Every practice chases outstanding documents in some combination of a personal phone call and an automated reminder. The two methods are not interchangeable, and firms that rely too heavily on one tend to run into the specific weakness of that approach.
What a phone call gets right
A personal call carries a weight that an automated message does not, and it gives a client the chance to explain a genuine obstacle (a document that is hard to find, a question they were embarrassed to raise by email) that a reminder cannot draw out. For clients who are close to a deadline or already showing signs of disengagement, a call is usually the more effective option.
What automated reminders get right
Automated portal reminders scale in a way a phone call never can, and they remove the risk of a client simply being forgotten during a busy week when the person meant to call them ran out of time. For routine, early-stage requests, a reminder does the same job as a call without consuming anyone's time.
The failure mode of relying only on one
Firms that rely only on calls burn senior time on requests that did not need a human touch. Firms that rely only on automated reminders eventually train some clients to ignore them, the same way people learn to ignore a notification that never leads anywhere different.
The verdict
The most effective pattern uses automated reminders for the early, routine stage of a request, and reserves a personal call for the clients who have not responded after a reminder or two, or whose deadline is close enough that a personal touch is worth the time. Treating the two as complementary rather than competing tends to produce the best response rate for the least effort.
