Markham Williams

Their need

Dave Williams assists businesses to capture and leverage tacit (informal) knowledge to improve business processes. His work requires in-depth interviews with a range of business personnel.

Dave uses analytical software to identify common issues and themes, which requires a transcription of the recorded interviews. Each new topic in the interview needs an accurate time-stamp; roughly every 2 minutes in an hour long interview needs to be accounted for. Incorrect time-stamping causes the software to reject the transcription. The mistake would have to be identified, corrected and the transcription would need to be re-run through the software – a real time-wasting process.

Our solution

To meet a tight time-frame, Dave sought help from WritersInc. Working closely with Dave, WritersInc wrote a set of rules for the transcribers to adhere to and provided them with a template to standardise all transcriptions. We ran a quality check prior to sending transcriptions through to Dave.

To manage time and cost, we frequently entered the details into Dave’s spreadsheet (each time work was submitted) so he could see how the project was progressing.

Outcome

Thanks to the consistency in work (due to the rule-set we developed), all the transcriptions ran like clockwork through the analytical software – much to Dave’s relief.

We recently completed a project for Dave where we were the transcribers! We had to shorten transcriptions by paraphrasing what the speaker was saying; we had to capture the meaning in a short and succinct (but accurate!) way. Our transcribers were simultaneously listening, interpreting, typing and time capturing. We navigated challenges such as interviews running overtime, strong accents from interviewees and background noise to complete all 25 transcriptions within deadline.