St. James’s Place (SJP) is a leading financial services company in the UK that offers one-to-one wealth management services, retirement planning, investment solutions, and more, serving more than 980,000* clients. With nearly 5,000 financial advisers* in the SJP Partnership, it’s one of the UK’s largest networks of accredited financial advisers.
SJP previously worked with DEPT® to create a digital ecosystem that could scale with the organization’s growth and enhance SJP’s capabilities to communicate with and support its financial advisers digitally. Recently, St. James’s Place and DEPT® worked together to improve operational efficiencies related to the vast network of Partner websites.
Building on digital transformation
SJP Partner Practices include a variety of large financial advice providers, small businesses and family-run firms, and sole traders located all around the UK. These companies are independently run, but as part of the St. James’s Place Partnership, SJP provides support in all aspects of their business, from obtaining their qualifications to technical support to navigating a business exit.
Partner firms align themselves with SJP corporate guidelines for communication and service standards. To make it easier for both Partners and SJP to maintain compliance with branding, content, and messaging, DEPT® developed an enterprise-scale content management solution that includes a white-label option to enable a centralized team to build and manage sites for over 2,500 financial advisers.
The solution has not only helped accelerate Partner firms’ online presence, it helps to ensure they meet industry compliance and security standards and enables SJP and Partners to track site performance and visitor behavior.
As with any digital transformation, however, St. James’s Place and DEPT® saw additional opportunities to improve and evolve operational processes. The SJP Partner websites and marketing support teams were fielding hundreds of support tickets from Partners that required website updates, and the case backlog was beginning to grow.
St. James’s Place set its target benchmark for DEPT® to reduce working unit times by 30%, with the goal of improving operational efficiencies, providing more value to SJP Partners, and increasing internal team morale and retention while continuing to meet compliance requirements.
Targeting operational efficiency and value for Partners
St. James’s Place identified five areas where DEPT® could take action that would contribute to time savings:
- Publishing improvements
- Enhanced functionality within the templated website
- Automation for standard processes
- Reduce content entry duplication
- Improved reporting
Next, DEPT® and St. James’s Place collaborated to define business goals and develop the roadmap, collecting data to understand the average time spent on each case type.
Ready to monitor and evaluate the results, DEPT® undertook 113 different case types/actions. 32 primary development tickets were raised and completed, and we released 11 development sprints from January to November 2023.
Post-development, the average unit time per case type was updated and reevaluated with consideration given to team experience and skill, as well as changes to processes and efficiencies. St. James’s Place calculated the unit time saving per case type and used total reduction in hours to determine results.
Streamlining support and saving time for an enhanced Partner experience
By reducing the amount of time needed to address support cases, SJP reduced the number of cases and met their target benchmark to reduce working unit times by 30.4%.
For example, some of the improvements made to make processes more efficient and intuitive include:
- Improved caching and reduced caching times, allowing straight-through case processing
- “Publish all” functionality enables one-time publishing for multiple partner sites
- Better troubleshooting and the ability to more clearly identify system issues
Not only can SJP Partners now rely on improved service delivery for their support tickets, the SJP team can process a higher volume of cases without needing to add additional team resources. In addition, the reduction in unit times has allowed more cross-team collaboration and flexibility between St. James’s Place Partner Websites and Marketing Support.
Altogether, these development updates have enabled St. James’s Place to provide even better service to its Partners, improve the SJP Partner journey, and boost the morale of internal team members.
*Data correct as of 30 June 2024
Working with DEPT®, we’ve been able to improve the website offering to our Partnership, as well as reduce the unit times for changes to the websites. This has resulted in an increase in morale within the SJP Partner website team and with our financial advisers.
Gemma Thomas – Head of Digital Marketing Platforms at St. James’s Place
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