How to maximize communication impact with transcription services
Effective communication has become more crucial than ever for businesses. Since hybrid and remote work have become the norm, it’s important to ensure your team members are on the same page when working toward a common goal.
Studies show about 72% of business leaders report an increase in their productivity levels due to improved communication initiatives. This shows the importance of ensuring information flows within your organization effectively, which helps every employee access it easily, without the pressure of accent, language, or dialect holding them back.
This is where transcription or subtitling services help you simplify your business’s internal and external communication.
Let’s explore the role and benefits of transcription services in streamlining communication in your business and the problems it can solve.
What are transcription services?
Transcription services involve converting voice to text, typically from audio or video recordings. This could be a recording of a meeting, interview, lecture, podcast, video content, or any other spoken communication.
In traditional manual transcription, a human transcriber listens to the audio and types out the spoken words. However, that isn’t an effective approach to transcribing as it’s more prone to human errors and fatigue, and the conversion can take hours, if not days.
Thanks to advancements in the automation industry, we have automated transcription services available to us. They use speech recognition algorithms to convert audio into text and are far more accurate and quick than human transcribers.
The result of this process is a written document, which is typically formatted and time-stamped to indicate when each segment was spoken.
Use cases of voice-to-text transcription in the business world
You can use transcription services in multiple ways in your business. Here are some popular ones.
Meeting transcriptions
Transcribing meetings serves as an efficient method of record-keeping, ensuring that important discussions and decisions are accurately captured and stored.
Let’s say you’re going to conduct a project kick-off meeting with both your onsite and remote teams joining. You’ll walk them through the project goals, timelines, and responsibilities in great detail.
In this case, business communication transcription is an efficient record-keeping method. Your transcribed document becomes a centralized reference for the team throughout the project’s lifecycle to help them stay on track and clear any misunderstanding.
Shift scheduling
Proper communication is crucial in building and keeping track of your employees’ schedules, particularly when your business operates round the clock and you’re building a 24/7 shift schedule. In this case, documenting communication and shift details can have many benefits for your business.
- It helps you accurately communicate details about work hours, shifts, and responsibilities.
- You can document discussions about employee availability, preferences, and any specific scheduling requests made by the employees.
- In industries where compliance with labor laws and regulations is critical, transcriptions serve as documented proof of adherence to scheduling policies and legal requirements.
Transcription services contribute to more effective shift scheduling by providing clear communication, documenting key details, ensuring legal compliance, and facilitating continuous improvement in workforce management practices.
Interview transcriptions
By creating an accurate and readable transcript of the interview conversation, you can:
- Ensuring accuracy, especially in cases of multiple speakers, accents, or nuanced discussions.
- Understand complex language, accents, or background noise.
- Code and categorize interview data, facilitating systematic analysis and identifying patterns or themes.
- Maintain a record of candidate responses, facilitating the decision-making process during the hiring stage.
- Quote and reference statements made by interviewees in articles or reports.
Transcribing your interviews helps in effective decision-making, research, and communication.
Training and onboarding
Transcriptions allow employees to learn at their own pace by providing a written version of training content that can be revisited as needed.
For example, a new employee undergoing training can refer to the transcribed sessions to review concepts, procedures, and guidelines covered during the onboarding process. Moreover, employees with different learning preferences, such as visual learners or individuals with hearing impairments, can benefit from transcriptions that complement other employee training methods.
Transcribing training content also allows you to provide materials in multiple languages, supporting a diverse and global workforce.
Five benefits of voice-to-text transcription in driving business growth
While transcription can benefit your business in many ways, here are our top five picks.
1) Enhanced productivity
One of the main reasons people procrastinate at work is they don’t know where or how to even get started. Often, it’s because the task is too intimidating or overwhelming. That’s more bound to happen when your employees don’t have access to the resources that can assist them in doing the job right.
By providing them access to transcribed notes and videos, you’re removing all the barriers to gaining knowledge, which could have been hampered by a lack of structured data or difficulty understanding accents.
Here’s how it helps increase productivity in your org:
- It eliminates the need for manual note-taking, saving time during the actual event. This allows participants in a meeting or an event to fully engage in discussions without the distraction of capturing every detail.
- Transcriptions serve as accurate and detailed documentation of various business interactions. This ensures you’re capturing all the important details, reducing the risk of miscommunication and providing a reliable source of information for future reference.
- Automation frees up administrative time, allowing staff to focus on more strategic tasks rather than spending hours on manual transcription work.
As a result, with the availability of transcribed resources, employees can focus on more strategic and value-added activities, driving overall efficiency and growth in the organization.
2) Improved accessibility and searchability
Transcribed documents are easy for everyone on your team to access—just upload them to a shared repository, and your team can refer to them anytime they need.
Instead of relying solely on audio or video files, teams can share transcriptions, ensuring that everyone has access to the same information. This accessibility promotes collaboration and minimizes delays caused by information gaps.
Moreover, these documents are easily searchable. All you need to do is assign a functional name to the document while uploading it so anyone can search it using the right keyword. This streamlines information retrieval, reducing the time spent on searching for crucial details.
Not just that, when you upload transcribed videos on your website, they make you more searchable on search engines, which is another added bonus of transcription in business.
3) Content repurposing in marketing
Transcriptions also make your job easier in many ways—especially for your marketing team always looking for inspiration to create content. When you have a written record of everything you do inside your organization, it’s easier to put this information into use for your marketing campaigns.
You can simply repurpose your transcribed notes into video content or a detailed blog post. This way, instead of starting every new initiative from scratch, you can quickly access your content repository and come up with consistent messaging to post across different channels.
4) Increased global reach
Transcription services contribute significantly to global reach by offering multi-lingual support, breaking down language barriers, and facilitating effective communication with diverse audiences.
This helps you market your products and services to a global audience by communicating your message effectively to people with varying language proficiencies.
You can create internal reference material in multiple languages, which can help you hire from anywhere in the world without stressing too much about language and culture. As a result, you can boost your brand’s image into a company that practices inclusive hiring, making you look attractive to top talents around the globe.
5) Addressing the skill gap
Transcriptions of training sessions provide written resources for onboarding and continuous learning. Especially those with different learning styles or varying proficiency levels can access training content easily, helping to bridge gaps in understanding and skill acquisition.
Employees can learn at their own pace and gain a thorough understanding of concepts, which reduces the risk of rushed or insufficient training.
Moreover, they can revisit these transcribed resources anytime they feel the need to brush up a concept or skill. This ongoing support helps prevent skills decay and ensures that employees remain competent in their roles.
Transcriptions also contribute to standardizing training content. It ensures that all employees receive the same foundational knowledge and skills required for their roles regardless of location or department.
Incorporate voice-to-text transcription to make your communication impactful
Voice-to-text transcription unlocks a realm of possibilities for businesses to maximize their impact. From fostering accessibility and inclusivity in a global workforce to increasing productivity by eliminating communication barriers, the influence of transcriptions on corporate communication is undeniable.
So, transcribe your organization’s internal processes and training materials and build impactful communication channels. You’ll soon find it a game changer in how you connect with your employees and the rest of the world.
Deepali is an engineer-turned-freelance writer for B2B SaaS, writing actionable long-form content for Marketing, Cybersecurity, and HR-Tech companies. When she’s not writing, she’s engrossed in a cozy murder mystery novel with a cup of hot chocolate!
