Jump to content

(Archived) Customer Meeting Notes Organization


BamaBillyP

Recommended Posts

I have many customers and have created individual Notebooks for them. My question is, what's the best way to keeping ongoing meetings for that customer? I'm interested in peoples thoughts of either 

 

1) Keeping one long running note, with time stamps to separate each meeting OR;

2) Individual notes for each meeting (trade-off is I would have to open each note individually to review all my notes, but I can use tags)

Link to comment

I agree with Jeff.

I used to have one Note per day in my diary Notebook. Adding tasks to the same Note as they came in. Often this could mean up to 30 tasks per day and sometimes more. Each task being ticked off as completed. After running this system in Evernote for a year and OneNote for about four years before that, I realised often a days Note was becoming unwieldy.

Now I have most tasks created on a new Note. Still in my Diary Notebook and then when the task is completed it goes in the Diary Completed Notebook.

In your shoes I would create a new Note for every meeting. Tag the Note with the customer name. Name the Note with a date code and the customers name and possibly any other simple detail. For example:

130223 - Xyz Widgets - Meeting - New contract

It then becomes an easy task to list all of the specific customer Notes by clicking on the Tag. You will then see the Notes in date order.

Best regards

Chris

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

I have many customers and have created individual Notebooks for them. My question is, what's the best way to keeping ongoing meetings for that customer? I'm interested in peoples thoughts of either 

 

1) Keeping one long running note, with time stamps to separate each meeting OR;

2) Individual notes for each meeting (trade-off is I would have to open each note individually to review all my notes, but I can use tags)

 

I agree that creating an individual note for each meeting will probably serve you best:

  • Provides you with an automatic "index" for each meeting in the form of the Note title
  • After you have more than one screen's worth of text, it be just as easy, if not easier, to click on the next meeting Note as it is to scroll through one Note will all of your meetings
  • Allows you to assign different Tags to different meetings, and thus easier to find all meetings on a specific topic, location, type (decisions vs information meetings), etc

 

 

 Name the Note with a date code and the customers name and possibly any other simple detail. For example:

130223 - Xyz Widgets - Meeting - New contract

It then becomes an easy task to list all of the specific customer Notes by clicking on the Tag. You will then see the Notes in date order.

Best regards

Chris

 

Although this approach for Note Title is endorsed by a number of users here, I do NOT recommend it for these reasons:

  • By always starting the Title with a date, it eliminates your ability to sort the Notes by descriptive Title
  • The Note metadata already provides two date fields:  Created Date and Updated Date
  • You can change the Created Date to the meeting date if you like
  • By setting the Created Date to the Meeting date, you can filter on date ranges, which you can't do if you rely only on the date in the Title.
  • The actual subject of your meeting is at the END of the Title, making it harder to see/find in a list of Notes, particularly the Snippet view which may NOT display the full Title

I have found the following format for Note Title to work very well:

  • <ShortKeyWord>: <DescriptiveTitle> {optional}<Source or other Identifier>
  • EXAMPLE:
  • MTG:  Contract with ABC Supplier -- Approved
    • TAGS:  CUS.XYZ, Meeting, MTG.Decision, Contract

The advantage of this format for Note Title is that when you filter your notes on Customer, you will see a list of only those notes for the customer, which you can sort by Title, Date Created, Date Updated, Tags, etc, depending on your objective.  The 3-5 UPPER CASE keyword at the beginning of the Title quickly and easily identifies the main category of the note.

 

So, if you sort by Date Created, you get a chronological list, but you can quickly pick out the meetings if you wish.

If you sort by Note Title, all of your meeting notes will be grouped together, with a "sub-sort" of the descriptive text in the title.

So, for example, it would list all meetings about contracts together.

 

I have Tag groups (hierarchy) to group together all tags that are choices of the same general keyword, like "Customers".

For Example:

  • Customers
    • CUS.Acme
    • CUS.Smith
    • CUS.Xyz
  • Meetings
    • MTG.Info
    • MTG.Decision
    • MTG.Review

The advantage of using prefixes like "CUS." is that it works like a dropdown selection list when you begin to enter a tag.  When you type "CUS.", Evernote will display a dropdown list of all tags that start with "CUS." making it easy to pick.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

I forgot to mention an exception to not putting the date in the Note Title.

 

I have a several cases where I APPEND a friendly date to the Note Title:

  • Reoccurring Meetings, like weekly staff meetings, that generally are multi-topic
    • MTG:  Weekly Staff Meeting -- Fri, Feb 22, 2013
    • I like the friendly date format for readability (including the day), but you can, of course, use other formats like 2013.02.22 if you prefer
  • Monthly Statements
    • STMT:  Monthly Statement -- Feb 2013
  • My Daily Notes (catch-all for misc notes each day)
    • Daily Notes -- Fri, Feb 22, 2013

I'm sure there are other examples, but these are a few of my most common uses of putting the date in the Title.  The key difference is that I APPEND the date, rather than using it as a PREFIX.  If you want these type of meeting notes, or any notes, to appear in date order, you can just sort on Date Created.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

I have many customers and have created individual Notebooks for them. My question is, what's the best way to keeping ongoing meetings for that customer? I'm interested in peoples thoughts of either 

 

1) Keeping one long running note, with time stamps to separate each meeting OR;

2) Individual notes for each meeting (trade-off is I would have to open each note individually to review all my notes, but I can use tags)

Hi. Welcome to the forums.

I would recommend one note for each meeting, and you can use note links, tags, notebooks, or search filtering to see them all arranged as you would like. Having everything in one note is unwieldy, and unnecessary in my opinion. In the end, though, it is a personal taste thing.

Personally, I use YYMMDD + keywords in the title, and this is sufficient for organizational purposes. A search for intitle:1302* intitle:meeting will show me all the notes for meetings in February arranged in chronological order. No extra work organizing the notes is necessary. If you are working on mobile, you cannot edit the created dates, so this method is particularly well-suited to that environment.

Link to comment
  • 5 months later...

I have a daily note that I use to keep track of interactions with various customers I support. The note may contain multiple cusomters:

Cust A -

* notes for today

Cust B -

* notes for today

Cus C -

* notes for today.

 

What is the best way to keep track of daily notes but be able to pull a report of all notes pertaining to Cust A or Cust B?

I like having the daily view of what happens each day but would like the ability to pull togther all the daily notes for a single customer as needed. Any ideas?

Link to comment

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...