I am a big business owner now. It wasn’t always this way but en route to my destination I realized the importance of outsourcing certain tasks. One of them was keeping the records of the business meetings with different clients. It included what was discussed and what was not; and following up on those. Even my usually competent secretary was making too many mistakes. I had to act before the human error factor would ruin my reputation.

But it was only after a faux pas that I decided to get my meetings transcribed with the help of the professional transcriptionists.

Getting my business meetings transcribed was the best thing that could have happened to my business. I got highest quality of services from the transcriptionists who were trained in the work and hence they met the deadlines easily. I got all my transcriptions mailed back to me in the form of MS Word documents and sent them to my clients. Wow, they were impressed with my professionalism!

Another benefit of getting the meetings transcribed was that I could just make actions notes in the margins. I began to give quality time to my business.

Today, my company still follows the policy of business transcription. Even if I am not present in some of the meetings, I can still get to know what was being discussed; and I encourage my colleagues to use the margin.

The best part of this was that I was not spending too much of additional money in the transcription. As I became experienced I bought bulk hours and saved on costs.

Transcription gave my business an edge over my competitors. In business, impressions are important. Imagine a proposal meeting with a client and you sending the transcript later on.

In my business it served as an edge. The client may have met more companies for proposals and may have even received better ones. However, the transcript spoke both of professionalism on my part and served as a reminder of the proposal discussed the day before. I also suspect that it was easier to forward my transcript through email to the boss. Hence I started getting more deals and my business grew.

The guest author is a client of GMR Transcription and a virtual office business owner.
As told to Beth Worthy.

Though general transcription is not tough and anyone with a good typing hand and ear can start of as a transcriptionist; accuracy does matter. It makes or breaks your reputation as a transcriptionist even if you are within a company.  General audios have materials that are full of technical, financial or specialized terminology.  This is typical of business transcription. To the managers the terminology may seem easy but transcriptionists may be unfamiliar with them. What to do?

It may be necessary to listen to words, terms, sentences or even a whole section several times in order to transcribe them properly. In such circumstances, it helps enormously if a glossary of keywords can be provided in advance or words can be spelt out while dictating. If you are working for a company you can ask for the glossary before hand especially if the client is an prior one.

However, if you are working independently and if you are working with a new customer or in a new area of business, you would be wise to get prior information about vocabulary and difficult words that may crop up. These words may not be specialist terms but may just be terms that are specific to the particular recording to be transcribed. Getting such a glossary avoids you using incorrect words throughout a document. Also, if you have a prior knowledge of a topic and information on the kind of words or names that may come up, you will find it easier to decipher words that on the first hearing you may think are audible. 

Knowing how to spell difficult names or words will help not only to make the final version of your document more accurate, but it will make your task more enjoyable. There is nothing more frustrating than hearing a word time and time again and having no way of checking whether you are transcribing it correctly. This is particularly the case with people’s names because no dictionary, specialist or otherwise will help you check the accuracy of the spelling.

If you are transcribing the recording of a meeting, you might wish to ask for a glossary, which contains the following-
#1 The name of the attendees
#2 The name of the project being discussed and related projects
#3 Name of other people and organizations who are closely involved in the project
#4 Relevant addresses, place names, property names
#5 Technical phrases, jargons, abbreviations that may be used during the course of meeting

Create your own glossaries as you work. In addition to requesting a glossary from the authors, you may find it helpful to note down, as you transcribe, any words that you find difficult to hear or spell for your own future reference. In this way, you can create your own on-going glossary that you can refer to and add to any time-in financial, medical or legal terms.