When most people think of transcription services, they picture the insurance, medical, legal, or law enforcement fields. While these sectors are certainly some of the best sources of clientele for skilled transcription, they don’t represent the entire market for this service. The truth is businesses big and small are also commonly looking towards transcriptionists to help document verbal communication.
Here are several examples of the role of transcription in business:
Research
The value of research is essentially worthless if there is any uncertainty regarding its accuracy. With this in mind, a business looking to analyze their competition, scrutinize potential partners or perform one of the other common forms of business research needs reliable documentation of their findings. The list of the highest rated transcription service providers includes companies which assure at least 99% accuracy, helping businesses guarantee their research is reliable. The same is unlikely to be said for any research derived solely from unskilled attempts at note taking.
Presentations
Depending on the speaker and the subject, there’s a potential for an enormous amount of information to flow during a business presentation. Even if you’re taking notes and having the PowerPoint slides emailed to you afterward, there are likely to be various points of interest brought up by the speaker which will appear in neither. Many business owners discover the more convenient option is to capture the presentation on audio or video and have it transcribed. That way they can be certain to have access to the entire scope of information provided by the presentation.
Focus Groups
One of the unintended consequences of commissioning a focus group prior to product launch is being inundated with last-minute data that either disagrees or outright defies the product roadmap. Businesses in this situation are in a race against time to sort out the confusion. Transcribing the focus group findings is a great way to look at the data from a clinical perspective, giving business owners and their product managers an efficient way to study the data and correlate it with the product experience.
Training Materials
Love the way Tina trains the new hires, but hate how you have to pull her from her day-to-day job responsibilities? Use transcription services to convert her succinct language into reusable training materials. That way, new employees can access her expertise without taking it away from the business.
Meetings
The productivity of meetings – or lack thereof – is a popular trope in business culture. This can be remedied by transcribing the meeting and therefore having an easily accessible document of its contents. While the contents themselves might consist of more hem-and-haw and less concrete statements, the nuggets of valuable information will be retained.
Teleconferencing
Similarly, the back-and-forth of a teleconference call can be turned into a readable document. This makes it easier to have a relaxing discussion, rather than be distracted by a need to take notes of what the other person or persons are saying over the phone or web chat.
Call Center
The interactions between service representatives and customers over the phone are typically recorded. In the event of an employee violation, customer accusation, or other notable and potentially damaging interaction, these recordings are valuable pieces of evidence. With that said, upper management personnel doesn’t have the time to sit and listen to entire phone conversation play out unless the event is exceptionally controversial. Instead, they opt to read through a document of the transcribed customer service interaction, scanning for relevant words and phrases.
While transcription is important for a wide variety of industries, few business owners realize they stand to benefit from this service. Consider the aforementioned reasons why businesses count on transcription services because chances are one or more will apply to your operation.
