Fantastic
Case Studies
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Internationally known Business School uses transcribed
interviews
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Leading Business Magazine uses transcribed interviews
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Prominent Research Organization uses teleconference
transcripts
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Public TV Producer posts transcripts on the Web
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Nationally known Think Tank sells conference
transcripts
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Fantastic Transcript's own Case Study
Internationally Known Business School Saves Time
and Money
An internationally known business school uses the case study method to teach
its classes. The case study method involves going out and talking with as
many people as possible within a company to find out its problems and from
that information to propose solutions. These interviews are taped on location
and transcripts are used to extract important information to help identify
the problems as well as to extract exact quotes to be used in a final report.
Without Fantastic Transcripts, research assistants would have to listen to
tens of hours of interviews, taking notes and transcribing key portions of
the interviews, a task requiring a hundred or more hours per case study to
perform.
To save time and money, the faculty of the business school sends its taped
interviews to Fantastic Transcripts to transcribe.
The school requires both accuracy and an understanding of the material, which
Fantastic Transcripts provides. With verbatim transcripts in hand, the professors
and their research assistants are able to quickly skim through hours of material,
and they can quickly identify key areas to concentrate their case studies.
Some case studies have been assembled in as little as a weekend thanks to
the fast, accurate transcripts that Fantastic Transcripts provides.
Leading Business Magazine Doubles Productivity of
its Writers
A leading business magazine was growing so fast that the number of stories
it needed was outstripping the ability of its reporters to write them fast
enough.
The magazine discovered that its reporters could save 20 hours or more per
story, translating to half a week's pay and making them more productive,
if they had someone else transcribe their interviews.
The business magazine decided to send its reporters' tapes to Fantastic
Transcripts to transcribe. The reporters are then able to go off to their
next assignment, and while working on their new story, they receive the
transcripts for their previous assignment so they can write their articles.
In this way, reporters can be more efficient, quite often being able to do
twice as many stories they would have written normally. To save time and
generate even more material, the magazine often runs edited transcripts of
interviews as articles, and lets the interviewees speak for themselves.
The magazine can do this because of the accuracy of the transcripts it receives
from Fantastic Transcripts.
Originally, the magazine was using another transcription company, but it
couldn't trust the accuracy of the transcripts and the reporters had
to waste time making corrections. The transcription company also couldn't
handle the volume of work the magazine was producing.
With Fantastic Transcripts handling its transcription, the magazine can use
its staff twice as efficiently as before, and its reporters can concentrate
on the creative aspects of interviewing and writing rather than the uncreative
task of transcription.
Prominent Research Organization Archives
Calls
A leading national research company uses Fantastic Transcripts to transcribe
its weekly teleconferences presenting its research findings to clients.
The transcripts are made available to those clients who could not listen
to the live teleconference, and they are also used in-house as an archive
of the research provided in the calls.
Previously, the company received its transcripts from its teleconferencing
vendor, for which the company was being charged $400 per hour of audio. The
research company was happy with the quality, but not with the cost.
The research company decided to call around for pricing and found out it
was being greatly overcharged. When the company contacted us, it discovered
that we were in fact doing its transcription for its teleconferencing vendor
for half the amount of money the vendor was charging them.
The research company decided to use Fantastic Transcripts directly to reduce
its costs. An added benefit was that since we were no longer providing
our service through a middleman vendor, we could do the calls more quickly
by recording the calls ourselves rather than waiting for
the teleconferencing company to generate a copy and send it to
us, which was either hours later or the next day.
By using Fantastic Transcripts, the research company reduced its transcription
cost by half, but maintained the same quality it had received in the past.
Public TV Producer Posts Video Transcripts on the
Web
A nationally recognized public TV production house uses Fantastic Transcripts
to transcribe the audio of its video productions so that transcripts of its
shows can be posted on the Web.
Posting transcripts of TV shows is a low-cost way of bringing the programs
to the Internet. Transmitting the actual videos over the Web would require
a thousand more times bandwidth, which would translate into higher Web hosting
costs for the company.
Transcripts of shows also allows visitors to access information faster. Text
can be searched far more quickly than having to watch entire shows for their
content.
Also, having the transcripts of the shows available on its Website doesn't
detract from the organization's sales of VHS copies of the shows to consumers.
Instead the transcripts act as a preview to interest people to buy the videos,
because they know what the material the shows cover before they buy them.
Nationally Known Think Tank Reaches International
Audience
A nationally recognized think tank uses Fantastic Transcripts to transcribe
its conferences and lectures as well as encode the audio for streaming over
the Internet to reach a worldwide audience.
The organization has a large worldwide following, however, only a fraction
of its members can attend its very interesting and informative seminars held
monthly in Northern California. To get its content out to the widest number
of people, the organization posts its typed transcripts and encoded Real
Audio files to its Website to reach its far-flung members as well as to interest
new people in supporting its activities.
The transcripts are also available for sale to help pay for the transcription,
as are audio tapes of the events.
Having Fantastic Transcripts do the transcripts and the encoding allows the
busy organization to concentrate on coordinating its own informational programs
and saves it time from having to do the transcripts and encoding itself.
Fantastic Transcript's Own Case Study
Fantastic Transcripts was founded as a way for businesses and institutions
to receive top-notch transcription services.
The founders recognized years ago that when companies needed material
transcribed, the only transcription services available specialized in medical
and legal terms, and not in the language of modern-day business.
As a result, many businesses discovered that the transcripts they received
from medical or legal transcriptionists were mangled or incomprehensible,
because the typists were not familiar with the names of products, companies
and industry leaders that were being mentioned.
They typed what they thought they heard, or simply left out the terms they
had never heard of before. This made for a lot of useless transcripts and
gave businesses a negative impression of the transcription field.
Fantastic Transcripts was established to specifically to provide business
and high-tech firms transcription services. Because it specializes in these
areas, it maintains its own in-house dictionary of terms and lists of industry
players so it can train its transcriptionists in business-speak.
Additionally, Fantastic Transcripts saw that typical transcription companies
had very little quality control over its product. Traditionally, tapes would
be assigned to various transcriptionists and the transcripts would be sent
back to clients without any checking or supervision. A typist could be typing
complete nonsense, but as long as it passed spellcheck, the company would
not know anything was wrong until clients complained.
Also some transcriptionists were better at their jobs than others. Without
any quality control, a company would get an excellent transcript some of
the time, and mediocre or poor transcripts at other times, depending upon
who typed them.
Fantastic Transcripts instituted a proofreading system where, after a transcript
is typed, it's then read over by professional proofreaders and other
transcriptionists with proofreading experience who listen to the audio a
second time and correct any words or phrases missed or garbled during the
first pass. Supervisors then look over the corrected transcripts in a final
pass to do spot checks before the transcripts are sent to clients, which
assures a high level of accuracy.
Fantastic Transcripts' own quality studies indicates that our proofreaders
catch up to 90% of the inaccuracies that creep in during transcription, which
results in near-perfect transcripts with broadcast-quality audio.
The difference in quality with hard-to-hear material is even more striking.
With poor audio, other transcription companies may only get 50%
of the material while Fantastic Transcripts can get 90% to 95% of the material
with a second proofreading pass. and as much as 94% to 98% with a third pass,
if the client authorizes it.
Additionally, Fantastic Transcripts has chosen to remain flexible and provide
services that its clients request. Unlike other transcription companies which
will only do certain kinds of transcription, we bring our quality controlled
transcripts to all fields, including legal and medical.
We have also branched out to include what use to be called electronic
transcription, where we digitize and encode audio for playback via the Internet,
and provide multimedia accessibility for the disabled where video and audio
is captioned for the deaf or described for the blind.
Our company continues to explore other complementary areas that we can branch
out into. We're keeping a close watch on such fields as closed captioning
and descriptive captioning as companies become more aware of Americans with
disabilities. We're also expanding into such areas as Internet broadcasting,
which complements our electronic transcription activities.
As the transcription field expands and evolves, Fantastic Transcripts stands
ready to offer our clients whatever transcription related services they require.
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