T-Mobile unlocks marketing efficiency with Adobe Workfront

With
109
million
customers
and
counting,
“uncarrier”
T-Mobile
is
one
of
the
top
mobile
communications
providers
in
the
U.S.
The
company
always
puts
the
customer
first,
which
it
achieves
by
delivering
the
right
experiences
and
content
to
the
right
customers
at
the
right
time.
But
with
different
sub-brands
and
business
units,
T-Mobile’s
marketing
and
content
workflows
were
complex—and
often
inefficient
and
disconnected.

Executive
visibility
is
key
for
T-Mobile

To
ensure
the
best
customer
experience,
T-Mobile’s
C-suite
participates
in
all
overarching
marketing
strategy
and
marketing
campaign
decisions.
However,
when
critical
decisions
were
pending,
manual
workflows
and
disjointed
tools
made
it
nearly
impossible
for
senior
leadership
to
see
everything
in
one
system
or
retrieve
information
efficiently.

The
marketing
operations
team
knew
they
needed
to
create
a
more
seamless
work
management
system
to
support
its

content
supply
chain.

“We
realized
leadership
didn’t
have
the
right
information
at
their
fingertips
to
make
decisions
in
the
moment.
We
knew
we
needed
to
pull
together
a
leadership
dashboard
to
show
all
of
the
given
campaigns
in
real-time.”
Ilona
Yeremova,
Head
of
Marketing
Tools,
Operations
and
Analytics
Team,
T-Mobile

Like
many
other
large
companies
with
complex
marketing
organizations,
T-Mobile
turned
to

Adobe
Workfront
to
streamline
its
content
supply
chain,
help
connect
teams,
plan
and
prioritize
content
creation,
ensure
compliance,
and
manage
assets
and
customer
data.

Scaling
Adobe
Workfront
activation
throughout
the
organization

T-Mobile
started
implementing
Adobe
Workfront
on
the
creative
side
of
the
house.
One
of
its
25
groups,
T-Studios,
was
using
Workfront,
but
it
was
siloed
from
the
other
24
groups.
“We
quickly
realized
that
work
management
has
to
happen
centrally
within
the
organization.
Data
has
to
connect,
people
need
to
connect
and
collaborate,
and
we
need
to
start
talking
in
the
same
language,”
Yeremova
said.

T-Mobile
did
an
inventory
of
the
things
they
really
wanted
to
accomplish
with
customer-focused
content
marketing
efforts,
and
evaluated
how
they
could
orchestrate
a
seamless
customer
journey
across
the
platform
in
a
way
that
would
aid
in
that
delivery.
They
started
with
the
customer
in
mind
and
then
walked
it
back
to
the
technology,
applications,
and
processes.
The
key
questions
they
asked
themselves
were:

• What
  are
  those
  journeys
  we’re
  trying
  to
  orchestrate?
• How
  are
  we
  trying
  to
  talk
  to
  those
  customers?
• What
  are
  the
  trigger
  points?
• How
  does
  that
  all
  come
  to
  life
  in
  a
  connected
  way
  in
  Adobe
  Workfront?

When
T-Mobile
first
started
using
Adobe
Workfront
five
years
ago,
it
was
a
basic
project
management
system
for
60
employees.
Today,
it
is
regarded
internally
as
a
transformational
business
technology
used
by
6000+
employees
as
part
of
a
content
marketing
strategy
to
achieve
business
objectives.
Overall,
T-Mobile
has
realized
a

47%
increase
in
its
productivity
on
the
marketing
side
since
optimizing
Adobe
Workfront,
without
adding
any
additional
headcount.

IBM
helps
unlock
more
value
from
Adobe
Workfront

Once
T-Mobile
achieved
a
more
mature
state
with
Adobe
Workfront,
they
wanted
to
better
understand
the
ROI
realized
with
Adobe
Workfront
and
how
to
connect
with
other
platforms.
That’s
when
T-Mobile
turned
to
IBM.

“IBM,
a
primary
partner
for
content
supply
chain
strategy
and
enablement,
helped
augment
the
T-Mobile
team
in
a
very
seamless
way,”
said
Yeremova.
“[They
are
helping
us]
accelerate
the
onboarding
of
teams
and
connecting
platforms.”

IBM
drove

change
management
for
several
departments,
including
the
Technology
Customer
Experience
(TCX)
and
Career
Development
teams,
two
of
the
largest
groups
at
T-Mobile,
both
of
whom
were
previously
operating
in
Smartsheets.

“[We
brought
in
IBM
as
an]
outside
party
for
change
management
because
internally
there’s
just
so
much
passion
and
inertia
and
you’ve
got
to
take
the
passion
out
of
it,”
Yeremova
said.

In
addition
to
change
management,
IBM
conducted
a

Value
Realization
assessment
of
Workfront
for
the
two
groups
and
found
that
the
career
development
team
realized
a
90%
decrease
in
time
spent
manually
setting
up
and
managing
projects
and
93%
decrease
in
time
creating
or
managing
reports.
The
TCX
team
saved
11
hours
a
week
by
eliminating
unnecessary
meetings
and
improving
automated
workflows.
T-Mobile
now
has
all
25
marketing
groups
operating
in
Workfront,
an
effort
for
which
IBM
has
onboarded
and
assisted
with
configurations. 

Yeremova
says,
“It’s
all
iterative.
Tomorrow
is
going
to
be
different
than
today.
T-Mobile
now
has
a
fairly
robust
environment
that
is
Adobe-centric,
and
everything
is
integrated
within
the
platform.”

Looking
forward
to
an
AI-powered
future

T-Mobile
strongly
believes
that
creating
the
right
guardrails
and
building
a
strong
foundation
with
Adobe
Workfront
has
helped
them
prepare
for
the
innovation
that
is
happening
today,
as
well
as
the
AI-powered
future
of
tomorrow.

“We
are
very
diligent
about
governing
the
platform
we
have.
And
it’s
critical
for
us
to
have
clean
data
in
the
system.”
Ilona
Yeremova,
Head
of
Marketing
Tools,
Operations
and
Analytics
Team,
T-Mobile.

As
her
team
ingests
data,
they
are
constantly
studying
it
and
verifying
it
–
because
if
your
data
is
stale,
nothing
else
will
be
accurate.

T-Mobile
is
currently
focused
onunifying
taxonomies
across
the
enterprise.
Yeremova
says,
“The
team
did
a
lot
of
work
and
[the
creative
taxonomies]
are
like
an
A
plus
now
–
but
next
up,
we’re
focused
on
unifying
taxonomies
in
the
whole
marketing
organization
and
then
even
looking
upwards
to
the
enterprise.”

The
combination
of
a
mature
work
management
strategy
and
a
focus
on
change
management,
governance,
and
clean
data
sets
T-Mobile
up
nicely
to
supercharge
Workfront
with
new
features
and
generative
AI
capabilities.
“If
you’re
not
onboard
with
AI,
you’ll
be
left
behind,”
Yeremova
says.
IBM
is
currently
helping
T-Mobile
evaluate
different
use
cases
where
they
can
leverage
generative
AI,
like
enabling
sales
reps
to
make
recommendations
more
quickly
to
customers
in
its
more
than
6,000+
retail
stores.

“We’re
going
to
be
much
quicker
at
doing
things
and
it’s
exciting
to
envision
that
future
where
folks
are
happy
doing
more
of
the
purposeful
work
and
less
of
the
manual
busy
work,”
Yeremova
said.
“I
watch
how
much
administrative
stuff
that
my
team
does,
and
I
know
that
there’s
a
better
way
to
do
it.
If
we
can
have
GenAI
technologies
like
IBM®

watsonx™
do
some
of
those
repetitive,
mundane
tasks
for
us,
I
bet
we’ll
incrementally
gain
that
benefit
of
more
meaningful
work.
My
team
is
small
but
mighty
and
we
are
incredibly
lucky
to
have
partnership
from
our
Adobe
and
IBM
teams.”

Learn
more
about
IBM’s
Adobe
Consulting
services