My Biggest Frustration

For years now I've been trying to find an affordable and easy to use transcription management platform, but to no avail.  This has been my biggest frustration.

I've tried scores of project management portals and softwares trying to fit them to my need.  However, all of them fail to satisfy me or make a good alternative to my simple Excel sheet.

True, there are these big enterprise level transcription management platforms and portals.  But these cost tens of thousands of dollars, money I could not afford at this stage.

Examples of What I Like

I am not alone.  Most transcription companies don't get it right either.  Like myself, they've cobbled together a number of solutions to accept files from clients and payments from clients via their website.  However, they simply miss the client self-service portal.

Transcription companies like Rev and TranscribeMe got everything right, in my humble opinion.  The problem is these are big companies backed by institutional investors pouring millions.  I, on the other hand, am bootstrapping my service.

Plug and Play Transcription Platform

Plug and play.  Yes, that's the key to making thousands of transcribers' lives easier.  I wish we have a platform like Blogger or WordPress for blogs where you can simply sign up and get a business-ready transcription website.

By business-ready transcription website, I mean a website for freelance transcribers with easy to build forms that allow uploading of media files, a simple project management tool and also invoice and payment capability, etc.   Simply stated, a CRM, project management and marketing platform built into one platform is what I've always wanted.

Such a platform will allow thousands of transcribers around the world to start their own freelance businesses and gain their freelance from employment.  It will allow married ladies to work from home while caring for their babies and families.  It will allow people like myself to bootstrap their businesses without investing a fortune.

How can you provide more value to a business?

Every b2b strives hard to provide value to customers. As a service provider to other businesses, my transcription business is on the quest to serve better and delivery value to our customers. So questions like, how can we improve our processes, how can we deliver more value to our customers, how can we provide more competitive service rates are some of the questions we ask ourselves on a daily basis. We know we deliver value and that's why our customers come to us again and again and use our services. But how do we improve our services to improve the value our customers get? Here's some of the areas we're working on constantly. We are reducing our response time. We notice that replying to a query or an email as soon as possible is valuable. It reminds your prospects and customers that you are responsive and care to be there for them. Improving the time lag between client order and us getting the projects under process. This is very important. We want to be able to get our customers' projects under process as soon as possible. We target 30 minutes. So within 45 minutes, we should be able to tell our customers that their projects are already under process and not left hanging in there or lined up in our line of production. We want to let them know we are working on their projects right away. What do you think? Are we in the right track?

Quick Tips to Record Interviews and Telephone Conversations for Transcription

Tips on how to record interviews for transcription from Carey Suante