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What to look for in an automated notes solution

Torn paper with typewritten words: Hey Siri
Photo by Karolina Grabowska

It’s no secret that automated notes can transform your call center agents’ days, reclaiming time and effort and boosting opportunities to increase efficiency.

But solutions are being rushed to market, making it tricky to identify the right one for your company. Anyone can white-label ChatGPT or old-fashioned speech recognition software and call it a notes app.

But you don’t need hype. You need something that can give you real results. A best-in-class automated notes solution is:

  • Focused on consumer finance
  • Concise
  • Standardized
  • Versatile
  • Editable
  • Easy to implement
  • Proven

Focused on consumer finance

Some notes apps promise to work equally well across industries.

But your business isn’t just any business. Consumer finance teams, whether focused on collections and recovery, banking and lending, auto finance, or healthcare RCM, have their own needs and priorities.

So a solution that promises to be everything for everyone won’t be able to deliver the kind of context and clarity you - and your customers - deserve. 

To create the great notes that result in solid business outcomes, the AI for your solution needs to be trained on consumer finance conversations.

The best automated notes solutions are concise

Consumer finance calls can be complicated. Automated notes apps should make things easier. Look for notes that:

  • Are brief and easy to skim
  • Bold or capitalize key events and outcomes
  • Will be customized for your company

Imagine an agent trying to quickly catch up on the previous customer call, or your QA team or supervisors reviewing multiple notes for compliance or evaluations. Short notes that don’t sacrifice context or complexity are the best option to ease those processes and offer the best insight.

And if your automated notes end up longer and more complicated than what your agents would write in the first place, the app is likely to make agents less efficient and end up costing you more - no matter how cheap it seems.


Standardized

In addition to brevity, an automated notes solution that doesn’t deliver those notes in a standardized structure complicates communication between teams and hampers analysis.

By standardizing the notes format, agents and leaders will be able to easily find the same data in the same order each time.

This allows agents to parse the content quickly, reducing their stress and making the customer feel understood immediately.

Supervisors and QA reviewers also count on being able to find the information they need easily and make clear call-to-call comparisons in order to effectively evaluate and coach.

Versatile

While we don’t recommend asking your notes solution to run your entire business - see the cautionary tale of trying to be everything to everyone above! - there are some features you’ll want to demand.

  • Notes analysis. Your automated notes solution should allow you to track metrics like words per note and time spent on notetaking per agent.
  • Call and account tools. A complete solution will automatically disposition calls and update account statuses.
  • Compliance and verification support. You want a tool that will flag missed compliance disclosure or ID verifications.

Editable

A notes solution grounded in consumer finance and customized during implementation for your company will offer solid automatically generated call notes on Day 1.

But the ability to edit notes is still vital. An agent might want to add a detail, or share additional information to help the next agent who speaks to that customer. 

And a really effective solution will use machine learning to learn from those edits, meaning agents will have to edit less often and won’t experience the frustration of having to make similar - or identical - changes over and over again.

Easy to implement

Believe it or not, there are still notes solutions that run off clunky desktop apps, requiring downloads and updates. 

Look for one that operates in the cloud, requiring only a web browser to run, leaving the troubleshooting to the provider and not to your already-overwhelmed IT team. 

Proven

You don’t want to be stuck with software from 2003. But you don’t have to settle for an app so new your company is basically an experiment.

What you want from a notes app is something that’s been around long enough to be tested, but continues to innovate.

And there’s your shopping list! Take it when you go out into the wild world of notes apps and make sure you check to make sure you’re spending your money - and time - on a solution that’s worth it.