A major automotive services subscription provider was experiencing competing strategic initiatives in the same channel. Multiple internal stakeholders were vying for the same resources and the same in-market dates.

To improve channel efficiency and effectiveness, the brand was looking to transition from its customary approach by running an agile methodology to plan, build, and deliver a better customer marketing experience.

After the client engaged Merkle for marketing operations and decisioning services, we customized an instance of Jira, a project management system for operations management, and applied an agile-based process to the company’s marketing, which included the following:

Systems: By moving communications away from email and into Jira, dashboards and calendars were established to provide operations visibility.

People: One centralized operations lead was appointed to work as a liaison and decision maker across all stakeholders, agencies, and execution resources.

Prioritization: Campaign requests are now scored by the execution team based on complexity and level of effort. Then, the operations lead prioritizes campaign requests based on business value, urgency, and readiness of campaign assets, fitting as many campaigns into one sprint as total point capacity allows.

Production: Stories are prioritized into sprints, then handed off from creative to the operations team.

Debrief: A sprint retrospective now refines the accuracy of scoring over time and informs process efficiency opportunities to maximize long-term CRM spend.