A customer-centric carrier from the inside out

T-Mobile has always distinguished itself by finding new ways to put customers first. In the high-stakes American mobile market, where the right move can shift the balance of power between carriers overnight and the wrong move can alienate customers by the millions, the company has never shied away from innovation in the name of customer success.

In fact, it was T-Mobile’s big-bet move to eliminate annual contracts from its service that turned the carrier model on its head. Offering more flexibility in plans brought in a tsunami of new customers, and today T-Mobile is the second largest mobile carrier in the United States with 109 million customers.

“We repositioned the brand as ‘the Uncarrier,’ says Peter DeLuca, Chief Creative Officer. “What that means is we’re squarely focused on our customers and their pain points.”

Most recently, it announced a wave of unique perks for T-Mobile customers traveling abroad, including faster data roaming and free in-flight WIFI.

As Ilona Yeremova, Senior Manager of Marketing Business Operations explains, being an “Uncarrier” is much more than a branding exercise. It’s a commitment to customer excellence that starts from the inside out with the way T-Mobile’s marketing and business strategy teams operate.

To that end, Yeremova and her team implemented Adobe Workfront in 2018 to centralize the company’s marketing workflows onto a single integrated platform and work in a more agile, flexible, and collaborative way. What began as a pseudo ticketing intake system used by just 60 employees five years ago has since grown into a transformational business technology used by more than 5,000 employees.

A complex ecosystem made simple

T-Mobile has grown rapidly in recent years, both organically and through its merger with Sprint in 2020. The company now has more than 109 million subscribers, up from 74 million in 2018, making it America’s second largest carrier.

But with growth comes complexity. T-Mobile’s portfolio of brands includes T-Mobile for Business, Metro by T-Mobile, Home Internet, and Assurance Wireless, among others. Each of the marketing teams behind these brands must be able to create and roll-out timely campaigns to tell their story and engage customers, all while respecting internal workflows and approvals. “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.”

In keeping with its relentless focus on customer experience, T-Mobile is committed to constantly optimizing its entire marketing workflow from content creation to campaign distribution, to reporting and ROI. It chose Workfront to bring that vision to life, which has since helped the business to eliminate siloes between marketing teams, automate time-consuming tasks, and simplify its approach to optimizing marketing operations across brands.

“We needed to rethink the way we work so we could scale to the next level,” says Yeremova. “Only Workfront could match the immense volume and velocity of marketing projects we run across T-Mobile’s many brands and make the entire process feel more integrated than ever as we continue to grow.”

“We’ve gained a single source of truth and turned planning into a competitive advantage for our business” she adds. “A centralized view of marketing workflows allows us to pinpoint bottleneck processes like content translation and approvals, which can potentially delay a campaign, and proactively address those hurdles so we can deliver more frictionless customer experiences.”

Greater productivity in less time

The goal for T-Mobile’s marketing team is to continuously improve the way it plans, tracks, manages, and delivers integrated campaigns. Workfront has positioned the business to do just that, improving the campaign delivery process so that T-Mobile stands out in a highly competitive market where customer needs shift at breakneck speed.

“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.”

For Yeremova, smarter campaign development isn’t just about the way work is done, it’s about WHAT work is being done. “For instance, we've developed the capability to use Workfront's scorecard feature which will help the team to automate the way marketers prioritize top-of-funnel marketing objectives, which means the right people spend the right amount of time doing the right work.”

“We’ve pioneered a digital approach to prioritizing work with Workfront that’s smart, dynamic, connected, and rooted in consistent logic. Those qualities are critical to our success as a growing organization,” she says.

This streamlined, structured approach to workflow management proved invaluable following T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint in 2020. The marketing team was able to increase its output by 47% to accommodate new campaign demands and a larger customer base, without taking on additional headcount.

What’s more, the consolidating of workflows deliver time and cost benefits all the way up to T-Mobile’s leadership team. For instance, weekly marketing updates with the company’s top leadership involves 150 stakeholders feeding into the same SharePoint document, a tedious process that falls apart if the document breaks or a cell is accidentally overwritten.

A prototype workflow and subsequent reporting was built in entirety on Workfront, allowing every stakeholder to share updates in a centralized location and cascade the latest campaign information in real-time. Better visibility, tracking, and fewer bottlenecks in internal review processes resolve in streamlined feedback loops on time-sensitive, competitive initiatives.

Digitized processes have also saved T-Mobile’s senior managers at least 20 hours of administration time each week, time they can reinvest in more strategic initiatives and in managing their teams. As for cost-savings, the business has saved upwards of $2 million across its marketing organization by consolidating its siloed workflow management tools on Workfront.

“Senior leaders shouldn’t spend hours on pulling data for reporting. Their time is valuable and should be focused on the business and not on creating multiple pivots of the same data for stakeholders,” says Yeremova. “Workfront has been a savior in that regard, and more managers are asking us to digitize their planning and reporting on the platform each day."

Digitization that puts people first

In addition to centralizing workflows onto an integrated platform, T-Mobile is laser-focused on improving the way its marketers work. Yeremova’s team of “Workfront ninjas,” as she calls them, are enablers for marketing teams across the organization, empowering them to collaborate, plan, and deliver campaigns with less headaches and a greater focus on the customer experience.

“Workfront has made our processes digital, but it has made our marketing organization more human than ever,” says Yeremova. “From content creation to campaign delivery to reporting, our people spend less time in siloes and more time collaborating to deliver the best work possible.”

The cultural shift T-Mobile has experienced since going live with Workfront has been dramatic. As with many large businesses, there was an initial hesitation to digitize processes when the platform was first introduced. But Yeremova’s innovative approach and the tenacity of her team have since turned a single project into a company-wide transformation.

“Teams across the business have come to appreciate our people-first approach to technology, and how platforms like Workfront actually make their lives better. The volume of work handled by the platform grows each day, and more importantly the quality of work being done by our marketers has never been stronger,” says Yeremova.

Linking content, campaigns, and customers

Having stood up Workfront as T-Mobile’s campaign development platform, Yeremova’s team is now looking to integrate the entire marketing workflow onto the solution, from planning to content creation and curation in Adobe Experience Manager.

T-Mobile’s content creators already use Adobe Experience Manager Assets as their digital asset management (DAM) platform for online marketing, to browse content from previous campaigns and reuse it. Yeremova is now working to create a bridge by integrating Adobe Experience Manager Assets with Workfront to unlock seamless workflows, where teams can easily find assets and map metadata and sync automatically for easier discoverability.

“The nirvana vision is to have a single thread connecting Adobe Experience Manager Assets and Workfront. Creative assets would be automatically saved and organized in Workfront projects, where creative teams could then download them as building blocks for on-going campaigns, saving everyone valuable time,” says Yeremova.

T-Mobile’s marketers are hardly short on ambition. With thousands of people now using Workfront, the team continues to uncover new opportunities to integrate, improve, and make its marketing processes more efficient.

DeLuca neatly summarizes how gaining control over marketing workflows has transformed T-Mobile and promises to drive further innovation in the years ahead . “We’re able to have a single source of truth that the entire organization can work from,” he says. “Putting information in people’s hands helps to inspire them to do the best work of their career, and that translates to the best customer experiences we’ve ever delivered.”

Expand your knowledge

A seamless customer experience requires more than just delivery, it requires coordination. Learn more about how T-Mobile is scaling collaboration for business efficiency in this on-demand session.

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