So, you have decided to use a transcription company but your project is a little more complicated than you had hoped. Can you rely on your chosen typing services company to deliver a multifaceted service tailor-made for your requirements or are you in danger of falling victim to a transcription faux pas? Let’s have a look at our top five transcription boo-boos.
1. Being a Transcription Snail
There is research to show that if you give an army of monkeys each a typewriter and an infinite amount of time, they may rewrite the works of Shakespeare, but hey, who has the time for that?!
Let’s say you have a really important interview transcription and you outsource the work to a typing services company, with the instructions that you need it back within four hours. So you go ahead and send over the work to your chosen company and they do a fantastic job. The document formatting is faultless, the grammar is impeccable and the spelling is perfect. Only problem is, they’ve made a bit of a transcription faux pas and it’s ten hours behind your deadline, making the transcript in effect, useless! Meeting deadlines is crucial in the transcription industry and reliable urgent transcription is just that (urgent). At Transcription City, our typing services are both accurate and timely.
2. Living in the Dark Ages
Nowadays, you can record interviews for transcription on many devices: iPhones, androids, Dictaphones, Blackberry, iPad’s and tablets – to name a few. This is great, if your transcription services company is actually able to open these files to transcribe. Audio and video for transcription can come in many different formats, sizes and specifications and you need your transcription company to be able to work with a vast range of these formats. At Transcription City, both we and are typists are all equipped with the most up-to-date audio format conversion and video format conversion software on the market, so no matter what form your recording takes: video, audio, or hard copy, we have the correct equipment and knowledge to work with it. So don’t worry, we will not be writing your transcript on a stone tablet and doing your invoice with an abacus – unless of course you want us to!
3. Promising the Universe (and delivering an amoeba)
Clients have needs and sometimes these needs are not straightforward. Let’s say you need a video transcribed with time codes within four hours and your transcription company has agreed to work with your template and deliver in two hours. Sounds too good to be true? Then it probably is! Honesty can be hard to come by when you are offering your cold hard cash, but in the long run, building a strong, trustworthy business relationship with your transcription company means that you can know what to expect and they will learn to under-promise and over-deliver, rather than the other way around.
4. Transcription Services Courtesy of Lady Chattermouth
The Audio and video files that transcription companies deal with often contain information of a sensitive or confidential nature, especially those within the medical or legal industries. Being registered with the Data Protection Act and using secure file transfer methods is essential for transcription companies. Take a look at the Transcription City Client Confidentiality page to see the great steps we take to keep your documents, audio and video safe, secure and confidential. So do your research when selecting a transcription company and avoid making a transcription faux pas by sending your files to a Lady Chattermouth.
5. Transcription Hooey
Mishears, bad research and common sense errors during typing can make a transcript unreadable, sound amateurish or render it outright ridiculous. Select your transcription company by ensuring that their transcriptionists are experienced and thorough with their research and proofreading. After all, imagine how embarrassing it would be to send a transcript out to important clients or work colleagues that is full of errors and badly researched or unknowingly quoting inaccurate research during an important business presentation.
Follow our advice and you can avoid making these transcription faux pas and live a happy life, safe in the knowledge that your transcripts are always accurate, on time and of a high quality!
If you would like more information about our transcription services, proofreading services, virtual assistance or secretarial services feel free to contact us at any time, we’re a friendly bunch and always happy to help.
