Phone calls and Zoom meetings have surely become the new norm for business conversations. The result? Professionals have a substantial amount of recordings at their disposal for referencing.
Sorting through all of these audio and video recordings to pull out the relevant information can be time-consuming. Fortunately, professionals can turn to call transcripts to review their conversations better and have a standing record of their shared data and quotes.
Call Transcription Information
- What is call transcription?
- How do you transcribe a phone call?
- Conference call transcription
- How do you transcribe a conference call?
- Is it legal to transcribe calls?
- Deep diving into call transcription benefits
- Should you outsource call transcription?
- Transcription accuracy and accessibility laws
- Can you use ASR for call transcription?
- Can you caption calls?
- Selecting a call transcription software and provider
Call transcription can be a huge time saver and offers record-keeping benefits that ease companies’ legal concerns. Plus, transcribing calls provides many additional benefits. With Verbit, companies enjoy greater searchability of call dialogues, accessibility for individuals with disabilities and other significant advantages.
What is call transcription?
Call transcription is a textual record of an audio or video call. For example, when customer service representatives speak to a customer, they may record the call “for quality assurance.” The company can take that recording and use it to generate accurate, verbatim records of each conversation.
How do you transcribe a phone call?
In the past, transcribing a phone call meant that someone had to listen to the audio recording and type out the transcript. Unless you’re an experienced transcriber, the manual process was very time-consuming. It often involved a lot of rewinding and replaying the audio file to capture everything the speakers said.
Now, phone call transcription services can make the process much simpler. For instance, Verbit’s phone call transcription software automates and speeds up the entire transcription process. Plus, you can use it live to produce real-time transcripts to reference while still on a call – not just after the call.
Verbit can integrate into virtually any system to capture the audio and turn around transcripts live or within hours for recorded calls. Users can also upload the audio or video files to Verbit’s platform themselves if they prefer.
Conference call transcription
Conference calls typically involve calls between multiple people. In many cases, video meetings on Zoom have replaced the need for standard calls. In either scenario, effective conference call transcription requires capturing the speakers’ dialogue word-for-word.
Sophisticated transcription solutions can also include markings like speaker identification, so transcripts attribute words to the correct participant. As a result, using this format can make the final transcript far more useful.
How do you transcribe a conference call?
Using conference call transcription services that integrate with platforms like Zoom make creating a fast, accurate record simple. With Verbit, you can generate live transcripts within calls in real-time or record your Zoom calls to transcribe them after.
Verbit’s conference call transcription offers call searchability as well. It works by syncing with the video file so that professionals referencing the transcripts can search for key terms they’d like to reference. When you search for a term, the software takes you to the exact places in the video where the speakers mention that key term. This time-saving feature helps professionals pull out data points, quotes and other items easily and quickly.
Is it legal to transcribe calls?
While recording phone calls comes with many benefits, it’s important to consider the legality. As long as everyone on the call knows they are being recorded and consents, recording calls is fair game. In some states, it’s legal to record the call if just one of the parties knows about the recording. However, for business purposes, the person recording and transcribing the call should inform everyone right away to avoid legal complications.
Deep diving into call transcription benefits
A written documentation of an audio or video recording is surely a useful tool for businesses.
Here are just a few examples of why companies transcribe phone and conference calls.
Note taking in meetings
Conference call transcription offers verbatim records for business meetings. Professionals can use the transcripts to review anything they missed or forgot. They can also share the link to the transcript to inform individuals who were absent about what occurred. This way, no one has to spend the time recounting everything.
When transcription solutions are working to preserve the conversation, professionals can focus more on the conversation at hand.
Gathering customer information
Businesses may rely on call transcripts to source important data. If a common issue continues to pop up in calls, it can be easily identified with the ability to search multiple transcripts. Transcripts also present a nice way to collect customer quotes and feedback to share with colleagues.
Additionally, if a customer has to call back and speak to different representatives, transcripts can help teams get up to speed with what happened on previous calls. As a result, customers don’t need to repeat themselves. This functionality makes for a much better customer experience.
Assessing employee performance
Phone call transcription is a great tool for understanding how well employees are performing on calls. Leaders at call centers or of sales teams can use call transcripts to review how their colleagues handle specific situations, sales pitches and more.
Enhancing employee training
When hiring new employees, companies can refer to transcripts from earlier calls to identify how employees handled various issues. The transcript can even serve as a script to help new hires practice. If the archives are searchable, as are Verbit’s, managers will have an easier time locating relevant transcripts.
Conducting market research
Companies can use verbatim transcripts of focus groups and consumer interviews to perform market research. These transcripts help inform important business decisions, so it’s critical that they are accurate and complete.
Boosting workplace accessibility
Call transcripts offer another way to digest information from a phone call or video conference. This tool is especially helpful for people who are Deaf and hard of hearing and need information in a readable format. This tool is also important for individuals who have auditory processing disorders or speak English as a second language.
Creating marketing content
Recording an interview as a transcript can support marketing efforts. For example, if the marketing team interviews a thought leader and wants to create content based on that interview, a transcript makes it easier to pull direct quotes and condense the important information.
Additionally, while search engines can’t crawl video and audio content, transcripts can influence search engine optimization (SEO). As a result, the searchable text form of the content can boost rankings. In this way, transcripts allow you to get more out of content that the marketing team is already producing.
Should you outsource call transcription?
Outsourcing call transcription is a good idea. First, outsourcing often saves resources. As mentioned, compared to professionals, non-professional transcribers may take a long time to complete a transcript. That employee would likely be more productive performing another task.
Secondly, transcripts are only helpful when they’re accurate. Companies like Verbit can offer high levels of transcript accuracy. Inaccurate transcripts can be confusing and misleading and exclude individuals with disabilities who rely on them. Verbit’s professional transcription can provide consistent, accurate speech-to-text records.
Another benefit of outsourcing is that it offers scalability. For instance, call centers that handle a high volume of calls may need to transcribe massive amounts of audio content. With an efficient transcription solution, tackling a large volume of transcription work is simple and easy.
Transcription accuracy and accessibility laws
Accessibility laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) require that businesses accommodate people with disabilities. Transcripts are one tool that companies can use to improve access for employees and consumers who are Deaf or hard of hearing. However, it’s important to ensure that transcripts are fairly accurate for this use case.
Inaccurate transcripts will put people who rely on them in an inequitable position that could lead to legal consequences for the company.
Can you use ASR for call transcription?
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tools are getting better at producing transcripts, but they still lack the accuracy most businesses require. ASR often struggles to correctly transcribe names or locations, may be incapable of interpreting accented speech and can fail to capture all of the audio content.
In the worst-case scenario, ASR recordings can be misleading or even nonsensical. With that said, AI-powered ASR can make the transcription process more efficient. Verbit uses ASR to streamline call transcription and provide industry-leading turnaround times. However, with Verbit, human transcribers also work on editing the transcripts to provide greater accuracy.
Can you caption calls?
Like transcripts, captions are another accessibility solution that helps people who are Deaf and hard of hearing. Typically, captions appear on recorded videos and livestreams. It is possible to caption conference calls and phone calls as well, though.
For example, Verbit integrates with Zoom to provide live captions on conference calls. This solution is an important accessibility tool that businesses should be offering. The captions for those calls can also become a searchable transcript and offer additional support for anyone looking for information from that meeting, call, webinar or other event.
Even with captions, it’s important to offer call transcripts as well because they serve additional purposes.
Selecting a call transcription software and provider
Using built-in or free ASR software alone for transcriptions is risky. It’s more likely to lead to inaccurate records, which defeat the point of producing and accessing transcripts. Verbit is different. We train our solution to recognize industry-specific terminology and acronyms and have it edited by human transcribers to generate highly accurate transcripts.
Verbit’s human layer in the process greatly enhances the transcription accuracy.
Verbit’s transcription, captioning and other accessibility solutions make us an essential partner for businesses working to improve their efficiency and inclusivity. Contact us to learn more about our call transcription software and other accessibility tools.