7 Must-Know DO’s and DON’Ts of Audio Transcription

Unless you are a rapper, a public speaker, or an audiobook narrator, you speak at an average speed of four to five syllables per second.  

The speed of your speech may differ basis the kind of speaking you are doing - speaking to your friends, presenting important data in front of a client, etc. Unless you are Eminem, there’s a good chance that you speak approximately 100-130 words per minute.  

Now, 100-130 words per minute may not seem much, but imagine trying to take notes at the same speed. (We can see you shaking your head… and we agree)

Your fingers can only move so fast. It is humanly impossible to write and record at the speed of speech, or is it?

How often have you ended an important call with your team and hurried to draft the mail detailing the pointers discussed in the meeting, lest you forget it? There’s a good chance, you would still end up missing out on a couple of important pointers as it is very difficult to listen intently when the burden of MOM (minutes-of-the-minutes for the uninitiated) looms over you.

This is where audio transcription comes in to save the day for you.

What is Audio Transcription and how does it work?

Customer facing teams speak with hundreds of customers on any given day. Given the sheer number of calls, it is only natural for your staff to miss out on recording key information from their interactions with your customers. This is where transcription solution comes into play.  

Audio Transcription feature within CINNOX enables businesses to convert the spoken words into written text, that’s easy to read and share.  

Any business that’s operating a customer support desk is sitting on a goldmine of customer insights – waiting to be unearthed. Analysing these conversations between your staff and customers can provide you necessary insight into the ever-changing needs of the market, and help you gauge customers’ expectations from your business.  

Audio transcriptions help to read and understand the context of a call. It also helps businesses to find and log customer details and quickly resolve their issues.  

This is achieved through Natural Language Processing or NLP. NLP makes use of machine learning and deep learning to listen, understand, and transcribe human speech.

There are three ways to transcribe an audio recording to a text document within CINNOX:

• Call recordings

Every time your staff makes or receives a call on CINNOX, the call history is logged. All customer enquiry calls, inbound calls from prospective customers, and internal calls with other team members can be recorded and transcribed.

• Voice Notes

CINNOX captures and transcribes voice notes shared between team members for easy access and more productive interactions.

• Voicemails

It’s easy to skim through the transcriptions of the voicemails sent to your staff by customers for enquiries with CINNOX.

Benefits of Audio Transcription

• Easily Accessible Records of Conversations

It has never been easier to transcribe audio files of your conversation with customers or with other members of team than now. AI powered audio transcription feature in CINNOX empowers your teams to log all conversations in textual format. This enables you to know more about your customers, refer to key information and highlights, and even share records with other members internally. This data can be used by your teams to analyse the success of the interaction and improve customer’s journey by personalising their experience.

• Readily Available Scannable Information

While audio recordings have their own benefits, it becomes difficult to skim through each recording to find key data when the need arises. Your team members would thank you for making a powerful audio transcription solution available to them when they need to scour through the records to identify key data. This also gives you the flexibility to share important information efficiently. Furthermore, these transcribed files can be labelled by following a pre-set convention that could be used to structure these siloed data into sets that could prove fruitful in mining actionable customer insights.

• Repurposing Content for Wider Reach

Audio transcription is not just helpful for the customer support teams but can also prove beneficial for your marketing and corporate communications teams. Transcribed audio files can give your team the flexibility to publish them as blog posts and articles, eBook, whitepapers, and infographics etc. Search engines can easily crawl the entire transcribed textand index it, giving you leverage over your competitors to rank higher on the search results.

• Provides Flexibility in Sound-Sensitive Environment

It may not always be possible to access an audio or audio-visual file in certain situations. It is also cumbersome to listen to an entire recording to find specific data. Transcribed audio gives you the flexibility to peruse the content without having to worry about putting on a headphone or disturbing your colleagues sitting in proximity.

• Improves Workflow Efficiency

Audio transcription is essential to access insights into the needs of customers, as well as your staff. The information accumulated through transcription can be used to improve your team’s core performance.

1. Helps in tracking your customer’s inclination towards specific products and services
2. Easy to spot customer preference pattern by comparing overlapping keywords from all call logs put together
3. Easily determine product or service performance by conducting a sentiment analysis on the data pulled from the transcribed files
4. It could be argued that the best and the most important use of transcribed data is to train your staff to follow a desired process. A step-by-step process can be created and shared organisation-wide using the transcribed data from the best performing team members.  

• Featherweight Files Leads to Heavyweight Profits

We all know how messy and cumbersome saving multimedia files can be. By transcribing your audio and audio-video files to text format, you are not only making the documents easily accessible for future reference, but also saving your capital investment in server and data centres. This can be especially beneficial for some restricted businesses like the financial sector, as they are required to store conversational records for a few years in adherence to certain regulatory policies. It goes without saying that lower operational costs, afforded by reducing burden on server and data centres contributes towards business growth and profitability.

The DO’s and DON’T’s of Audio Transcription

It’s no rocket science that the quality of the transcript will be dependent on the quality of your audio file.

Here’s how you can generate good quality audio, which in turn ensures the quality of your transcription:

Is Audio Transcription for You?

There’s no hard-and fast rule of using audio transcription, but there’s no arguing the fact that transcription helps you save time in processing and disseminating key data. Some industries benefit more than others from using Audio Transcription feature.  

Audio Transcription feature in CINNOX can prove very handy to media outlets. Transcripts from interviews conducted by Journalists and Reporters usually form the first draft of news write-ups.  

Market research and consulting firms conduct multiple consumer surveys and studies every year. Transcribed data accumulated from these studies and surveys help in developing marketing strategies, creating buyer personas, and analyse market trends, etc.  

Call centres use transcripts from the inbound and outbound calls to understand customer pain-points and to study the effectiveness of their process.  

Businesses use audio transcription feature to transcribe important conference calls, webinars, events, interviews, training sessions etc. These transcripts are easily shareable and can serve as a repository of accumulated knowledge and resources.  

The possibilities of using audio transcription for your benefit are endless. How you leverage the power of Audio Transcription to enhance your team’s skills and improve your organisation’s productivity depends on your objective and creativity.