Outsourcing Transcription Services: Benefits and Considerations

Audio transcription is useful to businesses for many reasons. Among them are good record-keeping, SEO and marketing benefits, and greater accessibility for customers and staff.

Modern technology makes remote collaboration simple, secure, and cost-effective. Because of this, more businesses are choosing to outsource transcription instead of appointing an in-house person (or assembling an entire team) to do the work.

In today’s post, I’ll cover four major benefits of outsourcing transcription services. After that, I’ll offer some suggestions for evaluating potential outsourcing partners based on three factors: cost, quality, and security.

Why outsource transcription services?

Besides convenience, there are several more benefits of outsourcing transcription services to consider:

• Save money. By using independent contractors instead of employees, you’ll eliminate the substantial costs of salaries and benefits. You’ll also avoid equipment overhead, including office space, employee workstations, transcription software, and remote collaboration technology.

• Free up manpower. When your staff aren’t bogged down in administrative tasks, they’re free to focus on the work that drives growth, such as marketing and sales. Additionally, outsourcing transcription lessens the strain on your IT and HR departments and saves management the time of training staff and managing projects.

• Be flexible and efficient. For most companies, the amount of available transcription work tends to fluctuate. An outside service can handle a flood of work efficiently, sparing management the distraction. And when there’s less work available, you won’t have to invent work to keep your in-house transcription team busy.

• Get professional results. Audio transcription requires experience to do skillfully and efficiently. If you burden your team with the task of transcribing audio on top of their regular responsibilities, turnaround times – and transcript quality – will suffer.

Below are three factors to consider when evaluating a potential transcription outsourcing partner.

Cost

What’s the going rate for transcription services?

For professional North American transcriptionists, expect rates of $1.50-3 USD per audio minute. For highly difficult or specialized material, this rate may increase.

Rates of $1 USD per audio minute or less suggest a company is using overseas typists, even if they advertise as North America based. It may also mean the company is feeding audio through voice recognition software rather than using human typists.

As with most things, there’s a trade-off between cost and quality when it comes to outsourcing transcription overseas. When accuracy is called for, many businesses prefer to work with native-English-speaking typists to ensure the job goes smoothly the first time, and each time thereafter.

I’ve written an in-depth post about transcription rates here, including info about standard pricing structures and factors that affect transcription costs.

Quality

Accurate transcripts are always ideal, but they’re especially important under the following circumstances:

• Projects with specialized terminology, like academic research or medico-legal content
• Projects that are critical to making business decisions, like conference calls and annual meetings
• Transcripts that will be published online or converted to captions, such as podcasts, seminars, and documentaries

To ensure you don’t end up paying for transcripts you can’t use, it’s a good idea to evaluate different service providers before committing to a long-term project.

Here are three simple ways to do that:

Check where a company’s transcriptionists are based.

Transcription as a skill deals primarily with the use of language. To produce a quality transcript, typists must be fluent in the nuances of the language they’re working in.

Typists who aren’t fluent in English may struggle with the basics of spelling, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. They may not recognize English idioms and colloquialisms. And because they don’t have local and regional context, they may be unable to identify the names of specific people, places, and events.

For these reasons, many North American businesses prefer to work with companies that use North American transcriptionists.

As noted above, just because a transcription agency advertises as North America based, that doesn’t mean its typists are. The best way to find out an agency’s hiring practices is to check the careers page on their website, or simply ask them.

Make sure the company has high standards for its staff.

Most transcription services have a careers page on their website. (It might also be called “Jobs”, “Work With Us,” “Transcriptionists,” or something similar.) Look at the company’s hiring requirements. Do they only hire experienced professionals, or do they advertise jobs to just about anyone who wants to work from home?

Certain types of transcription, such as medical and legal transcription, require typists to be proficient in industry terminology. If your project calls for expertise in a certain area, make sure the company hires transcriptionists with matching training and experience.

Ultra-low rates are an indicator of inexperienced staff and low quality standards, regardless of whether the provider offers a 99% accuracy guarantee.

Review samples of the company’s work, if possible.

Aside from simply typing the right words and spelling them correctly, a professional transcription service will pay attention to these details:

• Language mechanics: correct punctuation and capitalization
• Readability: logical use of paragraphs, clean verbatim transcription
• Style: consistent styling of numerals, dates, titles of works, etc.
• Formatting: attractive formatting of the document

Check with a company if published samples of their work are available, such as podcast or YouTube video transcripts.

Some transcription services offer a free trial. This can be a great way to vet a company’s quality standards and workflow to see if they’re a good fit for your organization.

Security

Reputable transcription services will have two important pieces in place to protect the confidentiality of your source media and transcripts:

• A signed confidentiality agreement
• End-to-end-encrypted technology for file hosting and delivery

Many smaller transcription services use popular free services like Google Drive, Dropbox, and Gmail to transfer files and collaborate with clients. There’s nothing wrong with using these tools for certain projects – some clients prefer them due to their familiarity and ease of use.

However, most free services aren’t suitable for storing and transferring sensitive data. A patient H&P report will require a different level of security than a podcast transcript that’s going to be published on the web, for instance.

For this reason, a secure transcription service will have end-to-end-encrypted file transfer and storage technology available should your project need it.

With end-to-end encryption (E2EE), your data can only be read by you and your intended recipient. Not even the third-party service hosting your information can decrypt it. This eliminates the possibility of anyone snooping your data.

Regarding security, small North American providers have an advantage as well: Your audio won’t be internationally accessible to a large pool of workers at any given time.

How to cut costs on transcription

Poor-quality audio takes many times longer to transcribe than clear audio. This is why many professional transcription services charge a higher rate for difficult audio.

A bit of preparation can go a long way in improving the quality of your recordings. In turn, this will significantly lower your transcription costs and ensure you receive the cleanest-possible transcripts.

Follow these simple tips for producing a clear audio recording:

• Use a quality digital recorder, like the Sony UX560 or the Olympus WS-853. Do a test recording beforehand to ensure that every speaker can be clearly heard.

• Avoid recording in locations with chatter or other background noise.

• Speak slowly and clearly. If you’re conducting a focus group or meeting, remind participants not to talk over each other.

• When possible, conduct interviews in person instead of over the phone.

Ready to outsource transcription?

We provide competitively priced transcription services by experienced North American transcriptionists.

We offer friendly service, end-to-end-encrypted file transfer, and premium-quality transcripts. Because we’re a small business, we’re able to provide prompt, attentive support to our clients.

Ask to see samples of our work (publicly available on the web). Or, take advantage of our free transcription trial.