Here Are The Top 10 Things to Look for When Outsourcing Transcription
With the daily demands of medical, law enforcement and legal professionals encompassing a wide variety of tasks from client relations to internal operations, hunkering down and spending hours transcribing audio or video is the last thing anyone has the energy or time to do.
One easy way to save these resources is to hire someone outside of your office who specializes in fast turnaround and accurate transcription to handle those tasks. Outsourcing transcription services is one way you can work smarter, not harder, so you can focus on revenue-generating activities and assistant your clients and citizens properly.
The main things to look for when finding a outsourcing transcription company to contract with include affordability, understanding of industry jargon, accuracy and fast turnaround. From a managerial standpoint, outsourcing non-revenue generating tasks like say legal transcription makes sense to a lot of decision-makers looking to streamline their workload.
Hiring another paralegal in-house takes extra training time and that person has to be added to payroll as well as have fast yet accurate typing capabilities. The financial savings alone are usually a significant part of any professional’s decision to outsource.
When researching US based outsourcing transcription companies it is important to understand 10 specific items to ensure you are making the best hiring decision:
- Do they understand industry jargon?
- Do they understand proper formatting?
- What are their procedures for fast turnaround?
- How do they ensure accuracy?
- What are their pricing options?
- What is their local phone number and physical address?
- Do they have social media accounts? Check them out to assess native language and grammar.
- Are their service offerings closely related? Unrelated service offerings like web development are a sign the company’s focus is not on transcription alone.
- Are they listed with the Better Business Bureau and included in the Yellow Pages?
- Will they offer a free trial so you can test the company out? Give the company a difficult file with a lot of similar-sounding words (e.g. access and excess, ceased and seized) and American slang (e.g. raining cats and dogs, airhead, bonkers) or brands (e.g. Crocs shoes, Chick-fil-A).
Why are these things important?
Your outsourcing transcription company needs to understand industry jargon but it’s also equally important that they understand proper formatting of documents and why they’re formatted a certain way. Without transcripts that are properly formatted, it will still take more time to format documents correctly in-house. Make sure when searching for a company, they will use the formatting your business or department requires.
It is important that the outsourcing transcription company you hire has solid procedures in place to ensure fast turnaround. Some companies will actually deliver documents in as little as three hours if they have a good system in place with dedicated employees, which only expedites the workload internally and gets things done efficiently.
Some outsourcing transcription companies will offer different price points depending on how quickly the document is needed, so it is also important to research pricing options with various outsourcing companies to ensure you’re getting the best bang for your buck.
In a lot of ways it puts the control back in the hands of the decision-maker because he/she can determine if they want to pay a higher or lower rate for turnaround time—either of which is still cheaper than hiring someone full-time, in-house.
The word “outsource” has some negative connotations regardless of what industry you’re in, as visions of tech support in India come to mind. For people who have been typing dictations in-house, people might think they’re being laid off but the reality is, it is freeing them up to do higher level activities. It is a chance to restructure what and how staff perform as well as financially restructure to make smarter investments.
In an ever-changing world, it is important for professionals of all levels and departments of all sizes to see what options are out there to work smarter not harder. With human and financial capital scarce, utilizing local outsourced transcriptionists to enhance the internal operations of a business or individual is not only a trend, but becoming a necessity in today’s business economy.
