Raymond James

Client: Raymond James
Industry: Banking/Brokerage/Insurance

Challenge:

Raymond James Marketing (RJM) is an internal marketing agency dedicated to the financial advisors and corporate employees of Raymond James Financial. RJM was facing several challenges to optimize efficiency, hindered by the department’s exponential growth, high volume of requests, and a complicated workflow system. As a result, projects were often delayed, resulting in a less than desirable turnaround time for their clients.

Early on, HCP had a role in the creation of RJM. Given HCP’s strong rapport with Raymond James and experience designing organizational structures for marketing agencies, RJM approached HCP to tackle their agency renewal initiative.

Solution:

Before launching into the project, HCP held numerous meetings with department management to understand the current situation. These meetings helped HCP to refine its method of gaining operational insight from the employees as well as to develop an outline of questions that would guide stakeholder discussions.

HCP’s plan began with stakeholder interviews. Some of the conversations took the form of one-on-one interviews, while others took the form of a group roundtable discussion; all were semi-structured. It was vital to obtain a well rounded approach that would capture all perspectives involved in the marketing agency, including managers (upper and middle), employees, and clients (financial advisors and corporate).

In addition to the interviews, HCP utilized an observational methodology to evaluate current operations and gain first-hand experience regarding how employees and clients interact.

Through the discussions, interviews, and observations, HCP identified potential contributing factors to dissatisfaction among clients as well as employees. While project turnaround time was identified as a major concern, a comprehensive analysis was conducted to identify the full range of organizational challenges and deficiencies. Comparative pricing of other agencies and organizational structure and processes were also analyzed for areas of improvement within the agency.