T-Mobile delivers on its promise to change wireless for good.

T-Mobile isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. In 2013, they turned the standard carrier plan on its head, eliminating annual contracts and mysterious fees, while offering free data when travelling abroad and unique customer rewards.

“We have completely transformed the company,” says Peter DeLuca, SVP of Brand Communications. “We repositioned the brand as ‘the Uncarrier’ and what that means is we’re squarely focused on our customers and their pain points.”

This “Uncarrier” brand promise marked a considerable shift for the T-Mobile customer experience — and the marketing organisation felt the pressure to deliver. This expectation required finding a more agile, flexible and connected way to get work done quickly and efficiently.

“We needed a way to organise our work and scale to the next level,” says Ilona Yeremova, Senior Manager, MarComm Business Operations. “With the volume and velocity at which we work, there is no other tool that can enable us to move forward. Adobe Workfront is our only way to really move forward in a way that’s going to enable people to stay focused.”

The digital landscape looks drastically different than it did even five years ago and not every company is up for the challenges that come with being a customer-focused organisation. T-Mobile’s bet on the customer experience paid off; in those five years the company’s total customer base has increased by 36% to 86 million customers. For T-Mobile, delivering exactly what those customers expect — and exceeding their expectations — required significant effort.

“It’s a very complex ecosystem,” says DeLuca. “We are customer experience obsessed and that means we have to be extremely nimble in everything that we do. Our teams have to be equally agile. Information needs to be in their hands as fast as you can possibly get it to them.”

T-Mobile wanted to bring that same passion and energy to the way they managed work. However, with aggressive growth came changing priorities and an exponentially larger volume of work. T-Mobile quickly realised its current workflows and processes would not scale to meet business demands.

“We were working in silos. There were a ton of meetings and duplications of effort,” says Integrated Marketing Programme Manager Dana Hawkins. “There was no cohesive way to communicate or keep up with our projects.”

“We put our tentacles in everything — but if you’re moving in a million different directions, you don’t always have a clear path forward,” says Yeremova.

Ultimately, the need for visibility and more efficient processes resulted in more than just lost nights and as a company that prides itself on being voted a best place to work, it was time for a change.

T-Mobile made a bold move to “change wireless for good” for its customers. Since then, the company’s growth trajectory has been dramatic. However, like many organisations, T-Mobile found it difficult to scale the expected level of service across millions of existing and prospective customers and more than 10,000 retail locations.

“When I got here, making sure you had the right people in the right meetings at the right time didn’t exist,” says Yeremova.

T-Mobile’s marketing department says their efforts felt a lot like “herding cats, dogs and zebras.” Manual processes ruled, campaigns lived in spreadsheets and meetings took up too many workday hours.

Workfront helped T-Mobile bring together all of its people, processes and tools in one place to create a single source of truth that captures the full lifecycle of work. Now the marketing team can track, manage and deliver fully integrated marketing campaigns that help them to keep pace with a growing customer base and stand out in a crowded market.

“Workfront enabled us to drive better project flow and bring previously siloed people and tools together in one central place,” says DeLuca. “It’s super impressive. And now we can manage that flow in a way that allows us the ability to target and talk directly to the customer.”

Today’s digital landscape enabled T-Mobile to create increasingly targeted and meaningful experiences for their customers. However, with personalisation comes more work streams — a campaign that previously required creating one asset now includes multiple deliverables to meet the needs of every customer.

While T-Mobile was proud of the number of deliverables the team could handle on a daily and weekly basis, this proliferation of work resulted in an inconsistent intake and content creation process.

Today, every task and timeline is managed using customised project templates in Workfront, giving everyone the ability to visualise and keep tabs on all in-progress programmes and stay focused on the work that matters most. T-Mobile can now track and measure progress across every project and task to ensure things are moving smoothly — and continue to evaluate and optimise processes.

“We need to prove that we’re developing better processes and working more efficiently,” says Hawkins. “We can track everything that we’ve done with Workfront and can move forward.”