once call centers are consolidated however the company will hire 1,400 new workers for still open locations.

The company has also offered some relocation assistance to certain employees wishing to stay with the company.

T-Mobile will close its call centers located in Allentown, Penn.; Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Frisco, Texas; Brownsville, Texas; Lenexa, Kan.; Thornton, Colo. and Redmond, Ore.

News of call center closings couldn’t come at a worst time for T-Mobile which recently slipped to next-to-last place in customer support according to a survey conducted for Consumer Reports. It has been a long fall for a company that once use to reign atop customer service satisfaction polls.

In the meantime T-Mobile will be creating some new positions under its restructuring plans, for example 1,000 new business sales positions will be added to the company.

There is always the possibility that through the consolidation of their call centers T-Mobile will be better able to monitor employees for purposes of quality control which in turn should help its customer service scores.

Do you think restructuring the company by closing a good chunk of its customer service support centers is a wise decision on T-Mobile’s part or will it come back to bite them in the butt?

Category: Business
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Posted: March 23, 2012
James Johnson

By James Johnson









Comments


11 Archived Responses to “ T-Mobile To Lay Off 1,900 Customer Service Call Center Employees ”

  1. Is it a coincidence that my T-Mobile voice mail stopped working today?

  2. my friend's aunt got paid $21933 the prior month. she is making income.
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  3. Michael Curry
    Mar 23, 2012

    This is a strategic move against the CWA. Call centers offshore were not affected at all. What T-Mobile should have done is hire returning US veterans to fill these positions and take the tax credits from both the Fed and States to compensate for the first year. The last time I looked I really don't see allot of people offshore using T-Mobile services; I believe most customers are in the USA. Please T-Mobile take a look at using Veterans for these jobs. It’s the moral thing to do.

  4. Vanessa Jackson
    Mar 24, 2012

    It already has begun to bite. T-Mobile has outsourced their once outstanding customer service overseas to people trained on the fly and buzzing phone call quality. You enter the account information prior to getting the representative and then you have to repeat it when the call is answered. They know only the mininum about the product they are servicing. An almost ten-year experience of quality service gone in seconds with 1,900 stateside jobs.

    Not everyone wants an i-Phone. I remained with T-Mobile for many of these years without a contract because of reasonably priced phone plans and superior customer service. It now appears it was more for the customer service as I'm counting the moments when the contract I'm currently under contract expires. Virgin Mobile's looking pretty good right now! Clean-up your act T-Mobile. If we're good enough to be customers we're good enough to be employees!

  5. Vanessa Jackson
    Mar 24, 2012

    I'm also checking out Verizon–can you hear me now, T-Mobile?

  6. Ok I get it.

  7. I used to work T-Mobile for 10 years and they fired me for insubordination according to the Unemployment Office which the Unemployment office stated was not and I received my unemployment benefits. All because I did not asked certain questions of the customer. She had called in to suspend her sons line because he was in trouble and wanted to teach him a lesson. She was turning the phone off for 4 days and would call back on Friday to turn it on. I advised I could set it to come back on automatically. But I was told by my supervisor that I needed a 3.05 quality score to keep my job instead I received a score of 3.00 and was told it was because I did not offer a family time plan due to he may have been going over his minutes and texting. I stated could not ask this due to the phone was a single line. Oh will will change this on the quality form. Then it was due to not offering them a Unlimited Plan. Advised was already on the Unlimited Loyalty Plan (UDL) nationwide. Oh will will change this also.

    The only reason they fired me was I was making to much money and they could hire someone else cheaper to fill my seat. I really liked working for T-Mobile at the beginning because they took care of the employee with a nice benefit package and numerous incentives. But they took all this away and we became a money machine with little regard to the employee. I was not the only one to lose my job their for this. With little regard to the employee how do they think you will treat the customer. I had worked during the time we had won 7 "JD Power" awards in a row for customer service. Glad they are going down the tubes. Sorry to hear about the employees losing their jobs because of this.

  8. Abhishek Kumar
    Jul 16, 2012

    Mera phn uupdate hona tha

  9. Adam Gill
    Aug 6, 2012

    They seem to fire a lot of employees that start to make good money. First they try to restructer commissions and if that doesnt work, they find another way to let you go. I couldnt agree with you more Aaron