About Karen

Experience, Skills & Impact

Karen Vinz-Holcomb

Customer Experience & Program Management Leader for Contact Center Transformation

I spent 21 years at Nextel, Sprint, and T-Mobile helping Customer Care run better. I map how employees and customers actually move through a process, find where it breaks, and lead the cross-functional work to fix it, from strategy through rollout.

Centennial, ColoradoRemote for 11+ yearsEarly riser, comfortable on Central Time hours

Experience

Two decades inside Customer Care

21yrsNextel, Sprint and T-Mobile, across frontline and corporate support functions
15yrsProject and Program Management
11yrsHQ support: National Sales Support, NBA Care strategy, Care feedback strategy and merger
10yrsSupporting a large call center: new hire, employee experience, system launches and war rooms
10yrsEnd-to-end strategic program management, including experience mapping and design

Business Impact

Programs measured in millions of customers and billions in synergy

2014 to 2018

Sprint Care & Digital Transformation

Strategic program support contributing to $33M+ in savings.

2019 to 2020

Sprint and T-Mobile Merger Planning

Strategic planning and management ahead of the ~$37B publicly valued merger, focused on Employee Experience, Service strategy and Network strategy. I aligned process and policy ahead of the merger itself.

2020 to 2023

Sprint Consumer Base Integration

Customer Experience strategy for the network and biller conversion efforts, contributing to an incremental $8B in projected integration synergy. I led the migration of 10 million Sprint customers to the T-Mobile network through a SIM change, partnering with Marketing, Network and Customer Care.

Integration

Sprint Customer Care Shutdown

Shut down the Sprint Customer Care line of business 2 years ahead of schedule.

2008 to 2020

National Sales Support Program Ownership

Owned the National Sales Support program, a line of business handling 1 million calls annually, including strategy, escalations, and performance with the Vendor Manager.

2008 to 2020

Pega Next Best Action

Led change management and later owned program strategy for AI-enabled decisioning across 20+ call centers and 2,000+ agent actions, improving usability to 80%.

2023 to 2026

Journey Mapping to Service Blueprint & Digital Self-Serve

Mapped Identity Management and Life Events journeys, partnered with Cyber Security on Identity Access workflows, and supported the AI team's build of agents for digital self-service. More than $10M in business benefit.

Awards & Recognition

3-time Winners Circle, Sprintacular and Pinnacle Club winner

Recognized among the top 0.2% of employees for leadership excellence, customer impact, and operational performance.

2014Sprint
2017Sprint
2022T-Mobile

Career Journey

Where I've been

May 2021 to April 2026

Sr. Customer Experience Manager

T-Mobile
  • Led journey mapping to service blueprint work for Identity Management and Life Events, using Figma for process diagrams.
  • Wrote user stories and requirements for digital self-serve, joined sprint reviews and demos, and partnered with UX on deployment.
  • Shut down the Sprint Customer Care line of business 2 years ahead of schedule. I managed the daily standup, kept the RAID log, and worked with process content to retire Sprint Care processes.
  • Moved 10 million Sprint customers to the T-Mobile network, partnering with Marketing, Network, Care and Retail, and Training. I managed the RAID log and the leadership playbook.
  • Partnered with the training team on every change, from process outlines to content reviews and knowledge checks.
October 2020 to May 2021

Go-to-Market Manager

T-Mobile
  • Led intake and launch readiness for enterprise launches, aligning 100+ stakeholders across Product, Marketing, Sales, and Operations through recurring status reporting, risk and readiness reviews, and post-launch stabilization tracking.
April 2017 to October 2020

Project | Program Manager III

Sprint
  • Owned the Customer Care war room: took frontline process and system issues from report to resolution with root cause analysis and a weekly readout to directors and process owners.
  • During COVID, ran a war room to stand up retail stores to take Care calls, tracking every open issue through to resolution.
  • Owned program strategy for Pega Next Best Action across 20+ call centers, including NBA process content.
  • Owned National Sales Support strategy and escalations, launched Care Chat, a new outsourced call center, and a new call tracker with authentication standards.
  • Prepared Care for the Sprint and T-Mobile merger by aligning process and policy.
October 2008 to April 2017

Project | Program Manager II

Sprint
  • Supported a 900-seat call center with hiring, new hire engagement and access, plus launches of new systems, programs and processes.
  • Supported the launch of a new billing system project for Customer Care.
  • Tracked and executed enterprise compliance training for the federally mandated Do Not Contact requirements.
  • Led change management for the Pega Next Best Action launch and partnered with Compensation and Revenue teams to recognize tool use.
  • Launched early remote agent teams and built back office HTML templates for contracts, adjustments and order processing.
  • Partnered with Vendor Management on call center performance.

Critical Skills

What I bring to the team

Strategic Planning & Leadership

Proven leadership of cross-functional teams driving delivery of key objectives.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Using data and analytics to inform decisions, prioritize, and drive efficiency.

Journey Mapping & Design

Quickly understanding journeys, identifying pain points, and building the path to optimization.

Relationship Building

Genuine, trust-based relationships with my team and cross-functional partners.

Influential Collaboration

Leveraging strong partnerships to influence delivery of commitments.

Strong Communicator

Informing and engaging through clear written, verbal, and visual communication.

Program Management

Balancing and prioritizing multiple large-scale programs at the same time.

Change Management

Navigating broad-scale change from the working level up to senior leaders.

ExcelFigmaJiraAmdocs CRMPega Next Best ActionMicrosoft CopilotClaudeChatGPT

My First 90 Days

How I start in a new role

I treat my own start like a journey map: learn the landscape, build the shared picture with stakeholders, then communicate and refine.

Stage 1

Embrace the new role, team and goals

  • Invest time with leaders, teammates and peers to build relationships.
  • Get clear on the organization's top strategic priorities and goals.
  • Explore existing data and find key data and analytics partners.
  • Set a roadmap and milestones tied to those priorities.
Stage 2

Build and support the stakeholder team

  • Align cross-functional stakeholders on shared goals.
  • Create one shared source of truth: project plan, journey maps, workback schedules.
  • Begin mapping critical employee journeys to capture pain points and gaps.
  • Run a regular stakeholder cadence by journey focus area and track key milestones.
Stage 3

Communicate, evaluate and deliver

  • Send regular updates on progress, wins, upcoming milestones, risks, issues and dependencies.
  • Keep refining the approach with new stakeholders and data sources.
  • Keep communication open with everyone to build growth and trust.