Benjamin Franklin once famously said, "By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail."
Transcription Services 2000's CEO not so famously once said, "All of our professional transcription service transcribers are expected to spend an appropriate amount of time preparing for their transcription assignments before their transcriptionist fingers ever touch the keyboard."
She's right in taking that approach, of course. That extra preparation step put forth by the transcription services team -- and included in our transcription billing rate, by the way -- is one of several factors that set us above and apart from so many of the transcription companies working in our industry today, where if you've got two hands and a set of earphones you're good to go.
A significant majority of our transcription service clients are highly sophisticated business and industry leaders. They have offices and customers around the world, and they communicate in very specific, very technical jargon, i.e., lots of acronyms, proper nouns, and industry-speak. From our perspective, jumping into a transcription services assignment with one of these entities without some understanding of their environment would be like diving headfirst into a pool without knowing the depth of the water -- scary and fraught with potential bad outcomes.
Our seasoned transcriptionists understand that the 20 to 30 minutes of in-advance preparation they invest -- reviewing a transcription service client's website, skimming through prior transcripts, scanning recent client company press releases, etc., etc. -- will more than pay off once they dive into the job.
The time saved by doing even a modest amount of research beforehand can make a huge difference in situations where meeting a service deadline is being challenged by poor audio quality, speaker accents, or other factors that slow the transcriber down. This investment can also help lessen the odds of having to resort to inserting phonetic spellings or "inaudibles" when time constraints prevent the transcriber from doing further research in the heat of battle (so to speak).
We encourage potential online transcription services clients to ask online transcription service providers they're interviewing, "How would your transcribers prepare for an assignment from my transcription company?" If the response begins with, "Um…" you might want to contact Transcription 2000 Services.
Ben Franklin got it right. So does our online transcription service.
