5 times you could outsource your typing

5 times you could outsource your typing

2 Feb 2021 | Insights

When is it a good time to outsource your typing?. 

Typing is necessary – there’s just no getting away from it.  Whether it’s responding to an email, editing a document or writing a file note, you either do it yourself or you pay someone to do it for you. 

Outsourcing can be a word that causes anxiety to some because it hints at structural change, redundancy and cost cutting for survival.  But we can flip that around to positive action and instead rename that word to ‘delegating’. 

From our clients’ experiences, here’s the top reasons why they chose to send their typing outside of their business.

1 Recruiting a new fee-earner

Recruiting new staff in your business is, hopefully, a sign of growth.  You will want your new hire to be as productive as possible, to feel supported, and start making money for your business as soon as possible. 

If you don’t have capacity for your support staff to cope with the extra work to be generated, then it can be a great opportunity to offer external resources to help your new team member work to their strengths. 

New staff means introducing them to new ways of working – your way of working – so introducing a remote support service won’t cause too much change-related-stress.

2 Staff sickness and holiday absence 

Organising a holiday rota and being fair to staff so they can have time off during school holidays can be a managerial nightmare.  Throw in sudden sickness absence, and stress levels in the team increase. 

Having a flexible resource ready to go means you always have a back-up plan and can be assured that work gets done and costs are kept to a minimum.

3 Keeping your business continuity plan updated

Just as above, those unexpected turn of events can throw normal operations into disarray.  Being prepared doesn’t cost much in money and can save you tons of time and energy in the long run. 

Believe it or not, hooking up dictation technology and sharing some templates is really easy.  You’ll get a lot of boxes ticked for your compliance because you have your back-up plan.

4 An unexpected large project

 For those occasional times when a piece of work needs more time than your support team have capacity for.  Here are a few examples of how we have helped our clients.

  • An old head lease document, poor quality PDF that can’t be converted to text, needs to be re-typed. It takes 16 hours of typing time. 
  • A 1-hour Zoom video meeting can take 8 hours to transcribe.
  • Police interview tapes are needed in a hurry.  Four hours of interviews could take 30 hours to transcribe.

5 Sick of doing it yourself

New business start-ups rightly do almost everything themselves.  Then comes the time when workload increases and a dawning realisation that time is better spent elsewhere.  Savvy business owners will have figured out where systems can be automated, templates can be created and repetitive work is treated like a process. 

But there are times when a spanner is thrown into the works.  Broken documents, long boring typing jobs or data input and struggles with PDF conversions, are just a few examples. 

None of the above circumstances require redundancy or a sharp reduction in staff numbers.  In most cases, restructuring workflow presents the opportunity to utilise employed staff to produce more and work to their strengths.

You might have your own specific requirements that you need help with.  If so, please get in touch  as I’m sure we can help you. 

 

What Our Customers Think

The work is completed accurately, with a choice of turnaround times and over extended office hours.

DGB Solicitors

They simply get the job done and they work around the clock too. We’ve saved salary and temp costs in our business by outsourcing the typing.

Child Law Partnership

They are the prime outfit for outsourced document
production.
Open Plan Law

[trustindex no-registration=trustpilot]

6 Ways To Get The Most From Your Digital Dictation System

6 Ways To Get The Most From Your Digital Dictation System

4 Jan 2021 | Insights

If you have a dictation system already, or perhaps considering an investment, these 6 tips will help you drive efficiency in your practice. 

 

1 Know your turnaround time

Did you know that a slow turnaround time STOPS people using the dictation system because they think it’s faster to do it themselves?

We measure the turnaround time from when a task becomes available to the secretary until it’s completed and the document is returned to you.  This takes into account any time that your work is stuck waiting in a queue.    

Some dictation systems produce a report that measures turnaround from the time a typist picks up a task and completes it.  This is only helpful as a comparison of speed of typing.  It doesn’t take account of the time your task has been sat waiting in a queue. 

Get in touch if you want some help with analysing your reports.

2 Get your notes typed up

The obvious use is audio transcription, but there’s a difference between transcribing notes and completing a form, or creating a report from a precedent.  Speech recognition software can give you a basic transcript (if you don’t mind correcting the errors) but humans can follow complex instructions and can work intuitively to give you what you need.  

If you’ve never used dictation before, think of it as telling a story or leaving a voicemail.  There’s no need to dictate punctuation as experienced secretaries will understand you and will punctuate with accuracy without changing the meaning of your sentences.

3 Send a voice instruction

Sending a voice note with instructions through the dictation system is an efficient way of alerting your support team to a new task in their work queue.  It’s more secure than email as you can quickly pass on explanatory information.    Did you know you can attach a document too?  So why not dictate those amendments you need to update your document?

4 Do you need a memory jogger or an audit trail?

How often do you give instructions then forget about them?  The task list in your dictation workflow system has multiple uses.  It gives you a visual reminder of what work is waiting to be done or has been completed.  It’s also a great way to monitor quality of the work produced.  The fact that every action is logged in a database we can see when the work arrived, who actioned it and when and if there was any query noted in the task. 

5 Analyse your costs and keep control of them!

How do you know if you’ve got a fast or slow typist?  Dictation workflow systems have reports to help you categorise and analyse your tasks and put a cost to them.  Did you know you can find out what the cost per dictated minute is from your reports? You can also analyse your average turnaround time to have work completed. 

6 Assign costs to a client file

Admin support is usually an overhead in a business but there are sometimes cases where the costs of certain tasks can (and should) be passed directly to your client to bear.  Release yourself from your overhead burden and ask for your documents and typing costs to be added to a client or matter file.  The digital dictation workflow system accurately produces reports and costs broken down to a matter reference.

What Our Customers Think

The work is completed accurately, with a choice of turnaround times and over extended office hours.

DGB Solicitors

They simply get the job done and they work around the clock too. We’ve saved salary and temp costs in our business by outsourcing the typing.

Child Law Partnership

They are the prime outfit for outsourced document
production.
Open Plan Law

[trustindex no-registration=trustpilot]