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Automating case notes using AI

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Citizens Advice SORT offers free, independent advice and support across Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale and Trafford, UK, and experiments with technology to help advisors spend more time with people who need them.

Use this Guide when your advisers spend almost as long writing up case notes as they do talking to clients. It shows how a small charity tech team built CaseNote – a speech‑to‑text and AI summarisation tool – to cut write‑up time by half while preserving advice‑quality standards and data privacy.

Jump to steps
How they set it up:
In house technical team created it
Setup costs:
£0 upfront (staff time + £120 prototype API credits)
Ongoing costs:
≈ £600/month API usage for ~2,000 calls
Guide in use since:
January 2025

Steps to automating case notes using AI

Shadow a cross‑section of advisers and time how long case‑note write‑ups take after calls, chats and in‑person meetings. Capture the hidden costs: adviser fatigue, reduced capacity and quality‑assurance backlog. Use real numbers (e.g. 20‑minute call = 14‑minute write‑up) to build a business case.

Citizens Advice SORT found advisers were spending up to a day each week creating notes – a clear blocker to meeting demand.

Integrate a Speech‑to‑Text solution with your telephony and web‑chat platforms to record and live‑transcribe conversations. Label speakers automatically so the AI can tell client from adviser.

The team used Gemini Speech to Text into their web app to extract audio, their existing phone system, and enabled the option upload of audio recording for pilots.

Pipe the raw transcript into the LLM with a prompt that maps to your organisation’s quality‑standards template (client situation, guidance given, next steps, etc.). Keep prompts version‑controlled so you can tweak without redeploying code.

CaseNote  uses carefully‑crafted prompts to turn a 20‑minute call into a structured note in ~90 seconds.

Run the draft through an automatic PII redaction tool (Microsoft Presidio, for example). Present the note to the adviser for a quick sense‑check and let them rate accuracy (Green/Amber/Red) to feed future improvements.

Presidio strips phone numbers and names; advisers copy the note into the CRM and mark quality – building a feedback loop for the devs.

Roll out to a small adviser cohort first. Track write‑up time saved, quality‑score changes and adoption. Iterate weekly on prompts and UI based on adviser feedback. Expand once success metrics hold steady.

During a six‑week pilot CaseNote handled 2,000 advice sessions and halved write‑up time while maintaining quality scores.

Further information:

Contact: [email protected]
Link to a demo of CaseNote: https://www.loom.com/share/41083a7ea6e247069daedc970fa87060?sid=c1853002-4791-49bd-9e6a-5676c5ccc1a6