This award spotlights a company that seamlessly adopted a digital-first approach in 2020, creating a digital HQ—in some cases, practically overnight—to empower its workforce from anywhere.
The second-largest wireless provider in the U.S., T-Mobile, receives the New HQ Award for using Slack to power its move from physical to remote offices in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using Slack channels, T-Mobile was able to digitally onboard employees from its Sprint acquisition—all in one day—and without disrupting service for 102 million customers.
The effort included shifting 12,000 call-center employees to work from home in less than two weeks. To do this, T-Mobile’s care team orchestrated everything in Slack channels and facilitated curbside pickup for employees to retrieve necessary equipment. Since experts maintained direct access with the appropriate teams, customers didn’t experience any dip in support.
To share critical updates and quickly triage questions, the consumer markets team uses a simple Slack form to solicit and answer questions about individual store reopening policies, compensation and safety guidelines in real time. Because store managers can receive responses in under two minutes, they’re able to update and enforce local guidelines and keep customers and employees safe.
When it comes to new T-Mobile products, frontline employees often learn the details just days in advance, which generates a lot of questions. Before Slack, the only way to get answers was to file a ticket or call HQ support (which meant sitting on the phone with a long line of customers waiting). By implementing Slack support channels and user groups to mobilize the right people at the right time, experts can now answer questions in a matter of minutes.
T-Mobile continues to evolve and innovate its Slack workflows, such as deploying Slack bots to reduce troubleshooting time from 30 seconds to one second. In the wake of the shift to distributed work, the wireless leader has successfully pivoted, using Slack as its digital HQ and, most important, staying, as the company puts it, “customer-crazed and employee-committed.”
