[Music] [Stephanie Antonelli] Well, thank you for coming to the session today. It's a full crowd, which we're very excited about. I think there's a wait list to get in, so you are the lucky 350 people. All right, so you all signed up for the session, so you know what it's about. But this is about T-Mobile and how they have harnessed the power of Adobe to revolutionize, excuse me, customer engagement. So we're just going to do a quick round of introductions today. I'm your moderator. My name is Stephanie Antonelli. I lead our Enterprise Solutions group at VML. [Whitney Hutchinson] And I'm Whitney Hutchinson. I run CRM OPS at T-Mobile.
[Graham Sensing] Hello, I'm Graham Sensing I'm the Lead Program Manager for the AEP delivery team, actually with Adobe Professional Services partnering with T-Mobile here. [Amber Novosad] Hi. Amber Novosad, Head of Production leading the CRM operations and deployment with Whitney. For VML. For VML, sorry. Sorry. VML. Excellent. All right, so quick just level setting for the day, setting the stage, we're going to go through a bit of history and background. A couple of the notions that make this program successful, talk about the journey to today, how we got here. Some of the wins along the way. We're going to have a bit of a panel discussion at the end before we get into Q&A. We will leave time for that, so please don't be shy. Ask questions. Everybody here is very prepared to answer anything you can throw our way. So with that, let's go ahead and jump in.
There are plenty of seats, too if anybody wants to come on up. Don't be shy.
Okay, so I think that this quote from Mike Sievert, who's the CEO of T-Mobile sets the stage for where we're going today, which is that "Pro-customer change is inevitable for all industries. Many companies fight and delay it, but a few embrace and lead it. T-Mobile will always be one of the few." I think it's a very proud statement from him and something that is reflected in the work that you'll see today. So just a little bit of setting the stage and background information. This has been a very long-standing partnership and all of us on this stage are very proud of that. We've worked with T-Mobile for over 15 years across a multitude of different programs with wonderful clients along the way across marketing and IT, it's been excellent. 15 plus years for Adobe and T-Mobile as well. And then over 20 years of partnership for VML and Adobe. So if you look around the room, you probably see a lot of people you know, same can go for the people on this stage. It's been wonderful to work with everybody across the years and see how the business has transformed as we've gotten tighter. So overall, this is a little bit of the background, just scratching the surface of the types of work that we do with T-Mobile. We've been partnering with T-Mobile since 2009. We provide end-to-end support across creative development, CRM operations, tech, campaign work, QA deployment, all the way through reporting and analysis. We also support brand, marketing, service teams for postpaid and prepaid work. Business, Division, Metro, Home Internet or anything you can really think of. We have a very deep understanding and intimate knowledge of the T-Mobile brand, the business, the culture in which T-Mobile puts forth products and so on, technology infrastructure as well. It's been a very vast relationship, it's been nice to be able to touch all parts of the business and really round out what is, I think a very sound strategy when it comes to marrying up technology, CRM data, and customer experiences.
Here are just a few examples of some of the email creative work that VML produces for T-Mobile and deploys to customers. These include phone and device offers for postpaid, customer benefits, highlighting and introducing some of the new plans for Metro, for the prepaid offering. And then any service pricing that comes with home internet, which is something that we've been doing recently along the way and very vast and deep work. So I think Graham's going to talk to us a little bit more about the Adobe services that marry up with that. Sure. Yeah. So again, I'm with the Adobe Professional Services team and I had the honor of being the delivery leader with the team of IT group. That was kind of responsible for building the ground zero capabilities and features and products set up to be able to allow for Whitney and for VML here to start their digital transformation in the messaging space. And so Anil said this morning, excuse me, already been a long day. Anil said this morning that Adobe really focuses on building products that help people, and that's been core to our partnership. In fact, something that we really have well between Adobe and T-Mobile is the bidirectional feedback. We're helping them and providing strategy from a professional services and ultimate support team to help them structure processes and people that partner well with the IT capabilities themselves. But we're also getting a bidirectional feedback from T-Mobile helping us improve as organization and also influencing our road map along the way. And so it's been a very, very healthy constructive relationship between us and T-Mobile. And so from a partnership perspective, the capabilities and products that we have built out, we do have things from AEM, AEP, a lot around V8 and Campaign, AJO, Target, Analytics, it's kind of the whole experience cloud suite, if you will, so the vision that you see at putting the whole cloud together really has been implemented and activated here with T-Mobile.
And so I think you can see this theme. I think VML got me this spot and I said "Okay, I don't want to do it by myself." So all partners come with me because it's really been key to our success. So I see the VML team is an extension of my operations team. And Adobe is our partner day in, day out at the table, helping us figure out how to do all of this. And the other really key parts to our relationships are those that I have internally with our tech partners who really are responsible for the platform, our data partners who enable the operations and the marketing experiences and service experiences that my team deploys and those relationships both internally and externally have been absolutely pivotal to the success that we've had so far and what I think will be much success moving forward.
And relationships are really pivotal how we're going to get success in our current reality. So T-Mobile has been the challenger brand for a very long time in this space, but not anymore. We're the champion now, and we have to operate a little bit differently, right? We're 1,000% customer obsessed. We are really focused on becoming a data-informed, AI-enabled, digital-first company. These are words that come straight from our CEO to our ears every single day. And again, this partnership that we have to get us to these aspirations is super important.
So how do I personally play into that vision? I run our CRM operations team. We service all of the communications that go out to customers, be it marketing, service, some in the middle, we support, we're a shared service, so we support all of the LOBs, the lines of business within T-Mobile. So Stephanie mentioned we have postpaid services, we have prepaid with a few different brands, Metro and Magenta prepaid. We have Assurance Wireless. We have different brands within our Home Internet and broadband line of business and my team supports all of those communications across multiple channels. So just some stats here you can see in 2024, we did over 1,000 campaigns.
Hundreds and hundreds by channel and many, many, many, many iterations, segments, treatments, whatever, whatever cut you want to take. So we do a lot, a lot of marketing and a lot of service messaging.
And so I started with T-Mobile a couple years ago, and when I started there was, my operation was really desperate. So every one of those lines of business had its own MarTech, had its own data ecosystem, had its own process.
And I needed to bring all of this together to really transform how we were going to get to the next phase in our journey.
That cohesive ecosystem was really going to help us drive operational efficiency, marketing effectiveness and then enable more advanced customer experiences, right? So we couldn't do that when all of our customer data was siloed, all of our operations were siloed. And just simply from the number of systems we had to operate into, I think we worked in at least 10, down to now where we're almost done with this full transformation and we'll be working within too. So that's drastically changed the way that my team operates how efficient we can be and how effective we can be.
And I'm looking at the screen and I'm passing it to Amber.
So just to talk a little bit about our journey and how we've been partnering with T-Mobile over the past 15 years and working through this transition over to Adobe.
So we had T-Mobile approach us and say that they wanted to create a modern CRM capability. And then from what we did is our VML partnership with T-Mobile, we collaborated with them for a 10-week engagement and we looked at an operating model and created a strategic engagement for us to be able to create an actionable program and build of what the team would like across. People, processes, technology, and the tools.
We made sure that we were able to be flexible, scalable and what we did in the next few slides that we'll talk through is just how we set up the program.
So we did an assessment to look at the transformation over a course of time. So we looked at first four different key areas, the operating model, governance, marketing CRM, and then we looked at analytics. The first piece looking at the operating model. We evaluated the existing processes and looked at ways to optimize the existing processes and then also create new ways of working. We knew that the ways of working in which we were working in with the current tools would not transition to the ways of working in Adobe. Secondly, we looked at governance. We reviewed the existing team structure across VML and T-Mobile, and we looked at a new org design which created a federated model which was more or less what Whitney was alluding to earlier as the one team. And acting as one team leaning in to make sure that we were cross-collaborating at every given moment in time, as well as Adobe to make sure that we were cohesive and working extremely well together.
We then looked at the transition of the current campaigns and BAU, business as usual, and the current tools, and then looked at how we would transition into Adobe and making sure that at any given point in time knowing that it's not a super easy transition to do it all at one time, we did a phased transition, so we worked on a road map with T-Mobile and Adobe to make sure that we were transitioning the right amount of campaigns at the right time to not do it all at once. We then looked at operational efficiency metrics and also ROI to make sure that we were continuously looking at those metrics and hitting upon those operational efficiencies as we transitioned.
We looked at this over a phased transition, so three different stages. We did the platform transition, then a transition to transformation, and then scaling transformation. And we did it in this way again, to ensure that we had the business continuity and making sure that we were able to maintain the business and the success that we had with the current tools, while slowly transitioning over into Adobe. So we looked at this in platform transition. There was very little usable content and assets that we could pull and lift and shift over. So we had to rebuild audiences with T-Mobile. We had to rebuild the HTML. So we made sure that we had a six-month time frame to look at that transition.
We then looked at the transformation, the transition, excuse me to transformation and that was when we were making sure that our teams were upskilling, upleveling and making sure that they were getting the knowledge that they needed to in order to transition over successfully. So we had teams focusing on current tools and BAU, business as usual, and then we had some teams focusing on the exact Adobe transition itself. And so going side by side and then eventually transitioning the entire team over into using Adobe. And last but not least, we looked at what do you do in the long-term after you get the team set up for success. Start doing those pilots and the programs. Then you start to be able to operationalize and use less efficiencies to maintain and grow the campaign work in Adobe itself.
Okay, back to Whitney.
And so the foundational work for all of this started in 2022.
And again, we'll talk a lot about partnerships in this presentation. It started with CRM Ops, our data partners and our tech partners internally. And really had to build that foundation working with VML on how we were going to actually do this. So we had to create a process and a program where we kept BAU in all of those legacy systems and we enabled new experiences in Adobe without spending an extra dollar and without breaking anything. I'm not sure we didn't spend an extra dollar. We might have broken a few things, but we didn't spend any more money, so we thought that was a huge success. What we did was we were very, very structured, very disciplined in how we would do this. We built standard phases for this migration across plans. This is where we were building our business requirements, really understanding across all of the lines of business.
What would we need to do to enable what they needed to do for their business? What was their data ecosystem? What was the infrastructure? What do we need to do to pull that into a more cohesive plan? We went through build. We did really interesting work with Adobe where they taught us, basically, how to fish, right? So we said don't give us out-of-the-box training. Please sit with us. And so Adobe would build our campaigns and we would watch, and VML would watch and then VML and my team would build and Adobe would watch and make sure we were okay and it was highly successful to do it that way. So we were building on actual campaigns and starting that migration on the backs of Adobe Professional Services, which was great. Testing hugely important to get through to make sure that data was flowing correctly, that data was validated, that everything was ready to go so that QA testing phase was really, really important. Then we went through go live. And now in some of the LOBs were really into optimizing those experiences and the workflow and the things that we're doing. We then took those phases and we waterfalled them by line of business. So we had a very actionable migration road map. I mean, we lived against this schedule for two years.
And what we were trying to do again was move lines of business over automate as much as we could. Save money. Turn off old tech, we'll go through that in a second. Start with the next line of business. And as we were learning, we would document what we were learning so that the next line of business we made maybe less mistakes or found out fewer things that we didn't know and we were very, very disciplined in how we manage this migration road map.
And all of this really has led us to some pretty big wins. So we're excited to walk you through some of those.
In the past two years, this transformation has really netted us quite a lot. We've integrated 21 different data sources to build a cohesive customer profile. So we don't have a siloed profile. It's now specific to T-Mobile, you're a T-Mobile customer, it doesn't matter if you're prepaid, postpaid, ASW, it's all one profile.
We consolidated a bunch of messaging platforms down to just Campaign and AJO. So we had a lot of email service providers. We had different messaging systems. It's now just within those two. We reduced our effort to build and launch campaigns by 40%.
Part of that was adjusting how my team operates. Part of that was adjusting my VML contract down a little bit.
So lots of optimization in terms of operation. And most importantly, we decrease a lot of tech debt. So it was not only tech debt in terms of licensing fees, it was maintenance, it was the management of all of these different ecosystems which netted T-Mobile significant savings each year.
And we're going-- I'll talk through some of those enterprise realizations and how we measured those ongoing. It was also really important as we were going through this migration to highlight our quick wins and our wins along the way. We'll highlight one key cross-channel journey that we've been able to enable via this ecosystem where we couldn't before. And then I'm teeing up for my colleague tomorrow, Anya Edstrom, she's right over here in the audience. There's other things outside of my team that this ecosystem is allowing. And so Anya's going to talk tomorrow about how AI decisioning is really evolving based on this ecosystem. And I highly encourage you to go listen to her tomorrow for. Cool. So as I mentioned earlier, Adobe really what came as part of ground zero partnered with the T-Mobile IT organization to make sure that we had the platform built out. I think the metaphor when I joked about earlier was building the kitchen or building the house before her team and T-Mobile marketing can move in and start to utilize all of those tools. And so we really started with going in and we did have AEP and a unified customer profile. That's a buzz word. I get paid by the hour to say it every few minutes, but we did really have that unified customer profile in our line of sight. And we also aligned from the top down on both organizations of the goal and the value what this messaging migration could bring to T-Mobile and its operations. And so with those things in focus and insight a lot of our technical, messaging, and data, and architectural leads from professional services. We got to go in and we got to work alongside with T-Mobile to review and catalog all of the existing systems, messages, and capabilities that were required to be able to move from BAU legacy to now BAU wasn't be run and operate inside the Adobe Stack. And so it's really powerful there again for that partnership is, T-Mobile and VML really dug in and they helped us with the catalog of documentation of what was BAU, and I know that was not-- It's a huge ecosystem with lots of acquisitions over time. So that's not an easy undertaking and so I commend T-Mobile and VML for bringing that to the table because what it allowed us to do really quickly was look at all of the different messaging systems, look at the capabilities, the business requirements, the velocity of the data is being sent and really getting real nerdy in that unified customer profile.
But going really nerdy to look at what data is available in AEP today from the initial MVP use cases that we had mainly utilized for front ends at the time for things on the screen, what data was missing that needed to be brought in for the messaging migration to actually begin and the markers' hands on keyboard. And so after that analysis and breaking that down, we did break that in different phases as Whitney mentioned. So phase one was we started with launching in 2022 a V8. So we had Batch Campaigns that actually had an integration into AEP. So V8 shared that profile with AEP so that's why there's always a centralized view of the customer, we were not trying to repeat sins of the past and have broken deals with the customer, right? So we really focused on AEP being the core of the profile and what the customer was being communicated to and we built on an added V8 onto that. So outbound messaging could go traditionally in a batch style, correct? And so from there we looked at the campaigns that we need to be migrated and we said, "Okay, we have the data ready and we have the capabilities ready." So T-Mobile marketing, VML, your team is ready to able to start to operate and move campaigns in this phase one bucket. From there we started to implement and integrate AJO capabilities. So that's more of your real-time one-to-one personalized messaging that included Push integrating with the T-Life app. So Push was available. SMS, obviously, had to be activated. And so we had a real-time messaging capabilities then set up, and ready to go. And at that point, we moved on to phase two, which allowed the marketing team to say, "Okay, great, we can start moving these types of campaigns from these systems over to Adobe." And then lastly was obviously the data, the long tail in this project is the data migration. And that's just because with how important governance and security. And getting the right data into AEP to make sure you're the right customer at the right time. It's an important subject that you don't want to rush into. And so we do that very thoughtfully. We partnered with T-Mobile Securities team to help regain that data and we made sure privacy was central to the theme of what we were doing and also to make sure the right customer at the right time at the right place. So we partner with the IT, data IT partners at T-Mobile to prioritize a backlog based off the existing data that we wanted to bring into the campaign to make that unified customer profile more holistic and better to achieve the end-to-end goals for the entire marketing ecosystem.
Along the way, and Whitney mentioned this as well, but we did do that hands-on training, which we called hand over and it started with-- Every time we had a capability built, so let's use AJO for an example, and we had AJO Push was now an activated capability. We did lots of documentation and training that was personalized to T-Mobile. This is how it's specific to your integration, taking in your privacy policies to consideration, etcetera, etcetera, and walk through not only T-Mobile IT, which is the team that I work with probably day in, day out and getting those built. But enabling the marketing team to understand that and be able to use those tools so we did personalized handover training. They watched our team build the first few campaigns and then we moved to where they were building and we were sitting desk side coaching to watch them build those campaigns and auditing up the door. And I do think that was a big metric for success that gains velocity for the marketing team as it needed to start building these messages inside the ecosystem.
And so lastly also, we had the same project, that was not just messaging that we're focused on, but that same type of training and enablement had to happen for data architects to bring data into the system. It had to happen for how we are plugging mobile and Web SDK. It had to happen into the screens for app and web. It had to happen for how we were running segments and audiences. And in fact, building a taxonomy of audience management was inside RTCDP. So that way it could also scale for not only the business today, but how Whitney could take her team forward to expand those audiences to future campaigns in the future. So future campaigns in the future, yep. - Double future. - Yeah. And so that's really the partnership that we had. And so now we're moving on to doing more capabilities and some of the things that we teased with Anya's session tomorrow, but about real-time decisioning on the web and in app. But yeah, that's really how Adobe partnered and hand it over to the marketing team. And so all of that led to these wins that we're going to talk about. So again, you're going to see. Here's the same road map. What we did within this road map was highlight our wins as we were going. We didn't wait till the end. We're actually still not done. We have one more line of business that we're finishing up in the next two weeks. We're going to have a huge celebration. But we wanted to highlight these quick ones as we wanted to share with leadership and with our partners where we were making progress. So we broke it down into three categories. We had platform decommission, we had operational efficiencies, and then we had modern marketing enablements. And as we were migrating each line of business into this new ecosystem and cleaning up our operation, we were turning off different tech, right? So all of these little black boxes on the bottom are all the platforms we had to work in, all the platforms we had to pay licensing fees to, all the platforms we had to manage from a maintenance perspective. And as we were going, we were highlighting as we were turning those off and mapping that savings to the company. Then we added in when we would, what operational efficiencies were we getting? Where were we reducing our time-to-market? Where were we saving on our agency fees? Where were we saving on our contractor fees? And we mapped those in. And then what was most exciting to some of our leadership on the marketing side was more when are those advanced capabilities going to be available for us to do all of this cool stuff that we bought, right? Advanced audience creation, automation, cross-channel journeys, and so as we went and as we continue to go, we highlight these every time, we stop, we celebrate, we have a little bit of champagne when we turn another platform off because it's a long journey and we want to have celebrations along the way and it's been really, really helpful. So huge savings from a dollar amount from an efficiency perspective and we really are able to create significantly better experiences for our customers. So I'm going to highlight one really quick.
Network Pass is a program we have for prospective customers to come in and try our network. So if anybody is not a T-Mobile customer, shame on you. But please go sign up for Network Pass. You can try our network out for 90 to 30 days, 90 days, thank you. 90 days. We're looking at optimizing the journey because we're getting so sophisticated. We're going to adjust it. So this program used to be very manual. It was not all channels. It was a lot of batch campaigns. We did it in batches like, "Oh, let's do everybody on day 1, and then day 10, and then in just a few channels." It was one of the first journeys we migrated over. It's now a multi channel journey, it's fully automated, it's based on advanced if then logic, right? As customers engage, they get a different experience. As they convert, they get a different experience.
I keep looking over here, my great team over here who are the ones that built it and manage it all day in day out. And it's been really successful. So not only is it driving lift in bands, which is our accounts, it's also driving lift in our lines per account. It's also driving lift in interesting segments. So people in rural areas, which is one of our key areas we're trying to share with everybody that our network is actually really strong there. It's working well there and people convert more in digital, which is also a strategy as I mentioned in terms of being a data-informed company, we want people to be able to self-serve and to activate and engage in digital. So it's been a super successful program. We're optimizing it. Now you can see on that bottom graph around the 30-day mark, we're seeing most of the activation there, so we're going to start to optimize that journey specific to that. But this is something we couldn't have done, I don't think we could have done this outside of the Adobe ecosystem in our previous ecosystem and we certainly couldn't have done it in the efficient way we are, nor could we have seen these insights at the level we needed to optimize. So it's been a huge success. This is one of very, a lot of journeys that we're enabling. So just one success story.
Amazing. Okay. So with that, we're going to enter into a panel discussion and then we're going to go into Q&A. So I think obviously the major theme of today is it was massively successful and we're still on that journey. But with any program of this size and any transformation of this size, can you just speak I think maybe give everybody a chance to answer this question independently. But what unexpected challenges did emerge as you were consolidating platforms, migrating, looking at creating this unified customer profile? - Who wants to start? - Who wants to go? I'll go. I think that the biggest challenge for us was rightsizing and validating the data from all of these, the platform was ready, the capability was there and what held us up was our data, right? How could we get our data in a format that would allow us to use it? How could we make sure that we right-sized from postpaid to prepaid so that we could build that unified profile.
And I think every single line of business that we brought over, we think we know and that we really don't know. And so we spend a lot of time really making sure that which is really the lifeblood, right, it's what we know about our customers, it's how they speak to us, it's all of the things we know. It's the most important part. We were highly protective of it and so how we get it in a way that we can really use it to drive those experiences was definitely a challenge for us, and I think we've made a huge progress. So that was unexpected to me that that part of it would be quite so hard.
Yeah, I think the technology is ahead of how we work as people sometimes. We're very much into our silos or into our organizations, and the technology is now able to bring us together. And so that's a challenge that enterprises across every organization ecosystem face. What I really appreciated with T-Mobile is the leadership from Whitney and her partners in IT and the data teams to really say, in fact, I'll quote Whitney in her salute today. They had a goal to finish each other's sentences. If they could be unified, our teams could be unified and that really helped us have the goal of that cross-communication of the one vision. Like, this is the focus and it allowed us to really remove barriers of competing priorities because we knew no, no, this is the priority. We have to re-prioritize data ingestion for a different campaign because the cost savings, operational efficiencies or what have you whatever that priority was. Whitney and the leadership team at T-Mobile were aligned on doing it in a unified way. So that was very helpful, but as a challenge, that is often hard to overcome.
So-- - Sorry, Amber. - Are you okay? Okay. I was going to ask the next question. Here just I think, Whitney, part of your success is that you've built this program in such a collaborative way and you've celebrated the moments as you said along the way. So that it doesn't feel like one big celebration that you're waiting such a long time for but you get to have those moments with your leadership, with the teams on the ground, was there any internal resistance along the way to this? How did you deal with that? How did you lift everybody up along the way? Yeah, there certainly was. I think everybody saw the vision and wanted it to be better, but when it comes down to your day-to-day, people liked the way they worked and they liked the systems they worked in and they liked the way that system did what it needed for them. And my team is laughing down there. We did a lot of coaching and cheerleading and it's okay to make mistake and if anything hits the fan, I'll take responsibility.
And what's really funny now is that-- And you guys can correct me if I'm wrong. Right now, we're really starting to lean into AJO and all of the things that AJO can do for us. And there's some complicated stuff we're trying to do and everybody's like, "But we could do in V8," right? But it took me about a year to get everybody comfortable in V8. So now we're comfortable there. And so it's just one of those things I think you know what you know and you're like what you know and but what we did was really, again, embrace our partners, embrace our partners internally and say, we're going to do this together and it's going to be bumpy and that's okay. So with that, what advice would you give other organizations who are going through this? I mean, people, process, tools, everything across the board. What's your biggest take away and piece of advice? Don't downplay the people part.
Agree. So thank you, everyone. If you have any other questions, feel free to come up. But we are done. So appreciate the time. Thank you.
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