Process Optimization - a missed opportunity for transcription companies experiencing growth
Transcription companies are no different from other services companies, with three key levers for growth: Recruitment, Sales and Operations. When they experience volume growth, either due to current client business growth or new sales, as with most service companies, they usually increase their service capacity through recruitment. While recruitment is the quickest response to handling a higher volume of service delivery, analyzing current transcription processes for missed opportunities is a better place to start. It can result in higher margins in the business while utilizing your current staff to meet volume growth. Let’s have a look at where you can start:
Reduce duplication of activities
Review each stage of your operations from when a transcription job is received to the release and invoicing of the job. Have each staff member log every activity, big or small, that they do on a specific job. Compare the activity lists of each member, find duplicates and assign them to the first staff member in the process while eliminating the activity from every downstream member’s responsibilities on the job. Utilize detailed checklists for each stage of the job to ensure that no essential activity is missed in the workflow of the job, while avoiding duplication.
Standardize the transcription processes on a per client basis
Every client usually has specific typing and formatting guidelines about how they want the final transcript to be produced, to ensure consistency in the work product. Turn this into a template with a typing guide.
Are there specific common errors that the transcription staff make? Turn those into a checklist to ensure that the errors are caught.
Assign dedicated intake, quality control and lead staff to each client to ensure that they are familiar with the processes, which will help reduce friction, improve speed and increase productivity over time.
Technical skills of your transcriptionists
This is often the most contentious point, but is also the one that if solved gives the maximum return in improving capacity to handle increased transcription volumes. Have a team lead or trainer do workflow assessments of each member of your transcription team to get a sense of their comfort level with navigating a computer. How long does it take them to set up a new transcription job? Are they comfortable with getting out of a tight spot, like not being able to find a file? Can they handle different audio/video file types? Do they know what to do when their document editor crashes? Can they recover and find the last auto-saved version of the file? What is their typing speed?
If your assessments show a general discomfort in navigating a computer, that could be causing a loss in productivity. Providing one-on-one training on areas that need improvement should help get them comfortable and moving faster. As for slow typing speed, it takes 3 to 4 weeks for a 25% gain in typing speed. Have them spend time on the clock practicing their typing the right way. It'll give you returns in the long term.
Maximize utilization of the transcription tools used
Beyond basic computer navigation, you need to ensure the team is fully utilizing the tools they have access to. How comfortable are they with using the document editor and transcription playback software? Are they setting up the applications correctly? Do they have the shortcuts configured correctly or do they do most repetitive tasks manually?
MS Word for text editing and Express Scribe for audio playback have been used as examples below, as they are the most commonly used tools in the transcript industry.
MS Word - If your team is using MS Word, are they utilizing templates with hotkeys for common sequences? Or are they typing everything manually? Is every transcriptionist using their own discretion on how to set a document up, and then leaving it to the quality control stage to clean up? Leverage MS Word’s style and template abilities to standardize the layout of the transcripts, and macros tied to hotkeys to reduce keystrokes for common notations in transcripts.
Express Scribe - Do they use a foot pedal to navigate audio playback? Do they use hotkeys, or they actually use the mouse to move through the audio? Have they configured different playback speeds on hotkeys to fast forward through blank audio or do they sit through silence?
Utilize Transcript Automation
The above 4 items when done well can double productivity fairly quickly. To give you perspective, someone typing 10 audio minutes per hour can go up to 20, with improved typing speed and macro enabled templates. To take the next leap in productivity, Transcript Automation is worth looking into. Transcript Automation combines multiple different repetitive activities in the transcription process into an automated workflow, freeing the transcriptionists to focus on editing the finalized fully formatted transcript, reducing transcript production time by a further 70-80%.
Document Extraction - For several different types of transcription, including legal and medico-legal, data has to be copied from source documents and inserted into reports and legal proceeding transcripts as part of the setup process. This process is automated so that a pre-trained AI model automatically extracts the required information and inserts it into the final generated transcript in the correct format and locations.
Speech to text conversion - For anyone that has been following the ASR/speech to text progression over the years, it has continued to get better year over year. The audio/video is converted into text and insert into the final generated transcript.
Document Automation - This is the process of assembling a finished first draft transcript using a specific client template and the results of a and b, all into a single document for the transcriptionist to begin editing.
While some of the above items will take longer than others to execute on, they are a great place to start in a tight labor market where it is getting tougher to find skilled transcription professionals.