T-Mobile drives more effective customer conversations with Microsoft Power Apps and Copilot Studio

Power Apps for integrated data access

Work quickly began on an app that the company calls PromoGenius.

Using Power Apps, the UI was designed with a series of drop-down menus to minimize the time that a CSR spends entering a query. “Power Apps enabled us to a create an interface that’s easy to work with—even during a live conversation with a customer,” says Hodel. The app runs on iPads which CSRs carry with them on the retail floor and can also be accessed online by call center representatives. Results from a query are displayed in a presentation format that can be shared directly with customers. 

Along with all the data from the original promotions report, the app also integrates with other systems to provide additional information, such as trade-in values. Previously, a rep would have to check multiples system for this data. Now, it can be all accessed and assembled in one app in a matter of seconds.

As Hodel says, “Our investment in Power Apps premium licenses is enabling us to build advanced capabilities into frontline solutions that are delivering real business value to our retail team.”

Copilot Studio for better search 

While the app successfully streamlined access to internal data sources, customer service representatives still had one additional challenge: gathering technical details on devices, which often involved going directly to the device manufacturers’ web sites. This was often an equally time-consuming task - especially if the customer wanted to compare products across multiple sites.  

Power Platform has helped address this challenge. Using Microsoft Copilot Studio, an AI-driven agent was developed that connects to over 20 device manufacturers’ web sites and assembles product information instantly and automatically. 

The agent, which is embedded directly in the app, is driven by generative answers in Copilot Studio, enabling a CSR to ask deep technical questions using natural language queries. This not only pulls up relevant technical details faster but in direct context of a customer’s question. Better yet, with multi-turn capabilities, the agent can understand a question in the context of previous questions. “Our reps are using our new agent in Copilot Studio to gather product information in a fraction of the time of a manual search,” says Hodel. 

The agent has proven to be particularly useful for product comparisons, where it not only gathers the data but formats it into clear, comparison tables that can be presented to a customer. 

Strong results 

The PromoGenius app was rolled out to all T-Mobile retails locations across the United States. Together with the new AI agent, the PromoGenius app has become the second most used Power Apps application in the company, with over 83,000 unique users and 500,000 launches a month. 

And it’s not just usage metrics that has made PromoGenius a success at T-Mobile. PromoGenius is driving more effective sales experiences overall. Previously, to gather details on a product question, CSRs would often have to leave a customer conversation, check data resources, and then return with the answer. Now, product information can be sourced instantaneously, with no interruptions.

Exciting enhancements 

Work continues to make PromoGenius even better. For example, the PDF in function in Power Apps will soon enable CSRs to generate a PDF reports of data sourced for a customer and have it sent automatically to a customer via email using a Power Automate flow. Adding voice capabilities to the AI agent will enable even faster access to data. 

There are plans to customize the UI, depending on a user’s preferences. Some prefer less information up front, for example, with high-level details organized in a grid view. “What we particularly like about canvas apps in Power Apps is that we can create different views to optimize the way different people use and consume data,” says Hodel. 

Updates to the data layer are also in the works. Currently, data is drawn from the company’s Oracle systems into SQL Server before it is moved into Dataverse. Now, the plan is to create a direct connection between Dataverse and the source system using the pre-built connectors available with Power Platform. 

“Connecting our systems directly to Dataverse will provide us with greater accuracy, efficiency, and performance – without sacrificing security,” says Hodel. He also explains how the new architecture will provide an additional layer of system redundancy. “With a direct a pipeline into Dataverse, we don’t have to worry about gateway issues or SQL going down. It just works. That’s especially important at the retail level where 100% uptime is so important.” 

More AI agents planned 

Based on the success of the PromoGenius AI agent at T-Mobile, it’s not surprising that new AI agents are planned for both new and existing Power Platform solutions across the company. 

Next up: an AI agent for the Orbit app which will be used for a wide range of functions, including summarizing of long text fields within the app; faster, more contextual search, and more. With Copilot Studio, the team will be able to easily re-purpose components of the PromoGenius agent, as well as prompts from other Power Platform solutions.   

As Hodel says, “One of the big benefits for us of Power Platform is that it all works together so seamlessly. That’s making it even easier to leverage the benefits of AI and add it to applications that have a real impact on our business.”   

Customer satisfaction ranking according to J. D. Power and Associates, a global marketing-information-services firm. For more details on other Power Platform solutions developed at T-Mobile, see this Customer Story. Learn more about T-Mobile on LinkedIn, YouTube, X, and Facebook.