Powell Spencer and Partners - UK

Dramatic Productivity Boost

Each Secretary now has full visibility over their job list, priorities and length of dictations. For instance, if the Secretary has 20 minutes left before lunch, she can select a short dictation and get it right out of the way. From a global business perspective, the new system brought in new reliability, as Diana Du Bruyn, Practice Manager, explains. "Dictations don't get lost around the office anymore, and thanks to the automated priority management feature, I don't receive panic calls from Fee Earners requiring priority jobs anymore. It is all taken care of."

Thanks to the quality of voice and the basic dictation skills that all Fee Earners have adopted within the firm, Secretaries can now handle any job from any Fee Earner. "Being able to manage our secretarial resources as a pool makes an in valuable difference to our firm" insists Du Bruyn. The firm, which used to hire several temporary Secretaries throughout the year to compensate for the permanent staff's vacation time and sick days, can now handle the entire workload internally. This is also true for the Personal Injury department, which is the most dictation-intensive area in the firm. "A few months ago, one of our Secretaries had to leave for 12 weeks. Thanks to DigiScribe-XL, we managed to dispatch her work easily and were able to manage the extra workload without having to hire a temporary Secretary. We could not believe it! Not only do we not need to hire temporary Secretaries anymore, but we can now direct our existing secretarial staff to more paralegal, billable activities. We owe this giant step forward entirely to DigiScribe-XL," agrees Du Bruyn.

Solicitors' Buy In

The new system was very well accepted by Fee Earners, who could quickly measure the benefits of digital versus analog dictation, as Graham Brierton, Solicitor, explains: "DigiDictate-IP freed me from the limitations of tape dictation while retaining my dictation habits and accelerating the turnaround of reports. Features such as the ability to insert changes to existing dictations have even enhanced my dictation practice. How could one not buy into this?"

Nicola Clark, Solicitor, adds: "We, Fee Earners, don't like being constrained. I found the use of PC microphones very intuitive so that no training or adaptation was ever needed. The DigiDictate-IP system itself is very easy to use, not to mention the huge acceleration in transcription turnaround the system has brought in since its implementation."

Increased Supervisor Control

The DigiScribe-XL Management Console provides Diana Du Bruyn with complete control over the work environment and productivity levels within the firm. "With the ability to monitor figures such as dictated jobs, dictated time, completed jobs and backlogs, I reached a level of visibility I had never experienced before. I know exactly what is going on in the firm and where potential issues come from," highlights Du Bruyn. Here is a rather odd example: one day Mrs. Du Bruyn received a complaint regarding a Secretary's accuracy in transcribing reports. "So I went looking in the DigiScribe-XL production reports and found out that this Secretary was actually handling an abnormally high amount of work daily. I could also listen to the voice files in question and soon identified dictation style issues in the voice files that were routed to this particular Secretary. DigiScribe-XL tells you the flip side to every single issue," comments Du Bruyn.

On the Same Wavelength

"Right now, we don't think of anything that should be added to the system. DigiScribe-XL has reached beyond our expectations. The only tweaks we can think of are merely internal to our firm," concludes Du Bruyn. "Our investment in digital dictation has already delivered tangible results to our firm, and we trust Crescendo entirely in their commitment to help us make the most of what the technology has to offer today and in the future. As valuable as the technology itself, we pride ourselves for the solid, trust-based partnership we have developed with Crescendo over the past few months. We know it is here to stay."