Intersect Investment Services

Problem Solution: Intersect Investment Services.

Intersect Investment Services (IIS) is losing clients, employees, revenue and investors. IIS must improve its competitive position in a constantly changing financial services industry landscape. Senior leadership of Intersect Investment Company can find ways to align its sales department with the new vision of providing its consumers and small business customers a broad set of products and services using a model of customer intimacy. Intersect Investment is experiencing a major changes with their organization. Employee turnover is up 25% in sales compared to 7% companywide. The top three reasons employees are leaving are; 1) Leadership not communicating, 2) Employees do not believe leadership, and 3) Poor work environment.

Also, another problem is that customer satisfaction has declined more than 10% and growing. Rumors of employee layoffs due to goals not being met are growing quickly. Finally, directors of Intersect Investment are preaching handling more clients in order to sell more products, and ignoring new vision. The biggest problem is that there is no alignment with the new vision. Sales people have been trained on the new sales and service model and many are flat out not using it, and members of the leadership team are not behind it.

Intersect Investment Services will become an industry leader in customer intimacy and financial consulting by motivating their employees to give the best customer service in order to grow customer loyalty.

In order for Intersect Investment Services to grow and become an industry leader, they must make some significant changes quickly. One major change is to have a better communication plan with their employees. ISS is losing employees due to management not communicating with employees; poor work environment and the employees do not believe management. In order for ISS to stop losing employees, they must make some changes to help stop the bleeding. First, ISS needs to have better communication with their employees through email, memos, staff meetings, and one-on-one meetings. ISS needs to get their employees input on various matters to build that trust. In return, when employees trust their company, they are happier and enjoy work more, which passes on to their customers and clients. Also, employees of ISS will build more trust with management.

ISS needs to implement an incentive plan to help retain employees. The incentive plan will be based on performance, customer service, longevity with company, and peer and management reviews. First, management will need to establish a goal for each employee based on their experience and length of time with ISS. Then, depending on where employees fall in the incentive plan matrix, bonuses would be paid based on performance and customer service surveys that ISS would receive from employees' clients.

By focusing on realizing the new vision for ISS, implementing incentive plans for customer retention, product portfolios sold, length of time with company, customer surveys, and on-going product, and customer service training, ISS can achieve their short-term and long-term goals of reducing employee turnover, increasing customer satisfaction, building customer loyalty, increasing employee satisfaction with ISS, and increasing sales by 16%.

ISS faces risks with major company changes. First, with on-going product and customer service training, ISS has to look at the costs of having their employees out of the office for training and not in front of customers or on the phones with clients to product sell. ISS needs to develop a summary of the training, and make it readily available to everyone in organization via email or online training. Also, ISS needs to make sure that any new policies and training are well communicated to all employees in timely manner and continually remind all employees how important they are to the organization and the overall company culture. Employees need to be aware of the tools that are available to them and that they are properly trained. Finally, ISS needs to prepare periodic progress reports and distribute them to all employees via email and hardcopy.

ISS will also need to implement an employee incentive plan to build long-term relationship with their employees and reward them for their hard work and loyalty. A major risk with such a plan is that it can cause competition among employees. When employees compete for a performance pay, they begin to see each other as obstacles to their own success. Also, many employees view rewards as a way of punishment, as an attempt by management to make employees do something they don't want to do. Performance rewards can tempt employees to act unethical with clients to reach a certain goal; some employees might put themselves first, instead of customers needs first.

Some steps to take to make sure incentive plan is successful is to pick an area or department to start, then determine the standard for each position, announce the incentive plan to all employees, implement the plan and commit to run it for a certain period, monitor the results and behavior of employees, and review the plan after certain time to see if it was worth it.

Based on the goals that ISS wants to accomplish within 12 months, they need to focus on realizing the new vision, have an on-going product and customer service training, and implement an incentive plan to help retain and build employee loyalty. With such measures, ISS can reduce employee turnover, increase customer and employee satisfaction, build customer and employee loyalty, and increase sales.

Table 1

Issues and Opportunities Identification

Issues Opportunities Reference to Specific Course Concept

Intersect Investment Services has not developed a formal change plan. This could affect its ability to realize the change effort because there will not be a clear set of steps with goals Janet Angelo has the leadership capability to enable transformational change based on her accomplishments at other organizations Issue concept- The success of any change effort, and the need for any organization to realize continuous improvement in performance, goes beyond change plans and goal setting to motivating people and organizations through a variety of approaches such as providing effective feedback and using comprehensive approach extrinsic reward systems (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2003).Opportunity concept- Leading transformational change is both an art and a science. Although there are many models and theories, it is also important to understand some of the best practices that come out of companies today. There is indeed as much art as there is science in