Business Imperative
In the late 90's this business unit of a major financial institution found itself in the position of being a somewhat disparate and unfocused collection of retail delivery channels. In their individual efforts to promote their respective pieces of the organization's full range of financial services, these channels were sometimes in competition with each other - and they were never fully aligned in leveraging business opportunities for the overall franchise.

With new leadership came a new impetus to radically re-think the organization and its approach to promoting the growth and competitive responsiveness of the retail side of the franchise. The organization was challenged to provide a more potent sales culture, one capable of:

• facilitating and supporting aggressive retail sales and marketing initiatives across the Bank.
• providing multiple customer touch-points and unprecedented access to Bank products and services.
• focusing on the evolving needs of the Bank's many different types of retail customers.
• maintaining a consistency of quality and experience in support of their brand.

Leadership Response
The group engaged the Stratton Consulting Group Team (Stratton) for their expertise in rapid organizational transformation. Stratton was called upon to partner with the group's top leadership team in developing, designing, and implementing a newly strategic organizational model, while managing the implications of that model as it began to impact people throughout the enterprise.

The group decided to declare a new identity within the Bank, together with an appropriately focused organizational structure and a compelling new mission, to more clearly guide and motivate its many efforts. Rather than being known for "managing" channels, the group was determined to step up and actively lead in the Bank's efforts to sell and distribute financial services.

With the help of the Stratton Consulting Group team the group declared a new identity and a new, more customer-focused and business-responsive organizational structure. Their fundamental goal was to become "the leader in delivering financial solutions to consumers and small businesses across the U.S."

Stratton helped the organizational design team develop a strategic model representing the desired end-state for this transformation, then develop a detailed map for deploying customer-centric management practices and planning processes in support of that model. Rather than simply stating that they wanted to develop a high-performance sales organization, the leaders declared an "audacious" goal of tripling sales within three years. That declaration got the attention of their people … not to mention the Bank's corporate executives.

Accelerating Toward Success
Stratton helped the leaders to not only generate new energy in the process of designing and declaring the new identity, organization, and mission, but to then channel and leverage that energy and accelerate the necessary transformations. By engaging as many people as possible in the process and confronting the implications of the changes head-on, Stratton helped the people thoughtfully effect the changes needed to make their goal of customer centricity a reality.

Stratton's role over the long-term change process included:

• facilitating an organizational inquiry into more effective strategic thinking and decision- making processes
• facilitating the implementation of the organizational model and achieving organizational alignment
• co-designing and facilitating the implementation of a robust communications and management engagement process, to help extend and enrich the impact of leadership's work across the business unit
• facilitating cross-business alignment and partnership processes, to ensure that their work was fully understood, valued, and supported across the retail businesses of the Bank.

Results
In the process of transforming the group into a more customer-centric organization:

• Thirteen line-driven Integration Teams were launched.
• Several off-sites were held to engage and align various levels of management and staff to the new organizational model.
• All integration recommendations and initiatives were assessed against the overall Vision and objectives.
• The entire management team was mobilized to support the change effort.

People throughout the business unit (and the Bank, overall) quickly learned that Customer Intimacy was indeed the cornerstone of the new strategy, and the way that they would differentiate their bank in the marketplace. This compelled changes in how people thought about their jobs, related with colleagues, and managed customer interfaces and interactions. The new structure reinforced these shifts, and supported a more responsive orientation to the marketplace, on the one hand, and their retail businesses, on the other.

Twelve months later, the most important customer indicators revealed the change had taken hold:

• 82% favorability in NY/Metro Market (#1 ranking)
• 74% customer satisfaction (12% improvement)