How to find what was said in a meeting or customer call

Your memory of the call is worse than it feels

If you've ever been sure a customer asked for something, then reread your notes and found they said the opposite, you've met the problem. Researchers who study conversational memory have found that people recall only a small part of what was said. A review of that research found that after a short delay, people may recall from memory fewer than 20% of the specific ideas that were originally expressed (Brown-Schmidt & Benjamin, 2018). Most of those studies looked at everyday conversations, not work meetings, but it's a useful warning for work calls too.

Part of the reason is that during a conversation your attention goes to following it and replying, not to storing who said what and in what context (Brown-Schmidt & Benjamin, 2018). Then time does the rest. A modern replication of Ebbinghaus's classic forgetting experiments reproduced the curve from his experiments in the 1880s (Murre & Dros, 2015). It used lists of nonsense syllables rather than meetings, so treat it as an illustration, but the lesson carries over: write things down soon.

Write the note right after, not just during

Notes taken during a call are usually fragments. The most useful notes are often the five minutes right after it, while you still remember the context behind the fragments. Block those five minutes in your calendar if you have to. If typing is slow on the move, dictating a quick note works too.

You don't need a transcript. A well-known study found that students who typed lecture notes did worse on conceptual questions, and the authors pointed to verbatim copying as the likely reason (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). A later replication found no consistent difference between typing and writing by hand (Morehead, Dunlosky & Rawson, 2019). The safe takeaway isn't about the device: write down what matters in your own words instead of trying to capture everything.

A meeting note you can search later

University committees have long rules for minutes, and the core of them fits a startup just as well. The University of Manchester's guidance says minutes should be action focused, show who is responsible for each action and by when, record the reasons for decisions, and not try to be a verbatim record (University of Manchester). A short template that follows those rules:

1. 1Title: who and what, plus the date. "Call: Priya, Halden Studio, Sep 9" is findable. "Call notes" is not.
2. 2People: who was there, with full names the first time.
3. 3Decisions: what was decided, and why, in one or two lines each.
4. 4Actions: who will do what, by when.
5. 5Their words: the one or two sentences worth quoting exactly, in quotation marks, like a customer's objection or a client's request.
6. 6Open questions: what you still need to find out.

One note per meeting, every time, is what makes this work. A long running document with every call pasted in is hard to search and harder to quote from.

Name things the same way every time

Search can only find what you wrote. If one note says "annual plan", another says "yearly billing" and a third says "12-month contract", a keyword search for any one of them misses the other two. A few habits help:

• Use the same name for each customer, company and project, and spell it the same way.
• Put the date in the title, so results sort and scan easily.
• Keep related meetings together, for example one folder or category per client.

The University of Waterloo's recordkeeping guidance for committees states the goal plainly: decisions and actions should be accessible when needed (University of Waterloo).

Asking your notes instead of searching them

Keyword search answers "which notes contain this word?". Often what you really need is "what did customers say about pricing?", which is a question across several notes written in different words. Tools that answer questions from your notes can bridge that gap, but only if they show you where each answer came from.

This is the problem Lumyo is built around. You pick the notes for a chat, such as one client's meetings or last month's calls, and each answer cites the meeting notes behind it. Tap a source and the note opens at the exact line.

Check before you act on it

Whether you found it by search, by memory or with an AI tool, check the original before you quote it to a client or base a decision on it:

1. 1Open the source note and find the actual sentence.
2. 2Check the date. A promise from March may have been replaced in May.
3. 3Check who said it. "We discussed" and "they agreed" are not the same thing.
4. 4If the stakes are high, confirm with the person before acting.