Helping Day Traders Refine Their Trading Strategies
StocksToTrade was founded in 2009 to provide both new and experienced day traders with an all-in-one trading platform. The goal is to help traders quickly analyze and identify key trade setups without the need for hedge fund managers. StocksToTrade provides its users with a high level of customer support, along with regular training and education and a platform that evolves along with the industry.
StocksToTrade is not a broker: It is a real-time stock scanner intended to quickly find potential stock opportunities based on a wide variety of criteria. The company offers its services to traders around the world, providing access to U.S. equity information in real time. There are no geographical restrictions to its services and it welcomes users from any country to use the StocksToTrade trading platform to meet their U.S. market-data needs.
ChallengesGet new staff trained quickly; improve agent efficiency
Prior to engaging with Forethought, StocksToTrade faced a challenge that would be familiar to any successful company: Scaling up quickly and efficiently to meet surging customer demand. For modern companies, that means automating as many aspects of the business as possible. As a company primarily focused on service, StocksToTrade sought ways to accelerate the training and efficiency of its customer agents.
“Our main goal is to provide data and learning tools that users can apply toward developing their trading strategies,” says Cameron Martin, StocksToTrade’s customer support lead.
Prior to bringing Forethought on board, he says, the company’s agents responded to customer queries primarily by sharing Google docs. But to find the right doc, new agents had to learn to apply or set up macros, which often meant asking their managers or co-workers for assistance. Once the query was resolved, the agent would then have to manually tag each support ticket.
Solution– Cameron Martin, Customer Support Lead at StocksToTrade“The way we were doing things got the job done, but as part of our growth strategy we wanted a solution that delivered answers and logged tickets much faster, and we knew full well that meant increasing the amount of automation in our customer service division.”
Resolving Complex Customer-Support Queries
There are chatbots available on the market that can help automate high-volume, repetitious customer queries. But StocksToTrade’s customer questions are usually complex and require access to both structured information, such as the company’s own knowledge bases and Google docs, as well as to unstructured information, such as past support tickets, how-to videos, and previously recommended answers to incoming customer queries.
StocksToTrade already had its Zendesk platform in place and wanted a solution that easily integrated with it. Its first step was to implement Forethought’s Solve and Assist widgets. Assist helps the company quickly categorize customer queries. Based on powerful AI that comprehends sentence structure, meaning, synonyms, tone, and nuance, Solve treats an entire support ticket as a query, rather than simply parsing keywords contained in the query. Then, it can extract the perfect answer from StocksToTrade’s structured and unstructured information.
Assist works in a similar fashion, learning and understanding all of StocksToTrade’s support content and comparing it to the full context of the customer query. By leveraging CRM and the company-wide knowledge base, it improves productivity and accessibility to the right content. Assist presents the best possible answer to the query, often responding automatically to the customer without the need for agent assistance.
ResultsReduced Response Time to 10 Minutes
It took StocksToTrade approximately one month to launch both Forethought Solve and Assist. Once in place, the tools were able to reduce Time to First Response from about 40 minutes to just 10 minutes. They also increased the ratio of solved tickets to created tickets by approximately 17%. Since these tools were implemented, StocksToTrade has been able to achieve a customer self-service rate just shy of 75%.
At the same time, new StocksToTrade agents have noted that the Forethought-supported system makes their learning process much easier. It has also enabled them to increase their workflow as measured by the number of customer queries they are able to successfully address each day. And agents note other changes that help improve their efficiency, such as having their customer service notes readily available—and by no longer having to tag each ticket.
Future– Cameron Martin, Customer Support Lead at StocksToTrade“Not having to manually tag tickets may only save about ten seconds per ticket, but when you multiply that by the number of tickets each agent gets per day, Assist saves us a lot of time,”
Partners for Growth
With Forethought’s machine learning capabilities, both Solve and Assist provide more targeted and accurate answers to customer queries over time. That means customers will receive answers to their queries even faster in the future. As Martin notes, StocksToTrade is confident that its customer base will continue to grow—as will the number of queries.
– Cameron Martin, Customer Support Lead at StocksToTrade“There will be a larger influx of tickets, and we will need automation to manage it. We’ve been impressed by the Forethought team’s adaptability and creativity as they’ve helped us use their tools to deliver the answers our very time-sensitive customers need. We want to have Forethought on our team as we plan for a future of continuous growth.”
