As advisers, we all know that it’s best practice to keep very detailed file notes after conversations with clients. This has always been a challenge, whether we’re talking about the most senior people in the firm or junior staff members who have interactions with clients.

Why is taking a file note so difficult for many of us?

There are two issues. If you take detailed notes during the conversation are you really listening that well to the speaker? Whether that’s over the telephone, on a web meeting, or face-to-face.

On the other hand if you just take notes pen-on-paper what do you do with those notes afterwards? Will you scan them into the document management system and file them under the contact? If you’re extremely disciplined you will, but many of us lack the discipline or the time to do that in the middle of a busy day.

A technique that’s been working really well for us in here at Paradox is rather than typing notes into our CRM system during a web meeting, for example, we just take notes pen-on-paper as we go. Then, after the meeting rather than type all of those notes out into the CRM, dictate our thoughts while it’s still very fresh in the adviser’s mind into a voice-to-text app (we use Dragon Dictate). We can then ‘Select All’ the text and paste it into our CRM as an extremely detailed file note.

This helps us and any other colleagues next time someone looks into the system to see what’s happening with that client. Dragon Dictate doesn’t get everything perfect, but it does quite an amazing job these days.

You can go through and tidy up any misinterpretations, misspellings or incorrect capitalisation in the file note.

My advice is to just fix the words that are utterly wrong and to not get too caught up in capitalisation and correct punctuation. Otherwise you’ll lose the enormous time savings are available to you by dictating your file notes.

So what about you? Are you using any dictation software? If so, in what context are you using it? I’d love to know. Share your comment below.

This is an edited version of a post that appeared on the Practice Paradox blog.