Continental Stock’s Path to 99% SLA Excellence

Continental Stock Transfer & Trust Company (CSTT) is a highly specialized financial services provider with over 60 years of expertise in stock transfer and corporate action services.

Serving as a crucial liaison between publicly traded companies and their investors, CSTT handles critical operations such as maintaining investor records, paying dividends, and managing tax reporting.

Their customer base is divided into two: publicly traded companies who are their direct clients, and individual investors whom they serve on behalf of these companies.

With a strong commitment to providing stellar agent services, CSTT has long been a trusted partner in the stock transfer industry. However, their call center internal processes were mostly manual and considering their unprecedented growth over the past 5 years, their customer support infrastructure required an upgrade to provide faster and more efficient solutions.

The Challenge: Lack of Visibility Into Customer Communication

John Torres, Director of Customer Communication at CST, was facing some challenges to streamline customer communication.

CST has always been known for providing excellent tailored service, but the structure of the customer care team was traditionally managed and required a sophistication that matched our approach to quality service.

-John Torres, Director of Customer Communication

John explained that CST, with the recent growth in client acquisition, faced significant workflow challenges. Initially, their team used Google groups in Gmail to respond to client queries, but it wasn’t the most efficient way.

It had numerous limitations and risks:

● Limited control over email assignment and tracking: Emails were handled manually, with no streamlined way to assign or track responses. This made it challenging to ensure accountability and meet response time expectations.

● Inconsistent quality assurance: There was no standardized process for reviewing responses, which occasionally led to inconsistent service quality.

● Lack of SLA monitoring and reporting: Without a system to set up and track SLAs, the company found it difficult to set standards for customer service quality. There was no means to create benchmarks for response and resolution time, and ensure the team is following them.

Recognizing the risks and inefficiencies of their existing setup, John began to explore software options that could streamline the process. He came across numerous tools such as Dragapp, HelpScout, Hiver and Gmelius – to name a few.

Out of all these, he went with Hiver. Here’s why:

We looked at Dragapp, Front, Zendesk, Help Scout, Gmelius, and Zoho. Gmelius came the closest and where did it lose?

The issue was their lack of support. They weren’t very responsive. We found Hiver’s support to be very responsive and very proactive. This is the most important thing.

The Solution: A Smart Way to Streamline Customer Communication

CST turned to Hiver to tackle their ongoing challenges with managing email communication. Also, since Hiver works seamlessly with Gmail, their team didn’t have to struggle with a steep learning curve. The switch felt natural, and Hiver’s integration with their workflows was quite smooth.

Here’s how John and other teams from CST use Hiver’s features on a daily basis:

1. Automated routing of all client communication

Earlier, John’s team used Google Groups where emails had to be manually assigned. This was time-consuming and did not provide enough visibility to everyone’s workload.

But this changed with Hiver.

The platform offers manual and auto-assignment features that allow managers at CST to delegate emails to team members based on expertise and urgency.

So now, some teams use manual assignments for a more hands-on workload distribution, while others have adopted automated assignments to streamline the process.

How does the assignment feature work?

Once the email lands in any of CST’s shared inboxes, managers can either manually assign these to respective agents based on their skill-set, or choose to automate the process by setting up conditional rules.

This flexibility ensures that inquiries are routed securely and efficiently. Managers also have complete visibility into their team’s workload.

2. Consistently meeting service expectations 

Before Hiver, CST had no reliable system to monitor service-level agreements. This led to missed targets and difficulty in reporting response time metrics.

In the highly regulated financial services industry, strict compliance and timely responses are non-negotiable when handling investor communications. Any delays could impact client trust and regulatory agency penalties.

All of this has changed for the better after the introduction of Hiver.

The platform’s SLA tracking feature helps teams set expectations for response time and resolution time. It ensures that no email slips through the cracks, and that every single query is attended to in a consistent manner.

Now, CST can easily track and manage SLAs, ensuring they consistently meet deadlines and uphold their reputation for reliability. In fact, CST’s teams meet their SLAs 99% of the time. This is a significant improvement because previously they could meet SLAs only 70-80% of the time.

I do a monthly report of my analytics to the entire company, and now we’re averaging 99% response rates within two days. That’s a great metric for us because it shows how we’re staying accountable to our customers.

Alongside SLAs, John is now able to monitor the number of new conversations and resolved conversations on a daily and monthly basis.

3. Faster and more accurate responses to client queries

Before CST switched to Hiver, they found it quite time consuming to respond to frequently asked questions – such as those around stock transfers. These inquiries often required detailed answers, which the team had to type out manually every single time.

This not only slowed down response time but also increased the chances of inconsistencies or errors in their replies. The lack of a standardized way to handle repetitive queries made it challenging for CST to maintain efficiency while managing a high volume of emails.

But with Hiver, this problem is no longer exists. Teams at CST use Hiver’s templates feature to create, save and reuse canned responses for common queries. The best part is that team members can customize these templates to suit specific scenarios and ensure consistent, accurate replies every time.

CST has now created over 70 pre-defined templates, and categorized them based on query type.

For example, John mentioned that the most-used templates were for stock transfers. These templates provide detailed guidance on everything related to stock transfers—why and how to do them. These templates also have important links through which investors can directly access additional resources.

Now, whenever queries on stock transfer come through, John’s team just has to

● Choose the template
● Personalize it with the customer’s name and a few other details
● Hit send.

They do not have to draft each mail from scratch anymore.

Thanks to templates, CSAT has seen a 50% increase in their completion rate of answering queries.

My team’s use of templates has increased significantly, making them much more efficient in responding to emails. This has allowed us to handle a far greater volume of inquiries. I’d estimate that our completion rate for answering incoming emails has improved by about 50% to 75%.

4. Smart spam filtering and streamlining of fax

Earlier, when the teams at CST were inundated with spam messages, there was no way to regulate them. These unwanted emails would land in everyone’s inbox, and only lead to more clutter.

John’s team made the best use of Hiver’s automation features to deal with this challenge.

He now sets up filters to automatically detect and close these spam emails. This reduces inbox clutter and saves everyone valuable time, so that they can focus on more important communications

What’s quite interesting is that CST still uses fax, based on shareholders’ needs, as a method of communication. Before Hiver, tracking and managing incoming faxes was a major challenge.

Faxes would arrive in individual inboxes, making it difficult to ensure they were addressed promptly and assigned to the right person.

With Hiver, CST now routes all incoming faxes into Hiver, where they are automatically tagged as “Fax.” From there, these messages are easily assigned to the appropriate teammate, and managers can track their status end-to-end. This process ensures that no fax goes
unaddressed.

I redirected the incoming fax rule in Dialpad to my Hiver account. Then, I created a rule in Hiver to automatically tag any email from ‘eFax at Continental’ as ‘Fax.’ Now, my manager can easily identify faxes, assign them to the right team member, track their progress, apply an SLA, and ensure they are responded to promptly.

5. Robust QA checks to stay compliant and reduce risks

John mentioned that some managers at CST opt for a more hands-on approach. They like to do a quality check before their subordinates send out responses to customers. This used to be a challenging task earlier since there wasn’t any structured review process in place.

That has now changed with the introduction of Hiver.

The platform offers shared drafts that allow frontline staff to draft a response and share it with their manager for quick approval.

Teams at CST also use the Notes and @mention functionality for review purposes. They add a response in the form of a note and @mention their manager. The manager is immediately notified, and then he reviews and approves the response before they are sent.

This ensures proper quality assurance and allows the managers to mentor team members on best practices.

The Result: Seamless Workflows and Enhanced Efficiency

Since implementing Hiver, CST has seen marked improvements in communication efficiency, team accountability, and service quality. To sum it up:

● Improved SLA adherence: CSAT now has a 99% adherence to its two-day SLA. The company is able to consistently provide quality service and exceed client expectations.

● Enhanced efficiency and completion rate: Thanks to templates and automation, CST’ team is now able espond to common questions much faster. In fact, their overal response rate is improved by 50%. Their teams can now handle a higher volume of inquiries efficiently.

● High-quality assurance scores: CST’s quality assurance scores have gone up to 99%, owing to the structured review process.

The collaboration with Hiver has not only optimized Continental Stock’s customer communication but has also empowered its team to provide a higher standard of service, all while adhering to the financial industry’s stringent regulatory requirements.