A comprehensive service strategy that transformed FirstNet from an unproven network into a trusted partner, earning 250,000+ subscribers in its first six months.
AT&T, the world’s third-largest telecommunications company, was awarded a $100B, 25-year contract by the U.S. government to deploy, operate, and maintain the first high-speed nationwide wireless broadband public safety network (FirstNet) in the United States. The network was ready. The experience was not.
To build momentum for FirstNet and foster trust among first responders, AT&T partnered with THRIVE to take a human-centered, design-thinking approach to understand what mattered most to them. Through contextual research, journey mapping, CX principle development, and service blueprints, THRIVE translated raw field insights from 24 first responders across the country into a differentiated service strategy. When FirstNet launched in March 2018, it didn’t just go live — it took off, surpassing 250,000 subscribers from 3,600+ agencies in just six months.
Unprecedented in scale and purpose, FirstNet is a critical infrastructure project launched in response to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when first responders relied on commercial networks that quickly became clogged. Impeding their ability to coordinate efficient responses to emergencies — exposing a critical need for better interoperability and seamless communication across agencies, locations, and equipment. AT&T needed a new service strategy, one capable of meeting first responders where they actually are and one focused on their well-being.
The unspoken problem AT&T faced was not technical. It was human. Building the network was the part they knew how to do. But convincing the women and men who sprint into burning buildings and pull people from wreckage to trust a new cellular network — when their current radios had been their lifeline for decades — was an entirely different challenge. No conventional service strategy would bridge that gap and build trust. First responders are not early adopters. They are deliberate, skeptical professionals whose livelihoods depend on knowing that their tools will work, every single time, without fail.
To foster trust and meaningful adoption, AT&T needed to understand not only the functional needs of its new customer base but also the emotional frameworks that underpinned their decision-making: Who decides to switch? What does trust look like for a Fire Chief managing a department of 200? What makes a Sheriff’s deputy in rural Nebraska believe a new network is worth the risk of changing? Recognizing that the boardroom alone could not answer these questions, AT&T turned to THRIVE and human-centered design to develop a service strategy that could create a step change in the first-responder experience by understanding the drivers of adoption for the new service and the desired user experience.
AT&T’s typical playbook didn’t apply here — and neither did a standard service strategy. First responders weren’t making individual purchasing decisions. They operated within multi-layered hierarchies — agency administrators, department chiefs, procurement officers, and elected officials all had a role to play. Billing complexity, switching costs, coverage anxiety in rural and underground environments, and an institutional distrust of commercial vendors all stood between a capable network and the people it was built to serve. Winning first responders’ confidence wasn’t just the right thing to do — it was AT&T’s competitive edge in a market where trust, not technology, was the real differentiator.
To kick things off, THRIVE’s CX team met with key AT&T stakeholders — synthesizing existing institutional knowledge, auditing what was known and what was assumed, and, critically, what was entirely unknown about the first responder experience. This Knowledge Gap Audit served as the compass for the service strategy that followed: it identified the questions AT&T couldn’t yet answer and gave THRIVE’s research a precise, purposeful direction. The answers to the “what,” “how,” and “why” of FirstNet would come only from a deep understanding of the people it was designed to serve.
Taking a human-centered approach using mobile ethnography, we engaged 24 public safety professionals — Fire Chiefs, Sheriffs, and EMTs — allowing them to share experiences on their own terms and revealing authentic insights into their communication challenges.
We designed our methodology to unburden people — meeting them where they were rather than pulling them away from their missions — and to actively build trust with a community that had every reason to be skeptical. This approach revealed a rich, real-world picture of how mission-critical communication works. We found that firefighters often didn’t carry phones because they weren’t fire-resistant. Trucks carried iPads, and the radio remained the primary tool. Across every discipline and geography, one need stood above all others: “When communication was needed, it had to work. No exceptions. No second chances.” That truth became the foundation of everything the service strategy had to deliver.
Our fieldwork netted 2,000 discrete data points, which we codified and sorted into themes — more than 200 pain points across the FirstNet customer journey and 50 moments of truth where the experience either earned a first responder’s trust or lost it for good — each one a critical data point in building a service strategy that could actually close the gaps. From there, we mapped the full customer journey across three stages (Discovery, Initiation, and Engagement) and nine steps —from Awareness through Propagation to Service —to holistically understand all unmet customer needs and catalogue the customer interactions most critical to driving—or derailing—adoption.
The customer journey map revealed pain points that went far beyond coverage complaints, showing us exactly where people got stuck, became frustrated, or gave up. The biggest pain points had nothing to do with network coverage. Billing was so confusing that people assumed it was intentional — like they were being tricked. Switching a large agency to FirstNet meant physically swapping SIM cards in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of devices, with no real support to make it feasible. In rural and tribal communities, the nearest AT&T retail location was often hours away, making the promise of “public safety grade” service feel pretty hollow. And even when agency leadership was bought in, internal resistance could quietly unravel the whole thing before rollout. None of that is a technology problem. It’s a people problem—and no effective service strategy can ignore it.
Insight only becomes impact when the right people are in the room together. So we brought them in: hosting a two-day Journey Mapping and Ideation Workshop that brought together a cross-functional team of 20 AT&Ters — spanning CX, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and Customer Service — and put everything we’d learned from the field directly in front of them. Using the journey maps and research findings as live stimuli, the team took a human-centric approach to problem-solving. It worked through the full arc of the first responder experience, moving from problem identification to opportunity framing to concept storyboards to anchor the service strategy.
Nearly 200 opportunity statements emerged from the sessions, which we sorted by theme into a framework organized around three human-centered domains: Trust & Confidence, Actualization & Achievement, and Motivation & Empowerment. That framework didn’t just organize ideas — it became the backbone of the service strategy, ensuring that every future decision kept the first responder’s voice and well-being at the center of everything that followed. When a team this diverse walks out of two days aligned on what matters most to the people they serve, that’s not just a workshop output. That’s organizational momentum.
THRIVE facilitated a series of ideation and activation workshops rooted in design thinking, bringing AT&T’s internal teams into the design process and integrating field insights. Rather than delivering recommendations from a distance, THRIVE worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the AT&T team to co-create a service strategy and service concepts that addressed the real, documented needs of first responders.
Qualitative research tells you what’s broken and why. Quantitative tells you how badly — and for whom. So we took everything we learned in the field and tested 191 opportunity statements — the building blocks of the new service strategy — in a 750-person validation study with first responders: firefighters, police officers, paramedics, and EMTs.
The results were clear. The most painful, least-addressed problems had nothing to do with coverage maps or data speeds. First responders needed technology they could actually rely on, billing they could actually understand, training that fit how they work, and a switching process that didn’t require a data analytics degree to complete. The customer feedback also surfaced something important: what first responders say they want isn’t always what drives their satisfaction. So we looked at both — and found the moments of truth that genuinely mattered. AT&T needed to deliver three things to achieve customer satisfaction and ongoing customer loyalty: proof that public safety comes before everything else, device security that exceeds consumer standards, and coverage that’s at least as good — preferably better — than what they already have. That wasn’t just validation. It was the quantitative foundation that the service strategy needed to move from insight to action.
THRIVE developed a set of five Customer Experience Principles defining how first responders should feel when using FirstNet: Empowered, Elevated, Connected, Confident, and Unburdened. A living framework that gave AT&T a shared language for what a differentiated, first-responder-centered service should look, sound, feel, and behave. These principles weren’t aspirational posters for the conference room wall — they were the human expression of a service strategy designed to build trust and guide every future service design decision. Operational guardrails that gave every team, from CX to Sales to Customer Service, a consistent answer to the same question: Are we actually serving the people who serve everyone else?
The resulting service blueprints were the operational expression of the service strategy — detailed architectural documents that mapped customer interactions across every touchpoint, from initial awareness through long-term maintenance. Concepts included dedicated service representatives assigned to individual firehouses or precincts — so a chief could call one person, not an 800 number — as well as training programs designed around how first responders actually learn, feedback mechanisms that gave agencies a voice in shaping the platform, and procurement support tailored to the unique complexity of government purchasing cycles. The final blueprints reflected not what AT&T wanted to build, but from a customer perspective, what first responders genuinely needed.
Six months after launch, FirstNet had 250,000 subscribers across more than 3,600 agencies — exceeding AT&T’s own adoption targets. But the number that matters most isn’t the subscriber count. It’s what those subscribers had to do to get there: convince leadership, navigate procurement, work through union agreements, and persuade the people who carry the devices every day that this change was worth making. That kind of adoption doesn’t happen through advertising. It happens when people believe. THRIVE’s human-centered approach gave AT&T the tools to earn that belief — journey maps that pinpointed where the experience was breaking down, service blueprints that gave operational teams a concrete vision of what excellence looked like, and a service strategy that kept the voice of the first responder at the center of every decision.
The results showed up in the metrics. But they also showed up in quieter ways: the rural fire chief with a dedicated AT&T contact — a name, not an 800 number. The paramedic who trusts her device will have network priority when every lane is gridlocked and seconds matter. The police department that signed on because their counterparts three counties over had a good experience and passed it along — exactly the kind of organic trust the research predicted was possible. FirstNet launched as a network. THRIVE’s service strategy helped make it a trusted partner for first responders every working day — and gave AT&T a competitive edge that no coverage map alone could have delivered.
