Everything must be efficient in today’s hustle-and-bustle, data-centric business culture. Practically every call — with a customer, client or even a colleague — can teach you something. But in an age of recording such conversations does it make sense to manually type up your transcription?
In most cases, the answer is a resounding “no”. Here’s why manual standard call transcription services could be wasting your precious time and what you should be considering instead.
Manual Transcription Is Incredibly Time-Consuming
Let’s be real: Type out every word while listening to a 30-minute phone call, and you can easily spend two to three times longer than you spent talking. Multiply that over dozens of calls, and you can kiss a lot of productivity goodbye. No industry in the fast lane has time for hours of something that automation can do in minutes.
Prone to Human Error
Even seasoned transcriptionists could mishear words, or skip phrases, or misidentify speakers — especially in noisy calls, or ones with a lot of fast-talking. This would threaten the accuracy of the transcript, resulting in miscommunication and possibly poor decisions.
It Doesn’t Scale
Have a small team? Scaling manual transcription as your business expands would then be a struggle. As you take more calls, it becomes less and less feasible to transcribe calls manually. It simply doesn’t work as a long-term solution for growing businesses or as a tool for customer support operations.
AI-Enhanced Transcription Tools Are Faster and Smarter
Today, AI transcription software can transcribe calls incrementally in real-time or just after the call, with speaker identification across multiple parties, time-stamping and even sentiment analysis. They’re quick, not too expensive, and getting much better—especially for business-quality audio.
Cost Inefficiency
It’s expensive to pay a human to transcribe hours of phone calls. Even if you or someone on your staff does it internally, the opportunity cost of that time is dear. With AI, you pay a fraction of the price for quicker, scalable, editable transcripts.
When You’d Want to Manually Transcribe
And there can be good reasons to defend manual transcription in some situations—legal recordings, or sensitive client interviews, or research calls where the nuance and context are crucial. But for the majority of business calls, automated solutions more than do the trick.
Conclusion :
Manual call transcription isn’t the gold standard any more – it’s the fallback. With the emergence of dependable AI-based transcription tools, companies can record the conversations they need at an increasingly faster and accurate rate, and for less money. If you’re still manually transcribing calls, it’s time to reconsider your plan of attack.
Make the smart move. Automate your call transcriptions and concentrate on what’s most important – your customers, your traction, and your time.
