Conference calls are an essential part of any business. These types of audio or video calls enable participants from any part of the world to connect and communicate with each other to discuss various critical business tasks and details. They are also an effective way of keeping everybody in the loop. Today, companies use business transcription for conference calls to enhance their benefits further.
Just as legal transcription services help lawyers with case preparation, recording and transcribing conference calls and meetings makes it easier for companies to store and distribute essential information to relevant parties efficiently. It also improves communication, accessibility, and searchability.
In this article, you’ll learn how:
- Transcribing conference calls can provide many benefits to businesses, including easier access to information, improved marketing opportunities, better accessibility, effective documentation, and legal compliance.
- When choosing a conference call transcription service, it’s important to consider accuracy, affordability, flexibility, security, and the option to outsource or transcribe in-house.
- Ditto Transcripts is America’s most trusted transcription service provider, offering high-quality, affordable, and accurate transcriptions for businesses of all sizes.
Benefits of Conference Call Transcription for Businesses
There are several advantages to having conference call transcripts done for you.
However, the benefits of transcribing conference calls can be diminished or completely erased if the company chooses the wrong transcription service provider.
Take the $140 million verdict against Thomas Hospital. In this real-world example, the hospital sought transcription services but hired a foreign transcription company based in India. Later, the same company transcribed discharge notes requesting 80 units of insulin instead of 8 units, and ultimately led to the patient’s death.
Thomas Hospital was held accountable and was obliged to pay $140 million to the patient’s family. If the hospital had hired a medico-legal transcription service from a trusted company like Ditto, the incident would have been 100% preventable.
Improve Information Access with Call Transcripts
Conference calls are the perfect avenue for brainstorming ideas, training sessions, and meeting with clients and upper management. These calls can last an hour or more, and referring back to the audio recordings to find specific information can be a time-consuming process.
With an outsourced professional transcription service producing call transcripts, you can easily find any part of the conversation, like meeting notes, action items, and tasks. Transcribed calls can be easily filtered using search functions and keywords, provided they are done through accurate transcription. Similar to the use cases in the legal field, verbatim transcription is beneficial in capturing all the statements, including the pauses and stutters, made in an audio recording.
This saves time and ensures you don’t miss any essential items or tasks needing your attention. It also enables the rapid dissemination of information to everyone, not just during business calls, but to customers and upper management alike.
Use Call Transcripts to Boost Marketing and SEO
A conference call transcript can boost your company’s marketing efforts. For example, if you interview a thought leader and record the conversation, your marketing team can quickly create content based on the dialogue using a call transcript. Having a written document makes it easier to pull direct quotes and identify the most important information shared.
Additionally, search engines can’t accurately crawl any audio file or video content. In some cases, transcripts can significantly enhance your SEO efforts and boost your rankings, increasing the chances of your target customers seeing your website first when they search online for your products or services.
Transcripts used in marketing material are also evident in the case of This American Life (TAL), a public radio program and podcast. It began transcribing its entire audio archive into transcripts to be featured on its website. The idea was to increase traffic, improve user engagement, make its content more accessible to individuals with hearing disabilities, and facilitate easier referencing. The results were remarkable, boosting SEO and leading to increased visibility and engagement.
Conference Call Transcripts for Accessibility and Inclusion
Keeping call transcripts ensures that team members who are hearing impaired can still participate in meetings and contribute to the decision-making process.
Some people learn better by reading than listening, and having conference call transcriptions shows that your company caters to different learning styles, which can significantly impact employee engagement, satisfaction, and productivity.
Transcribing business and conference calls, as well as Zoom meetings, ensures everyone is on the same page. This applies especially to employees who could not attend the meeting or might have missed parts of the call due to choppy reception.
Improve Business Documentation with Conference Call Transcripts
Conference call transcripts help your company develop a more efficient documentation and archiving system. Written versions of your business conference calls serve as a reliable future reference for compliance officers, upper management, and consultants who might want to revisit important meetings during a year-end review or board meeting.
Transcripts also allow business professionals to review how they did on their calls to identify their strengths and weaknesses better and improve their public speaking abilities.
Another good thing about transcription files is that they are usually much smaller than video files, so uploading them to a cloud server or your company’s servers will take up way less space.
Ensure Legal Compliance with Call Transcriptions
Depending on the scope, requirement, and company type, conference call recordings and transcripts may need to be kept available for private and public use, which may tie back to appropriate legal protection. One particular example of this is earnings conference calls for registered or publicly traded companies.
A company may be legally required to provide transcripts to ensure transparency and accountability, to assist investors in their decision-making process. That’s why most earnings call transcripts are available for anyone to download. Depending on the jurisdiction, failure to provide such transcripts can lead to heavy fines or dissuade investors.
How to Choose the Right Conference Call Transcription Provider
When evaluating a transcription service, look for a company that offers high-quality and accurate transcriptions. Acceptable accuracy rates range from 85% to 95%.
Meanwhile, exceptional providers, like Ditto Transcripts, offer more than 99%. These are the companies that you want to work with.
Although there are many transcription companies to choose from, not all have the headcount to provide a high accuracy rate. Some claim that their accuracy rate is as high as 99%, but their service says otherwise. Additionally, these transcription companies, unlike Ditto, do not have certifications that ensure data privacy.
When choosing a transcription services provider, client testimonials are also a great indicator. Here’s what our clients say about us:
At Ditto, our commitment goes beyond just delivering your transcript on time. Our team is available to assist with any edits you may need. And in the rare event that we don’t meet your expectations, we offer a money-back guarantee.
Affordable Conference Call Transcription Services
Today, don’t expect anything free. That said, transcribing your conference calls and business meetings shouldn’t cost your company a small mortgage.
Accurate and efficient transcription companies can offer balanced costs and multiple price options to better fit your budget requirements. Ditto Transcripts, for example, offers business transcription for as low as $1.50 per audio minute. Our legal transcription pricing is transparent, allowing you to estimate the cost using our easy-to-use calculator.
Flexible Transcription Services with Expanded Features
Just because you hired a transcription company for conference calls doesn’t mean they can’t offer other services.
The best and most effective service providers offer expanded services and support different audio file types (as different recording devices have different file outputs), sending finished transcripts in specific file formats, adding speaker labels and time stamps, and the ability to scale up and down depending on your requirements.
Data Security and Confidentiality in Conference Call Transcription
Not all conference calls are for public consumption. Any sensitive information discussed in business recordings must be protected by top-of-the-line security measures to minimize the chance of data breaches.
So, if you’re willing to invest in security, shouldn’t you expect the same commitment from your transcription provider?
With Ditto Transcripts, all your information is kept safe using state-of-the-art security protocols, including:
- Detailed Reporting and Tracking Features
- Individually Defined User Access Levels
- Individual User Names, Passwords, and PINs (immediate deactivation upon request)
- Scaled Network Redundancy
- Virtual Private Network (VPN) Integration
- Dedicated Data Centers
- SSL 256-bit Encryption
- Employee Background Checks
In-house vs. Outsourced Transcription: Which Is Better for Business?
Conference calls are an effective way to circulate information among relevant people and organizations efficiently. There are generally two accepted ways to transcribe your audio or video recordings: in-house or outsourced.
In-house transcription, however, can be time-consuming and costly. Let’s break down the expenses using accepted costs.
- Finding and hiring transcriptionists: up to $4,000
- Providing salaries and benefits: $60,000 plus approximately 30% (or $18,000)
- Necessary transcription equipment: $2,000 each, depending on quality
Take note that these values represent each professional transcriber you hire. Hiring an in-house transcription team to transcribe conference calls can easily rack up more than $100,000 annually and cut out a hefty chunk off your bottom line.
On the other hand, outsourcing to a conference transcription solution provider allows you to avoid all that hassle and save on operational costs. They take care of hiring, training, retaining, and providing equipment. You only need to send them the audio files, and they’ll transcribe them.
Outsourced transcription can also help with further resource management; you no longer need to provide additional office space for your in-house staff, significantly reducing overhead costs.
In hindsight, here’s how in-house transcription compares with Ditto Transcripts.
| Cost Component | In-House Transcription | Ditto Transcripts (Outsourced) |
| Hiring Transcriptionists | Up to $4,000 per hire | No hiring costs |
| Salaries & Benefits | $60,000 + 30% (~$18,000) per transcriber | None |
| Equipment Costs | ~$2,000 per transcriber | Covered by the provider |
| Training & Retention | Ongoing internal burden | Fully managed by the provider |
| Total Estimated Annual Cost | $100,000+ per transcriber | Pay-per-project or per-minute pricing (Standard pricing is $1.50) |
| Time Investment | High | Minimal – just upload and receive transcripts |
Manual vs. Automated Transcription: Pros and Cons for Conference Calls
Automated call transcription software is all the rage, especially with how artificial intelligence is implemented in every part of our lives. It has real-time transcription features and uses speech recognition to transcribe business calls or video recordings.
That’s why many business communication officers are looking into AI-powered providers. However, automated call transcription benefits may be outweighed by their inherent weaknesses.
For example, the automated transcription process is inaccurate. Inaccuracy is the tradeoff for its speed. AI has only been known to reach 61.92% accuracy, and given that business video or telephone calls last for hours, you are potentially looking at a significant number of errors.
Automatic transcription also produces an unedited stream of text, which may be suitable for some instances, but is definitely not suitable for transcribing your business meetings and calls.
Conversely, manual transcription, i.e., having a human transcriber perform the transcription for you, has a significantly higher accuracy rate, reaching up to the high 90s. Ditto Transcripts is such a provider; we have 100% U.S.-based human transcribers that handle conference call recordings and all manner of business audio transcription, and our process guarantees more than 99% accuracy all the time.
So, don’t settle for AI transcription tools or other conference call transcription software and risk losing face in front of your investors. Ditto’s human transcription offers businesses the best, most accurate, and most affordable solution.
In summary, this is how automated transcription compares to Ditto Transcripts.
| Feature | Automated Transcription | Ditto Transcripts |
| Accuracy | 61.92% accuracy | Guaranteed 99% accuracy |
| Certification and Compliance | Usually None | CJIS, HIPAA, and FINRA |
| Turnaround Time | Real-time or within a short amount of time | As early as 4 hours |
| Cost | As low as ~$0.10-$0.25/min | $1.50-$5.00/min |
| Usability | Output is generally inaccurate. It mislabels multiple speakers and does not transcribe (skips) messy audio. | Output is appropriately labeled and formatted. It accurately captures all the statements from different speakers despite the audio quality. |
End-to-End Business Transcription Solutions with Ditto
Get the benefits of conference call transcription without the hassle and downsides. Ditto offers industry-leading security measures, affordable pricing, top-notch customer service, and accuracy rates other providers can only dream of.
You don’t need to worry about accuracy, even if your meeting is heavy on jargon and industry-specific terminology. We cover a wide range of industries—and we’re experts in all of them.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA-compliant and CJIS-compliant Denver, Colorado-based transcription services company that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcripts for individuals and companies of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote.