You just knew that it wouldn’t take long for T-Mobile CEO John Legere to start crowing about his carrier adding 1.1 million subscribers last quarter. In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, a triumphant Legere bragged about his company starting an “uncarrier revolution” with its initiatives to ditch two-year service agreements for smartphone purchases and to shrink the time that customers get to upgrade their phones from two years to just six months.
“T-Mobile has really struck a chord on the uncarrier proposal to customers and ‘uncarrier Phase 3’ is coming right around the corner,” he said. “Customers are completely unsatisfied with the other carriers.”
Legere also predictably took another shot at AT&T, which has become his favorite punching bag during his tenure as T-Mobile’s CEO. Specifically, Legere claimed that T-Mobile was taking customers away from AT&T, which he said is in “complete fight-back mode” at the moment. Of course, AT&T added 551,000 postpaid subscribers last quarter while posting a postpaid churn rate of just over 1%, so it’s doubtful that the company is hemorrhaging customers en masse to T-Mobile.
It’s also a little ironic for Legere to say that AT&T customers are “completely unsatisfied” with their carrier when a recent survey showed that AT&T actually had the best customer service satisfaction while T-Mobile had the worst, but it’s clear that his aggressive marketing and pricing tactics have pushed T-Mobile into the spotlight and have helped it add customers.
