A call transcription is a crucial tool business leaders and salespeople can use to gain behind-the-scenes insights into their customers and the buyer journey. Through transcriptions, companies convert valuable verbal data into searchable text.
With a phone call transcription service, it’s even possible to track trends and patterns in customer service and sales discussions, which can help with business decision making.
What is a Call Transcription?
Call transcription, or a phone call transcription, is the art of converting voice or video audio tracks into written words. These calls can then be stored as plain-text files, providing valuable data for everything from customer sales scripts to employee training strategies.
Call transcription can either be done live, during the call, to help employees track the words customers are saying in the moment, or post-call. In a post-call transcription, the audio file is converted after the discussion has ended.
Why Do Companies use Phone Call Transcription?
Call transcription can be a powerful tool for businesses for a range of reasons. Text has far more advanced analysis and search features than audio. This makes a text-based history of conversations essential for training, business decision making, and even legal compliance.
Logging the words spoken in a call can help businesses to identify business problems algorithmically, and come up with common solutions to problems. Other benefits of a call transcription service include:
Greater clarity in conversations: Real-time transcription services, or speech-to-text closed captioning allow users to see what a customer is saying written down. This can help support employees who are hard of hearing, struggling to understand a caller, or new to a language.
Improved analysis: With call transcriptions, it’s easy to track trends in customer conversations, analyze common topics of conversation, and even identify problem areas which occur for a number of customers in a group. This can help companies to make better decisions about how to sell products and offer service.
Compliance: Many companies are required to keep audible logs of their phone and video calls for compliance and security purposes. Transcribing calls makes it easier to argue for your business in a situation where a customer tries to take legal action against you.
Training purposes: The transcriptions you can create can be shared among reps, through your onboarding process, and in other training tools. This makes it easier to teach employees how to deal with common customer objections and issues.
Information access: It’s easier to search through text files and documents for critical information when you need to follow up on an issue. If you need to confirm a date when you agreed to call a customer back, for instance, you can use the search functions to quickly scan through text, without having to listen to an entire call.
Using Call Transcription in Business
Call transcription is a common and crucial tool for many business operations. You can use call transcriptions for legal purposes, to stay compliant with the latest industry regulations, and to help you make better decisions about the future of your business.
To leverage call transcription, companies usually access a call transcription service or tool. Call transcription services are often managed by human beings, who listen to recordings and convert them into text for you. These agencies can also use natural language understanding and NLP products to convert content into text while keeping information private.
The tools available for call transcription ensure you can create all of your text files on your own. The best call transcription service will leverage the latest natural language processing technology and AI to recognize all forms of content, conversational tone, and even accents in calls.
How to Do Call Transcription
There are various ways to invest in phone call transcription capabilities.
There are services for capturing information and converting it into closed-caption text in real-time. There are also simple tools you can embed into your contact centre or sales technology for converting calls when a conversation has ended.
The most common methods of call transcription include:
Human translation, which involves using a human being to transcribe and even translate texts for you as accurately as possible. Though this does have some privacy and efficiency issues.
Real-time transcription, which involves using an NLP application to automatically transcribe calls into text in real-time, during an audio or video conversation.
Post-call transcription, which uses an application to convert all of your audio files from videos and phone calls into text after the call.
Do You Need a Call Transcription Service?
Whether you’re trying to improve your training strategy, improve your business compliance, or simply invest in deeper insights into your customers, a call transcription solution can be a valuable addition to your toolkit. Most companies will benefit from having at least some form of call transcription technology available to their team.
