From managing back-to-back meetings to ensuring compliance documentation is impeccable to marketing their firm to overseeing staff, advisors often live their lives at maximum capacity.
With so much to do, productivity-enhancing tech tools are a must for busy advisors. One of those productivity tools is dictation software, which advisors use to quickly summarize and archive notes from client meetings.
In the most traditional sense, dictation software (also known as talk-to-text or speech recognition technology) is a tool that converts spoken words into written text.
Dictation software can be entirely tech-enabled or employ a combination of technology and human knowledge. While many companies are embracing the AI boom to churn out new dictation solutions, a human-led solution incorporating AI to increase efficiency is essential to deliver higher accuracy and a more personalized user experience.
If you’re considering adding talk-to-text software to your advisory firm, it’s important to understand which approach to speech recognition would better serve your staff and clients.
3 Key Benefits of Dictation Software (and Which Advisors Need Them the Most)
1. Saving Time: For the Always-busy Advisor
The J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Financial Advisor Satisfaction Study found that 28% of advisors – nearly one-third – are struggling to find time for their clients. Those same advisors reported spending 41% more time on “compliance and administrative duties” than their counterparts.
One recent report showed that the average American can speak at about 150 words per minute (wpm), while the average typing speed is just 40 wpm. Generally speaking, we can talk three times faster than we type.
With dictation technology, advisors who are constantly juggling meetings notes, to-do lists, and compliance documentation can reclaim valuable time, allowing them to focus on high-priority tasks.
2. Enhanced Accuracy: For the Compliance-focused advisor
You know that compliance doesn’t leave room for errors. With your firm’s reputation, client satisfaction and expensive penalties on the line, it’s imperative that you get the details down correctly.
However, our short-term memory isn’t great – it’s been reported that most humans can only retain about seven separate items at once.
Dictation software via phone-based apps makes note-taking accessible for all your advisors, whether they’re in-office or not. Combined with guided, standardized templates and CRM integrations, your team is prompted to deliver the correct and necessary information for compliance personnel. When that information is needed in the event of an audit, you have organized, searchable evidence of real-time documentation. In our experience, some teams have saved nearly half a day in audits alone!
3. Customized Templates: For the Team of Advisors Seeking Standardization
A Kitces report showed that the average advisor has 71 clients, seven more one-time or new clients and another half dozen or so of “inactive” client relationships – and those numbers are significantly higher for broker-dealer advisors (who maintain 118 clients on average!).
With so many clients across multiple advisors, standardized notes are essential.
Some of your advisors take down extremely detailed notes – perhaps spending too much time on erroneous details – while others forget to jot down important follow-up information or add relevant tasks to your CRM. To ensure each client within your firm has equal access to tools and resources, there needs to be some sort of standardization.
With template-driven dictation tools, you can guide your team of advisors (however large or small) to document the right information at the right time.
Dictation is more than just a tool for converting speech to text; it can allow you to save time, standardize processes, improve client relationships and more – so everyone on your team can focus on revenue-generating endeavors rather than just administrative tasks.
