T-Mobile US plans to add around 1,000 new customer support jobs at a soon-to-open facility in upstate New York, a move that comes on the back of the carrier slashing thousands of back-office and technology roles.

The carrier said it plans to hire up to 1,000 new positions for a new “customer experience center” scheduled to open next year in Rochester, NY. The new jobs include account associates and “other frontline positions” that deal with customer support, account management and customer educations.

A local Rochester business report from earlier this year indicated that plans for the call center were finalized earlier this year.

T-Mobile tied the new hires to a pledge it made prior to its acquisition of Sprint, which closed in early 2020. That pledge involved opening five new customer experience centers, each creating around 1,000 new jobs, though that pledge also stated those jobs would be added by 2021.

T-Mobile had previously announced plans to open support centers in Overland Park, KS, and Kingsburg, CA. Logistics firm MGAC indicates on its website that it’s working with T-Mobile on an “integration program” of the carrier’s customer experience centers that include those already named locations as well as centers in Las Vegas, Dallas and Denver.

T-Mobile did not respond by press time regarding details on further hiring plans.

The announced hires come just over a month after the carrier started to move on cutting thousands of back-office positions.

T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert in late August sent an email to employees stating the carrier was planning to cut 5,000 positions due to operational success that has put the carrier “at a pivotal crossroads.” Those cuts are coming from “primarily in corporate and back-office, and some technology roles.”

“What it takes to attract and retain customers is materially more expensive than it was just a few quarters ago,” Sievert noted. “We’ve been outrunning this trend by accelerating merger synergies and building our high-speed internet business faster than expected, and outperforming in a few other areas. However, it is clear that doing everything we are doing and just doing it faster is not enough to deliver on these changing customer expectations going forward.”

Those announced cuts came on the heels of a self-proclaimed successful second fiscal quarter where Sievert stated the 5G-focused operator attracted the most postpaid phone net additions for the second quarter as compared to those of the past eight years. The carrier has also witnessed outsized success of its 5G-powered fixed-wireless access (FWA) service that has been able to tap into excess capacity on its 5G network.

T-Mobile CFO Peter Osvaldik added during that earnings call that the carrier was increasing its customer growth forecast for the full year, saying the company's “focus on profitable growth allows us to fund those higher customer net adds” while still being able to increase its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) expectations by 10% compared to the previous year.

Image courtesy of T-Mobile.