A Leading Capital Markets Communications Platform
Q4 Inc. is a leading capital markets communications platform that is transforming the way publicly traded companies, investors, and investment banks make decisions to efficiently connect, communicate, and engage with each other.
The Q4 Capital Connect platform facilitates interactions across the capital markets through IR website products, virtual events solutions, engagement analytics, investor relations CRM, shareholder and market analysis, surveillance, and ESG tools. Capital Connect is the only holistic capital markets platform that digitally drives connections, analyzes impact, and targets the right engagement to help public companies work faster and smarter.
The company is a trusted partner to more than 2,650 public companies globally, including many of the most respected brands in the world, and maintains an award winning culture where team members grow and thrive.
The company aims to help its clients achieve their investor relations goals and build trust in the capital markets. To deliver on this, Q4 is committed to providing actionable intelligence, ever-evolving technologies, and industry-leading customer service.
Q4’s client support team is there to deliver on the promise of industry-leading customer service. For the past two years, Hutch Morzaria, Director of Client Support Services, has been laser-focused on this goal.
Challenges– Hutch Morzaria, Director of Client Support ServicesWe want to solve client requests in a timely manner, with the best quality answers. My focus is on getting clients’ support questions right the first time and delighting customers with speed and quality of responses. In short, turning around accurate answers, quickly.
Manual Ticket Categorization
Before working with Forethought, Q4’s support team had a staff of eight queue managers. This role acted as the first line of defense to interpret and categorize the 6,000-9,000 support emails received per month, in addition to inquiries from phone and other channels. The queue managers sifted through these tickets and assigned them to one of the 60 support agents with the appropriate skills and bandwidth to handle the type of ticket.
When recalling the role of queue management prior to using Forethought, Liz Wood, Manager of Client Support Services, says:
– Liz Wood, Manager of Client Support ServicesYou couldn’t really disregard the queue. You always needed a tab open to keep an eye on it because you had the feeling that if you moved away from it for a few hours, all of your progress would be lost.
The tediousness of this process became difficult to endure. The queue managers spent significant amounts of interpreting and assigning tickets, which slowed down agent response times. Some agents were bogged down with more tickets than they could handle, while others were left idle without any assignments.
The client support team knew they needed to make the ticket categorization process more efficient to deliver on the promise of accurate, fast resolutions for their customers.
SolutionAutomating Ticket Categorization
To solve their queue management problems, Q4 turned to Forethought, the leading generative AI platform for customer support automation. Forethought Triage enables Q4 to use their historical data combined with Large Language Models to proactively predict and classify new incoming tickets. The support team leverages existing routing capabilities to prioritize and handle tickets without the need to manually triage.
With intelligent case routing, Triage predicts support ticket fields then leverages the existing capabilities of Q4’s Salesforce help desk to send the ticket to the right agent. Within their Salesforce instance, Q4 set up additional automation to assign cases based on agent availability. Now, cases are categorized based on the level of skill needed and the bandwidth of each agent.
– Liz Wood, Manager of Client Support ServicesWorking with Forethought has given the client support leadership team some breathing room. We have confidence that support cases are being managed without wondering if someone has looked at every single case in the queue.
Greg Smith, Manager of Client Support Services at Q4, agrees that the queue that was once cumbersome has become manageable.
Reducing Time in the Queue
After seeing success from the first model, Q4 noticed that Triage could help in another area: processing client approvals. Q4 publishes information directly onto the websites of their clients. Before publishing anything, they request approval from their clients.
Much like the queue of support tickets, approvals sat in a queue until a team member could read through and process them. With Triage, these approvals are now automatically tagged and classified, without the need for team member intervention.
ResultsResponding to Customers Faster
With Forethought, Q4 has observed significant efficiency gains in their support process. The queue is now automated and doesn’t need to be constantly scrutinized by a team member. With that, the queue manager role has been dissolved, with the 8 headcounts being flipped into support agent roles. Now, client approvals are processed in under 2 hours, compared to 16-17 hours previously.
By automating ticket categorization, Q4 has achieved:
- 98% reduction in time to first response
- 20% increase in CSAT
- 14-15 hour reduction in resolution time
- 100% coverage across ~50k predictions
- 89% accuracy across ~50k predictions
Looking Ahead
Looking ahead, Q4’s client support team will emphasize quality assurance with ticket responses. The focus will be on continuous improvement in responses through agent training and up-skilling.
The team would also like to evaluate a prioritization model with keywords and sentiment, and they’re considering a new spam-detection model.
– Hutch Morzaria, Director of Client Support ServicesThe Forethought team is just exceptional. They’ve worked with us on solutions that aren’t out of the box, but fit our needs and our business exactly. They didn’t try to shoehorn requirements into an existing product, but really addressed our specific needs.
