How AT&T Turns Customer Obsession Into Practice

The Gist

• Customer obsession as an operating rule. AT&T treats "put the customer first" as a discipline that drives decisions across tech, culture and execution.
• EX is the multiplier. Customer obsession only scales when frontline employees have the tools and context to deliver it.
• Repetition is a trust breaker. If customers have to repeat themselves, the experience is already failing—AI can help summarize what matters.
• AI reduces friction, not conversations. AT&T applies AI where it clarifies, compares and fixes issues instead of deflecting customers.
• Agentic AI needs guardrails and coaching. As AI agents take on tasks, leaders must manage quality, accountability and customer impact—not chase shiny objects.

Customer obsession is easy to talk about and hard to operationalize — especially at enterprise scale. In this episode of CX Decoded, we distill a CMSWire TV conversation with AT&T into five clear takeaways that show what customer obsession looks like when it's treated as a system, not a slogan. From enabling frontline employees to applying AI with restraint and purpose, the discussion focuses on the real decisions CX, DX and contact center leaders face when turning intent into execution.

Dom Nicastro: Welcome back to CX Decoded, the podcast where we break down what customer experience leaders are actually doing — not just what they're talking about.

Dom Nicastro: Today's episode is an adaptation of a recent CMSWire TV: The Digital Experience Show conversation I hosted with John Miller, vice president of Consumer and Business Solutions at AT&T. If you watched the video or read the article, you already know this wasn't a fluffy CX discussion. It was a very real look at what "customer obsession" looks like when you're operating at massive scale — millions of calls a day, thousands of frontline employees, and customers who expect everything to just work.

Dom Nicastro: What we're doing here on CX Decoded is different.

Dom Nicastro: Instead of replaying the full interview, this podcast distills that conversation into five core takeaways — the moments, insights and decisions that CX, DX and contact center leaders should be paying attention to right now. You'll hear a quick setup from me for each takeaway, followed by John's own words, pulled directly from that conversation.

Dom Nicastro: This episode is about moving customer obsession from a slogan to a system. From culture to execution. From AI hype to practical, frontline impact.

Dom Nicastro: Let's get into it.

Takeaway 1: Customer Obsession Isn't a Slogan — It's a Discipline

Dom Nicastro: When we talk about customer obsession, it's often framed as branding language or leadership rhetoric. But in my conversation with John Miller, it became clear very quickly that at AT&T, customer obsession is treated less like a mindset and more like an operating rule — one that shapes decisions across technology, culture and frontline execution.

Dom Nicastro: Here's how John defines customer obsession — in the simplest, most unforgiving terms.

John Miller: Sure. One of the things I think that being customer obsessed means is putting the customer first, period. There's no other part to that sentence. And when you do that, everything falls in place.

John Miller: One of the coolest things that I learned at General Motors, and we've taken that into AT&T, is that we really need to know our customers. We need to understand them, and by doing that, we can serve them.

John Miller: And I love the fact that AT&T is a service-oriented company. We really focus on servant leadership. We want to make sure that we are helping and serving customers in everything that we're doing. And so that's really, to me, what customer obsessed means.

Related Article: AT&T's John Miller on Turning Customer Obsession Into Everyday Practice

Takeaway 2: Customer Obsession Only Scales If Employees Are Enabled

Dom Nicastro: One thing that stood out in John's definition of customer obsession is how quickly it moved beyond the customer alone. Putting the customer first sounds simple — but at enterprise scale, it only works if employees are actually equipped to deliver on that promise.

Dom Nicastro: So I asked John to get specific about what this looks like in practice — not philosophically, but operationally — especially inside a company as large and complex as AT&T.

Dom Nicastro: What followed was a candid breakdown of why employee experience isn't a side conversation in CX — it's the multiplier.

John Miller: Yeah, so one of the biggest things that we had to do is we're a big company with a lot of customers. And one of our biggest challenges was creating a culture of that customer first and truly being customer obsessed.

John Miller: And so one of the things we started looking at was, you know, with our brand experience, the AT&T guarantee that says, you know, we're going to give customers the best prices, we're going to give them the best service and make sure that we're always focused on them.

John Miller: We wanted to make sure that that was something that was going down to every single employee, whether it was the people that are digging the cables for fiber, if it was the people that were answering the phones in our call centers, or the people that are helping customers in our retail stores.

John Miller: The other thing that we wanted to make sure was is that we were providing them the right tools, the right technology to be able to put that into action. And sadly, we had not always done that.

John Miller: As we started walking that mile in our employees' shoes on how are they truly helping customers, we were finding that we were lacking. And so we had to make some pivots. We had to actually have people go out into the field. We had to listen to hundreds of thousands of calls to say, you know, how is this working?

John Miller: Why is it that our technology is creating more friction versus enabling those conversations, those moments that matter for our customers?

John Miller: And so we've had to pivot a lot in terms of making sure that the technology is driving the employee experience because we know that when we have a great employee experience, that can enable the customer experience.

John Miller: And as Forrester says, customer experience plus employee experience equals brand experience. And we truly believe that here at AT&T.

Related Article: The Employee-Customer Experience Tango: Are You in Sync?

Takeaway 3: If Customers Have to Repeat Themselves, You're Already Failing

Dom Nicastro: After talking through culture and employee enablement, John zeroed in on something that sounds basic — but consistently breaks customer trust: repetition.

Dom Nicastro: From a CX standpoint, nothing signals disconnect faster than a customer having to re-explain who they are, what they need and what just happened five minutes ago. I asked John what they were hearing directly from customers and frontline teams — and how they were addressing that gap at scale inside AT&T.

John Miller: Sure. And I think that there was kind of two things that we heard directly from both of our employees and our customers. One was, customers don't like to repeat themselves. They really want us as AT&T to listen to them. I mean, we're the phone company, right? We should be listening.

John Miller: And they talk to us in all these different ways, whether they go to our websites, whether they're walking into our stores, whether they are calling in our contact centers. They're talking to us all the time.

John Miller: So one of the things that we did was we started looking at interaction history to be able to say, look, here's the marketing messages that we're sending to customers. Here's the times they walked into the store. Here's the last few issues that they've had so that they didn't have to repeat themselves as they were interacting with us.

John Miller: And we used AI, as everybody's doing nowadays, to create like a 45-day summary to then say, look, we know that our employees can't spend five minutes going through all of the history. So let's use AI to create the bullet points that says, here's the three or four things that you should need to know now in terms of this interaction — to help make sure that the customer doesn't have to repeat themselves.

Episode Takeaways at a Glance

Five CX lessons from AT&T on turning customer obsession into an operating system.

Takeaway	What It Means in Practice	Why It Matters for CX Leaders
Customer obsession is a discipline	Putting the customer first as a non-negotiable operating rule, not a value statement.	Shifts CX from rhetoric to repeatable decision-making across teams and systems.
Employee enablement drives scale	Frontline teams need the right tools, context and workflows to serve customers effectively.	Great CX cannot scale without a strong employee experience foundation.
Repetition signals system failure	Using interaction history and AI summaries to eliminate the need for customers to restate issues.	Reduces friction, builds trust and accelerates resolution in high-volume environments.
AI should remove friction	Applying AI to explain, clarify and support conversations rather than replace them.	Preserves human connection while improving efficiency and understanding.
AI maturity requires restraint	Deploying agentic AI with leadership oversight, guardrails and clear accountability.	Prevents automation from undermining experience and trust at scale.

Takeaway 4: AI Should Reduce Friction — Not Replace the Conversation

Dom Nicastro: What stood out in that last takeaway wasn't just the use of AI — it was where AT&T chose to apply it. Instead of forcing automation into every interaction, the focus was on removing friction so agents and customers could actually have better conversations.

Dom Nicastro: That distinction became especially clear when we started talking about billing — one of the most common reasons customers reach out in the first place. I asked John how AI was being used not to deflect calls, but to explain, clarify and, when needed, fix issues in real time.

John Miller: And the second thing that we did was we started looking at what were the biggest things that were driving customers into our stores? What were the biggest things that were driving calls into our contact center?

John Miller: And a lot of times it was, hey, I don't understand my bill. Like, why is my bill different this month from last month?

John Miller: And so again, we used AI to start looking at doing bill compares because a lot of times it's actually a good news story. You went on a cruise last month and we added a cruise package so you could have internet and connectivity and it was much cheaper for you to do that than go and pay for that cruise package or have roaming charges.

John Miller: And then customers will be like, yeah, I forgot about that.

John Miller: And so being able to come up with and understand a customer's bill and then making sure that we can put into terms they understand why this was good — or if it wasn't good, let's go fix it.

John Miller: But it was enabling more of a conversation, that human to human conversation, versus just having something where a customer is like, my bill's $5 more, give me $5 back.

John Miller: It was like, well, here's why — and here's why it's good — or if it's not good, let's make sure we make it good.

Takeaway 5: AI Maturity Means Knowing Where Not to Use AI

Dom Nicastro: By the end of our conversation, it was clear this wasn't about chasing AI for efficiency's sake. The real differentiator was restraint — knowing when automation helps, when it harms, and when humans still matter most.

Dom Nicastro: As we wrapped up, I asked John what AT&T is really focused on next — and his answer wasn't about replacing people. It was about agentic AI, leadership accountability and making sure AI serves the experience, not the other way around.

John Miller: So I think that the biggest thing for us is that we're really looking at agentic AI and agentic workflows.

John Miller: We have a lot of AI currently embedded inside of our systems and our tools. We talked about that 45-day summary. We want to make sure that we have guided workflows so that we can make it easy to perform the steps that our teams need to do to make sure we have repeatability and quality in the services that we offer.

John Miller: But the biggest thing that I think that we're really looking at in 2026 is how do we create these agents, these AI agents, that can go off and do those kind of lower value tasks and do them with high quality — without hallucinating, without doing crazy things — but be able to make it so that we can then do more for our customers.

John Miller: So we can spend more time with our human-assisted areas on those moments that matter and less time doing some of the things that need to be done, but aren't creating that special moment for the customer.

John Miller: And as we do that, there's a lot of things that we have to think through to make sure that we have amazing customer experiences.

John Miller: We have to make sure in 2026 that our managers and our leaders are rethinking how they do their jobs. Because when we start thinking about agent first, I now have, as a manager, six employees and six AI agents that are going off and doing work.

John Miller: I need to make sure that I'm coaching both.

John Miller: As those AI agents are going and doing things, I need to review that to say, hey, you created the customer experience we want to do. Good job.

John Miller: Hey, you really kind of missed here, so I'm going to put you on a performance improvement plan, AI, and make sure that you're going and doing things in the right direction.

John Miller: Being able to use those agents the right way to enable a more human experience — through a human channel, through a digital channel, or through that AI agent — is really, really important to us.

John Miller: And that's where we're focused: doing this the right way, not just chasing a shiny object.

Conclusion: Customer Obsession Is About Decisions

Dom Nicastro: What this conversation with John Miller makes clear is that customer obsession doesn't come from slogans, awards or dashboards. It comes from decisions — where you invest, where you automate, where you slow down, and where you still insist on human judgment.

Dom Nicastro: At AT&T, that shows up in practical ways: empowering frontline employees with better context, using AI to reduce friction instead of forcing it, and drawing clear boundaries around automation so it supports — not replaces — real conversations.

Dom Nicastro: The takeaway for CX leaders isn't "do more AI" or "go digital first." It's this: design experiences that respect customer intent, employee reality and leadership accountability at the same time. That's how customer obsession becomes an everyday practice — not just a promise.

Dom Nicastro: Thanks for listening to CX Decoded. We'll see you next time.