Since September 11, 2001, many financial firms in the industry face constant challenge and the volatile climate has led many firms including Intersect Investments to struggles in keeping their clients trust and Wall Street’s credibility. Despite Intersect Investments decline in sales and customers’ satisfaction, they managed to survive the instability of the industry. Intersect Investment’s Chief Executive Officer, Frank Jeffers understand that in order to survive, he would need to make a drastic strategic shift by offering an ever-expanding array of up-to-the-minute products coupled with expert advice. His new vision include providing a broad set of products and services to consumer and small business customers using a model of customer intimacy that will build long-term relationships based on trust and value to the customers.
Frank Jeffers’ new vision has also stir controversies within some of his own leadership team and employees of Intersect Investments making this infrastructure a challenge in meeting its goals and visions. Already, he has let go of his current Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sales as the EVP did not support his new vision and continuously failed to lead his organization to follow the new approach. He has hired Janet Angelo as the new Executive Vice President of Marketing and Sales as she has a track record of implementing a "customer intimacy" model. He believes that she will be able to push the organization in the right direction in fulfilling the company’s goals. Despite Janet’s expertise and Frank Jeffers vision of this new brand image and establishing long-term customer relationships, they are also faced with internal conflicts where team work collaboration, managing resistant to change and ethical conflicts with stakeholders are all issues they will need to overcome in order to stay aligned with their new vision.
Situation Analysis
Issue and Opportunity Identification
The terrorist attach of September 11, 2001, has caused many financial firms in the industry to be in a constant state of flux. Many external forces resulting from this event has caused many financial firms to make changes within its firm in order to survive. "External forces for change originate outside the organization" (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2003, p. 674). Intersect Investments also faces the same issue from the unstable industry forcing the CEO, Frank Jeffers to make a drastic strategic shift in order to keep their clients’ trust and Wall Street’s credibility as being a trusted advisor.
The company was taking the big risks of financial. Due to the firm was started winding down after collapse of the Bear Stearns hedge fund. The firm also had accumulated a very large commercial real estate portfolio. The CEO of the firm believed that it had sufficient funds to tackle the problems after borrow money from the federal reserved investment.
The novel Liars Poker by Michael Lewis is a very interesting firsthand account of an inside look into the investment banking world, in particular bond trading at the firm Solomon Brothers in the 1980s. Lewis took an interesting and roundabout way to end up on Wall Street, studying art history at Yale and bombing his interview with Lehman Brothers. But he eventually found himself at Solomon Brothers through a lucky encounter with two managing directors wives. Through his book, Michael Lewis conveys the inner workings of investment banks in the 1980s to the average person using his own experience at Solomon Brothers. The book goes into Lewis’s own rise in the firm, as well as the rise and fall of the entire Solomon Brothers Mortgage department.
The attacks of 9/11 resulted in history’s longest stock market shut down since the 1930s. The New York Stock Exchange remained closed for six days after the attacks. Furthermore, Davis (2011) reports that upon reopening, the New York Stock Exchange fell almost seven hundred points, the biggest one day loss in history. Additionally, Jackson (2008) reports a 14% decline in the Dow Jones, a loss the Dow still felt almost a year later. But, it was American Airlines and United Airlines that experienced the greatest loss. Following the reopening of the stock market, American experienced a 39% decline and United experienced a 42% decline (Davis, 2011). However in face of discouraging numbers, Jackson (2008) reports that the U.S. markets rebounded second only to Japan, showing the great economic resilience of the U.S. While the stock markets present a bleak outlook immediately following the attacks, the financial loss is far from reassuring.
In light of an evolving market, faced with new competitors, and after a careful analysis of their current customers, the Vanguard Group (hereinafter referred to as “Vanguard”) realizes it must rethink its entire marketing strategy. However, in order to protect and leverage their competitive advantage, which is their low management fees, and to optimize the loyalty that their customers continuously demonstrate toward their organization, they must now target the most profitable segment for them, and develop the best way to serve and delight these customers.
RBC Financial Group uses a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy that provides a variety of services for a variety of clients. The strategy allows for individual customers to trust RBC and develop a personal relationship with each and every client. One major factor that allows CRM to operate effectively is the use of technologies and analytics to help classify each client’s financial situation. These customer profitability-based techniques allowed RBC to categorize their clients into A, B, and C groups so that the sales teams could optimize their efforts in catering to these different clients. This strategy holds the following strengths: optimizing sales efforts to different customers, easily accessible electronic sales leads, centralized and standardized financial decisions, and building personalized and sustainable customer relationships. There are a few weaknesses to the system though including the complexity in predicting future positions of companies despite the use of analytics as well as the complexity in creating consistency when using these
The events that unfolded on September 11th and the days that followed also profoundly effected the stock market. It is the purpose of this paper is to examine what happened to both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ after September 11th and how it is similar to events such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Gulf War in terms of how the stock market experienced a blow and bounced back after a while.
Before being cultivated with cocaine and hookers as the key to success in Wall Street, Jordan Belfort demonstrated the incontrovertible advantages of positive business communications. One of which pertains to the effectiveness of corresponding with customers over the telephone. Especially for stockbrokers, having a conversation over the phone is pivotal when trying to sell a stock to a potential investor. Jordan Belfort began his process with a potential client by stating his name, where he was from, and what he had to offer. This was a method of gaining the trust of a customer that he did not know. Furthermore, he engaged the customer with an optimistic attitude and stated how the stock could affect him or her in the best way possible. Jordan coul...
The company has established good relationships with most of its customers which has assisted it to create high level of brand and customer loyalty
Wiersema, M. T. a. F., 1993. Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines. Harvard Business Review, p. 92.
-Customers: The company felt the importance of being customer-centric and innovate by adapting to customer
Under CEO Philip Purcell’s management, Morgan Stanley’s infrastructure and systems did not grow with the needs of employees and customers, nor did it apply future technologies to their current systems, it’s focus was reducing overheads to maximize profits in the short term. Many brokers resigned, taking with them valuable portfolios and profits. In June 2005 Purcell resigned, and John Mack provided new leadership. The firm then began to change its information systems and provide better services for clients, which saw stronger ethos and integrity within the employees.
Morgenson, G. (2005, September 17). Clues to a Hedge Fund's Collapse. In The New York Times. Retrieved November 1, 2013
Before being cultivated with cocaine and hookers as the key to success in Wall Street, Jordan Belfort demonstrated the incontrovertible advantages of positive business communications. One of which pertains to the effectiveness of corresponding with customers over the telephone. Especially for stockbrokers, having a conversation over the phone is pivotal when trying to sell a stock to a potential investor. Jordan Belfort begins his process with a potential client by stating his name, where he was from, and what he had to offer. This is a method of gaining the trust of a customer that he does not know. Furthermore, he engaged the customer with an optimistic attitude and stated how the stock could affect him or her in the best way possible. By providing the customer with onl...
The central purpose of writing this Case Study Analyses on The Gap, Inc. is to identify and isolate key issues and their underlying implications and offer practical solutions and plans for implementing those solutions.
At one of our quarterly All Hands meetings, the president of our division discussed how growing the market share was critically important in the digital banking space. The key goal is to continue to lead this space in the future, but doing so becomes increasingly more challenging as new market competitors try to steal share. To keep ahead, we need to always bring our “A” game to the market. To create blue ocean strategies would require innovation, customer engagement, and out of the box thinking. We have to consider buyer utility, pricing, cost, and adoption. To do this would require us to be strategic about how we design, build and price our products. Even the way the business manages the different consumer segments is important. There is differentiation of the needs of different types of financial institutions. The customer centered brand management strategy we discussed in class is very useful to this type of organization. How we market to large national banks should be different than how we market to small town banks. Generally, small banks do not have the technology budget to invest in large scale digital channel solutions. Many companies decided to have different brands for their different customer segments. We discussed how this works successfully for car companies. For Digital Channels,