Earnings Lifecycle Management
Context on Investor Relations
Without Q4
Investor relationship management is a core responsibility of Investor Relations Officers (IROs), who, each financial quarter, communicate the company's performance narrative to maintain strong relationships with existing investors and attract potential new ones.
With Q4
Q4 supports IROs throughout their earnings journey by streamlining key tasks, from scheduling earnings events and publishing content to analyzing post-event results, thereby enhancing overall efficiency.
Goal
To investigate the existing journey, tasks, needs, and pain-points of IR professionals during the earnings period and propose a solution that brings efficiency into their task flow.
Timeline
September 2024 - ongoing
User research
Research methodologies
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Customer interviews
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Stakeholder interviews
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Concept testing
Tools
Recruitment
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Customers​
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Email outreach
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Internal referrals
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Internal stakeholders
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Internal referrals
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Research operations
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Google Calendar (scheduling)
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Zoom (interview and remote concept testing)
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​Maze (unmoderated concept testing)
Other tools
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Analysis
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Miro
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Google sheets
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Deliverable
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Microsoft PowerPoint, Word
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Respository
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Dovetail
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Research questions
Customers
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How do the customers feel during the earnings season?
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What motivates them to get through the challenges of the earnings period?
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What are their tasks before, during, and after the earnings period?
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​How can Q4 add more value to their earnings journey?
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Is there a digital product that they enjoy using at work or outside work? Why?
Stakeholders and Subjectmatter experts
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What does the customer journey look like from their perspective?
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What, according to them, are customer pain points?
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What role do they see the AI playing in this?
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If the Q4 platform didn't exist, what would the users have done?
Customer persona
Based on customer and subject-matter experts interviews
Key takeaways
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The majority of users are not tech-savvy and can get easily confused if what is required of them is not clear.
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There’s always high stress around the accuracy of content being posted, which makes the users very anxious.
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The current process being heavily manual, there’s a general resistance from the users to switching to a new process.
Current earnings user journey
Key touch-points
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Problems with current process
Current process
Identifying the moment that matters
MVP Information Architecture
MVP User Flow
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Action:
User:
Earnings plan setup in the internal-facing side of the application
Internal Q4 support agent
Action:
User:
Asset setup in an internal legacy application
Internal Q4 support agent
Action:
User:
Earnings content upload, website preview, and publish
Q4 customers
Concept testing
Ideas tested
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Feedback received
Wireframes
High-fidelity mockups
Before content submission
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Each content group publishes at a different time and has its own tab.
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Since the goal of the page is to provide content, the buttons that allow users to provide content will be primary.
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The footer action will be tertiary until all content is provided.
Partial content submission
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As the user provides each piece of information, the primary button will convert into an icon button, indicating the hierarchy of interaction.
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Each content piece will have a time stamp and the title of the content provided for an easy overview of task completion.
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Content submission complete
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When all the content has been provided, the footer actions will change into two buttons, primary and secondary, in order of importance.
Notifications
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When the earnings content is published, but not live, the user will get a banner message notifying them.
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When all the content is published and live at the time provided by the users, they will get a confirmation banner message.
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All of these will occur in tandem with an email notification system.
User Feedback
"It was really easy to upload my documents using this new application. I knew what I was supposed to do off the bat, and it actually published everything on time."
"I didn't have to go back and forth with the Q4 agent on anything. I just went onto this site and submitted my documents, and it told me when it was going to publish them, and it did."
"I feel good that I'm not using email to send over all of these sensitive documents. I would love a white-glove service, if there was that option, where a Q4 agent would do this uploading on my behalf. But overall, this was quite easy to us.e"
- Charles M.
- Heather B.
- Mary D.
Success metrics
Next steps
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Measure the success against the metrics.
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Expand the scope to account for other moments that matter in the user journey.
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Conduct interviews to learn about ways to enhance the service further.