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Churston Heard is a West End property consultancy with 53 fee earning professionals and 11 secretaries. Frustrated by lost or wiped tapes and aging analogue tape machines, they installed BigHand’s award-winning digital dictation workflow software across the organisation. Mike Benton, Finance Director at Churston heard, describes the project...

"Digital dictation enables a fee earner to record dictation directly into their PC or laptop and transfer the dictation via the network to their secretary, or a pool of secretaries, for transcription. Additionally property professionals can record dictations when out on-site and transfer them back to the office instantly - meaning a first draft can already be completed by their secretary by the time they return to the office. Recently while one of our surveyors was on maternity leave, she even dictated work from home and utilised a secretary based in the office. All-in-all the software promotes day-to-day efficiency, with fee earners receiving a ‘same day service’ from their support staff.

However, aside from the boosting productivity of the professional, the real impact of digital dictation comes in the way it enhances and streamlines your secretarial support provision. If one secretary is very busy then some of her dictations are submitted to the central pool, where less busy secretaries pitch in and help complete the work on schedule. Likewise when a secretary is on holiday or ill her work is shared by the rest of the secretaries in that ‘virtual’ pool. Secretaries don’t mind helping out as they know when they are off those people will then cover for them. Crucially it means that we now do not require any temp or float staff at all.

We were actually spending an average of £40,000 per year on temp cover, often concentrated during the summer holiday season. From the day we installed BigHand we have not used a single temp.

During this time we have also had 3 secretaries leave the firm, and not had to replace them due to BigHand software. The BigHand system allows you to calculate more scientifically whether existing secretaries have enough capacity without having to bring in direct replacements. Importantly it also enables work to be automatically absorbed by the remaining secretaries. With a cost to the firm per head of £33,000 per annum, the total annual saving there was £99,000. Where our fee-earner to secretary ratio was once 3:1, it is now 5:1 – the optimum level in terms of our practice.

I have overseen the purchase of many new IT systems but can categorically state that no application has gone in as easily as BigHand Digital Dictation. It is popular with both fee earners and secretaries alike and has delivered on the ROI side – in total we have saved over £400,000 due to the system. These user and financial benefits would make it attractive to any company in any sector, but the additional remote working facilities make it particularly suited to the property industry."