Why Should You Invest in Business Transcription?

Improve your business with transcriptions

If businesses want to be successful, they need to find ways how to develop constantly. Have you ever thought about how transcriptions might improve your business? There are indeed various business areas that might benefit from transcription, no matter if we are talking about legal purposes, staff training sessions or some routine tasks. Transcriptions are an impressive tool and there are many companies that hire professional transcribers to help them with transcribing their business documents. In the era of digitalization, there are also different software tools that can offer new possibilities in this field, and they can sometimes be pretty advantageous as well. What you will need to do is think carefully about the best solution for your business and your preferred money-price-time relation.

How exactly can transcription be of help to your company?

We are sure that most of you have at least heard of business transcription? No matter the field, an average modern company generates a great deal of information and constantly creates content. Take for example an average customer service department that records hours of audio content on a daily basis. Also, important data are mentioned during interviews, meetings, conferences, presentations, seminars, workshops etc. which are all often recorded. If you decide to transcribe those conversations, you can keep all your valuable data in a single folder. Many companies often require obligatory business transcriptions to avoid disputes and lawsuits later on.

Being able to read through a transcript is important for recalling all that was discussed in a meeting and to make sure all key points are noted. If you only have notes, it is possible that some very important details are omitted and that some key information are wrongly interpreted, but if you have the whole transcript, you have the whole context. Just imagine a brainstorming session, ideas are coming and going very quickly and topics are changing. Again, a written transcript can help your company catch important ideas that without it could be forgotten.

Another problem is that if you only got recordings of meeting, that isn’t necessarily convenient. Employees who couldn’t attend a conference or a lecture will have to listen to the whole recording to hear what was happening. It they have a transcript in front of them, they can just quickly read through the content and they will get an idea what the meeting was all about. Also, if someone needs to go back to a specific part of the lecture or conversation, there is no need to listen to the whole tape to find that spot, which often turns out to be time consuming. As you can imagine it is much faster and easier to just go through a text file.

Transcripts can also be great for repurposing content, for example a transcription of a speech of lecture could be used as source material for articles and websites. Today, many companies use online videos and podcasts as a way to promote the company and what it does. There are many reasons why to transcribe an audio content of a business. One of them worth mentioning is SEO. The search engines still cannot pick up keywords from a video, but they can recognize keywords from a transcription. Also, many people will appreciate it more to read a transcription of a video instead of watching it for various reason: hearing impartment, insufficient English language skills, or just inconvenience to watch a video while for example commuting in public transportation. A written transcript makes it much easier to consume content for these types of audience or these kinds of situation. On top of that, it is always nice to have the written format to refer back to and to review key information.

It is important for every company to organize their content effectively and to share it with their staff, clients and shareholders and sometimes even with the public. Transcriptions can help a lot by simplifying the communication and saving valuable time of everyone involved.

How to choose the ideal transcription service for your business?

It is not easy to choose the right service provider for a transcription, especially today when you have so many possibilities to choose from. A good approach to eliminate the ones that aren’t quite right would be to go by reviews. How was the experience of other companies with the transcription service provider? You can ask the transcription service provider for references or you can simply make an online search. Today, the internet is an enormous source of reviews for any sort of service and it will give you the right information. After you are done with the search and you have eliminated companies to a handful, you can ask for a quote and see what the price and the timeline for the transcription would be in the remaining transcription service providers. Also, it is crucial to ask the company if the quality of your recording is acceptable, since this will have an impact on the quality of the final product.

Good news is that transcription service providers have great websites which can easily be used today. You won’t have to be very technically savvy, because all you’ll need to do is to enter your contacts and upload your recordings and the final product will usually be sent to you via email or you can just download it from the site of the service provider.

Companies that offer transcription services

Businesses can choose if the transcription is done by a human transcriptionist or a software tool in which case, we are talking about machine transcription. Both choices have their advantages and disadvantages. 

Usually, transcriptions done by the human hand are going to be more precise and much more accurate. It is important to mention that it should be done by professionals. Transcribing, just like any other job needs to be trained and practiced. When amateurs do transcriptions, they usually make more mistakes, are less accurate and they need much more time to deliver the final product than professional transcribers. While office assistants or secretaries can write business transcripts in-house, they won’t be able to match the speed, accuracy and eye for detail of a professional. Not to mention that amateurs that already work in-house for the company already have other responsibilities in the company, their real tasks for which they were hired in the first place. Those tasks will suffer, since the employees will be busy doing time-consuming transcriptions of dubious quality. That is why most business who need transcriptions usually don’t write them themselves. They outsource and hire a transcription service provider since professionals do the job faster and the final product tends to be better. This is especially true for companies that need to transcribe a large amount of content, for example legal or medical companies. Of course, as any service costs money, this one does as well. But really, if you take the saved time into consideration, you might find out that you are actually saving yourself money. Former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew once said: “If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business.” Our advice is also to let your staff do their job and to outsource. At this point, we should mention that even professional transcribers can’t do a transcription in a blink of an eye, but it is still going to be faster than transcriptions done by amateurs. Good quality transcription takes time.

When it comes to software transcription, the biggest advantage is that it is fast and it won’t cost you as much as a professional human transcriber. The downside on the other hand is that a software isn’t as accurate as a human, because it just won’t get everything that has been said, the context won’t mean as much to a machine as it will to a human being and sometimes a difficult accent of the speaker might be problematic. But it should be highlighted that software tools are being developed and becoming better each day and it is just a matter of time when they will be just as good as human transcribers. Still, that time hasn’t come yet.

That all being said, we can just conclude: every company has to maintain exhaustive records of its communications. Reading through a text file is much faster than listening through hour-long meetings. You can save executives and employees time and hassle by having important meetings, interviews, phone calls, training sessions transcribed so the staff can catch up, and more crucially, review the conversations in order to make sure they have not missed any important points. A transcription service provider, no matter if it is a human transcriber or machine transcription, can help businesses a great deal by delivering them valuable transcriptions which they can use in their working proceedings, while allowing business owners and employees to focus on running their business. Transcriptions are done most accurate if they are handled by professional human transcribers and fastest if they are done by a software.

Gglot can help you turn your audio files to text files. We offer accurate transcriptions and fast turnaround times. Invest in business transcription and get in touch with us!