With 109 million customers and growing, “the uncarrier,” T-Mobile, is the leading mobile communications provider in the United States. The company has always put the customer first, and it achieves this by delivering the right experience and content to the right customer at the right time. However, with multiple sub-brands and business units, T-Mobile’s marketing and content workflows were often complex, inefficient and disconnected.
Executive name recognition is key for T-Mobile
To ensure the best customer experience, T-Mobile executives are involved in all overarching marketing strategy and marketing campaign decisions. But when important decisions were pending, manual workflows and disjointed tools made it nearly impossible for senior executives to see everything in one system or get information efficiently.
The marketing operations team knew they needed to create a more seamless work management system to support their content supply chain.
“We realized that our executives didn’t have the right information at hand that they needed to make decisions right away. We knew we needed to put together a leadership dashboard to see all our campaigns in real time.” Ilona Yeremova, Head of Marketing Tools, Operations and Analytics Team, T-Mobile
Like many large enterprises with complex marketing organizations, T-Mobile turned to Adobe Workfront to streamline its content supply chain, align teams, plan and prioritize content creation, ensure compliance, and manage assets and customer data.
Extend Adobe Workfront activation across your organization
T-Mobile began rolling out Adobe Workfront to its internal creative teams. One of 25 groups, T-Studios, was using Workfront but was separate from the other 24. “We quickly realized that work management had to be centralized within the organization. We needed to connect data, we needed to connect people to collaborate, and we needed to speak the same language,” says Yeremova.
T-Mobile made a list of what they really wanted to accomplish with their customer-centric content marketing efforts, and then evaluated how they could orchestrate a seamless customer experience across platforms to help them get there. They started with the customer in mind, then worked their way back to their technology, applications, and processes. Key questions they asked themselves were:
What are the journeys we’re trying to orchestrate? How are we trying to interact with those customers? What are the trigger points? How do we bring all of this together in Adobe Workfront?
When T-Mobile first started using Adobe Workfront five years ago, it was a basic project management system for 60 employees. Now it’s seen internally as a transformational business technology, with more than 6,000 employees using it as part of their content marketing strategy to achieve their business goals. Overall, T-Mobile has seen a 47% increase in productivity on the marketing side since optimizing Adobe Workfront, without adding any headcount.
IBM helps you get more value from Adobe Workfront
After T-Mobile reached a more mature state with Adobe Workfront, they wanted to better understand the ROI they were realizing with Adobe Workfront and how it could connect with other platforms, so they turned to IBM.
“As a key partner for content supply chain strategy and enablement, IBM helped empower the T-Mobile team in a very seamless way,” said Yeremova.[They are helping us] It accelerates team onboarding and platform connectivity.”
IBM drove change management across multiple departments at T-Mobile, including its two largest groups, the Technology Customer Experience (TCX) team and the Career Development team, both of which had previously used Smartsheets.
“[We brought in IBM as an] “It’s not a good idea to leave change management to outsiders because there is passion and inertia within the company, and the passion has to be removed,” says Eremova.
In addition to change management, IBM conducted a value realization assessment of Workfront with the two groups and found that the career development team reduced the time spent manually setting up and managing projects by 90% and reduced the time spent creating or managing reports by 93%. The TCX team saved 11 hours per week by eliminating unnecessary meetings and improving automated workflows. All 25 of T-Mobile’s marketing groups are now running on Workfront, and IBM onboarded and helped configure the initiative.
“Everything is iterative. Tomorrow is different from today. T-Mobile has a pretty robust Adobe-centric environment right now, and everything is integrated within the platform,” Yeremova said.
Hopes for a future powered by AI
By using Adobe Workfront to create the right guardrails and build a strong foundation, T-Mobile is confident it will be ready for not only the innovation happening today, but also the AI-powered future ahead.
“We work very hard on managing our platform. Having clean data in our systems is very important to us.” Ilona Yeremova, Head of Marketing Tools, Operations and Analytics Team, T-Mobile.
Her team is constantly reviewing and verifying data as it comes in, because if the data is out of date, everything else becomes inaccurate.
T-Mobile is currently focused on unifying taxonomy across the company. “The team has done a lot of work,” said Eremova. [the creative taxonomies] Right now, it’s like an A-plus. But the next step is to align the taxonomy across the marketing organization and then really focus on looking at the whole company.”
With a mature work management strategy, combined with a focus on change management, governance and clean data, T-Mobile is ready to enhance Workfront with new features and generative AI capabilities. “If you don’t adopt AI, you’ll be left behind,” says Yeremova. IBM is now helping T-Mobile evaluate different use cases where generative AI can be leveraged, such as helping sales reps make faster recommendations to customers at its more than 6,000 retail stores.
“It’s exciting to envision a future where we do things a lot faster, people are more satisfied with purposeful work, and there are fewer manual chores,” says Jeremova. “I look at how much administrative work my team does and I think there’s a better way. If GenAI technologies like IBM® watsonx™ could help us do some of those repetitive, monotonous tasks for them, we’ll gradually reap the benefits of more meaningful work. My team is small but mighty, and we’re very fortunate to have partnered with the teams at Adobe and IBM.”
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Adobe Workfront Practice Lead, Americas, IBM Consulting Associate Partner