Goodbye, earnings call tech mishaps?

If you’ve ever listened to an earnings call, you may know about Q4. The company, not the uniquely stressful quarter.

Darrell Heaps, founder and chief strategy officer of Q4, started the investor relations operations software company nearly twenty years ago, when its buzziest IR tech offering was…managing investor relations websites. “Before we founded the company, they were doing all this, back in the day, with fax machines and handwritten notes,” he said of early investor relations communication.

In the decades since the Paleolithic era, or, umm, the early 2000s, Q4 has expanded “to help IR teams manage the entire IR function,” he explained.

Its trademark tool, a tech stack that unifies essential IR data and workflows into a single dashboard, has helped the company gain over 2,500 customers, including “about half of the S&P 500,” according to Heaps, who adds that in the last four earnings periods, Q4’s tech aided 5,000 calls.

In late March, Q4 unveiled digital conferencing capabilities, with the aim of streamlining the sometimes chaotic assortment of conference call and dial-in tools that companies use for earnings calls. Everything needed to manage the conference experience is now accessible in one place. No more dropped calls, awkward audio issues, technical mishaps, or delays.

At least, that’s the goal. Success for the new conferencing capabilities will be measured by how close Q4 can get to its goal of “a sub 1%” error rate on earnings calls, Heaps said.

Old dog, new tricks. “Earnings calls, they’re like the Super Bowl of events for public companies,” he said. The problem is that many of those calls are “still very much being run in a very old school way,” he added, with companies sometimes relying on conference call technology that hasn’t been updated in ten or fifteen years.

“Something falters, the audio breaks…that can have a cascading impact on the company, because it rattles the overall team, it produces a lower quality event,” Heaps noted. “The content can be a little bit sparse. You can have missing parts of the transcript. All these things can have a downstream impact on how you’re communicating with investors. It’s a very high stakes event.”

As Q4 zeroed in on conferencing capabilities as an IR area in need of tech improvement, it also became clear why progress had been so slow thus far. It’s the whole “old dog, new tricks” thing.

“The market is very used to how earnings calls work,” Heaps said. “Analysts want to call into a conference call line, and they want to wait to take their turn to ask their question.”

So, as the product design team started looking at ways to consolidate everything to one platform, their ultimate goal was identifying how to “really minimize any of the changes and actually streamline that experience” for both management teams and analysts “so we’re not asking them to really do anything different,” Heaps said.

Q4 isn’t the only IR software provider working to innovate in the space, and other companies offer similar centralized data platforms.

Tried and true. Q4’s flexibility around existing workflows is what drew clients, like Jessica Cox, a Lumen Technologies investor relations manager, to the new tools.

“I always would go into the earnings call with this feeling of like, ‘Oh, we’ve done so much hard work on the actual call and the financials and the decks and the prepping,’ and then facing down the barrel of the minutiae of technology is something that my brain and energy had very little time to care for,” Cox told us. “I always went into it with the expectation of an emotional fire drill, if you will.”

Lumen, a networking services provider, already used Q4’s platform. So when Lumen’s IR team got word from its Q4 account manager that a digital conferencing rollout was “on the horizon,” Cox’s team asked more about the platform before getting a more formal walkthrough of how everything would work.

“I remember it being a very long runway for us to be able to get comfortable and make a decision,” she said, noting she was particularly impressed with how much Q4’s team was directly involved with the rollout and training.

Initially, Q4 built out a beta version of its conferencing vision and tested it “with a number of clients” before rolling it out to actual calls, Heaps said.

Now, Q4 is migrating its existing client base over to the new platform. Keep an ear out for a lack of technical difficulties.