Transcription

In light of a recent report concerning security issues involving on-demand transcriptions provider Rev and their handling of customer data, secure transcriptions provider Civicom™ TranscriptionWing weighs in on the importance of the implementation of stringent security measures in multiple components and stages of the transcription process.

In an article published last week, OneZero reports that information from clients who request transcriptions from transcription service Rev are stored in a database accessible to tens of thousands of Rev transcribers. This database allegedly displays full names and business titles of customers and any Rev transcriber can listen to an audio or video file while it is unclaimed.

TranscriptionWing, Civicom’s transcribing unit, is a leading provider of accurate and secure transcriptions. In contrast to Rev’s practices, TranscriptionWing utilizes a proprietary transcription manager where transcripts and audio files can only be accessed by transcriptionists to whom they are assigned – a measure put in place to eliminate the risk of client data breach.

TranscriptionWing has successfully thrived as a trusted transcriptions provider over the years because we have always actively sought improvements in ensuring the security and confidentiality of client information that we process.

Anonymized recordings and transcripts are processed by a thoroughly vetted group of transcriptionists and editors who are required to sign confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements. Transcribers are provided with secure, encrypted laptops with restricted access to non-essential applications offline and online.

Completed transcripts are deleted from the transcriber access tool once a project has been finished and sent to the client via encrypted mail. Additionally, when transcripts and audio files are deleted, they are securely purged to remove artifacts as well as the possibility of recovery from the TranscriptionWing database. More information on TranscriptionWing’s retention policy can be found here.

Earlier this year, TranscriptionWing was confirmed compliant by an external auditor with the federally mandated standards of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and continues to be GDPR compliant.

“We have successfully thrived as a trusted transcriptions provider over the years because we have always actively sought improvements in ensuring the security and confidentiality of client information that we process,” said Francis Bilowan, Managing Editor of TranscriptionWing. “We have security and confidentiality measures in place to ensure our compliance to various regulations that formalizes our utmost regard for the privacy and security of our clients’ information.”

TranscriptionWing continues to remain vigilant in keeping its security standards up-to-date through continuous review and audit of internal processes and controls, with the aid of external consultants and specialized staff dedicated to safeguarding data.

For more information on TranscriptionWing’s privacy policy, click here.

About TranscriptionWing™

TranscriptionWing continues to deliver affordable and accurate transcriptions to all industry sectors, including market research, technology, finance, healthcare, as well as to legal, educational, and religious institutions. TranscriptionWing™ also specializes provides accurate transcriptions of conference calls in every sector, including earnings calls. Flexible turnaround options range from four hours to five days at rates that are as low as $1.29 per recorded minute. TranscriptionWing solutions also include automated voice-to-text transcription clean-up as well as InSummary, a meeting minutes summary service.

TranscriptionWing is a service of Civicom Inc., a global leader in proprietary audio conferencing technology, online meeting software, web technology tools, and superior recording capabilities. For more information, call +1-203-413-2414 or visit https://www.transcriptionwing.com.

Contact:
Jam Eleazar
TranscriptionWing™
jam@transcriptionwing.com

Meetings may be the bane of your professional existence, but it is vital to achieving success for any company or organization. Meetings are done to bring people together, share ideas, and decide where to go next. You’ll be able to brainstorm, form strategic plans for the company, and get everyone in the same direction. With such important points being made, there needs to be an accurate record of it all. To do so, it is essential to write down meeting minutes for distribution to all participants and key stakeholders. Some might see meeting minutes as inessential and won’t be of any use later on but it’s actually far from the truth.  

Fortunately, there are now meeting minutes services that can help you effectively summarize the crucial points of your meetings.

Here are the 6 reasons why meeting minutes are important:

• It becomes your guide

By taking note of the meeting, you and your team can keep tabs of the commitments and when they are due. The meeting minutes could serve as a map where all the plans are laid out in front of you, and you’ll have a guide as you accomplish each and every action item. 

• It serves as a reminder

With so many things going on at once, forgetting a thing or two is unavoidable, but the team can depend on the minutes to check on their progress. Are they on target? Is there anything missing? What else is left to do? You won’t overlook any task as long as you have a precise document that can help you remember anything and everything.

• It will serve as a reference for members who weren’t present during the meeting

Conflicts in schedule or emergencies may happen and some individuals won’t make it to the meeting. By creating meeting summaries, everyone who missed the meeting can be updated on what happened and be informed on what they missed. Hence, no one is left hanging and every person is on the same page on what are the goals of the company and how to reach them. 

• It is time-saving

With every teammate knowing their own responsibilities, whether or not they were in the meeting, the whole team can fully focus on their designated duties and not have to meet and use up precious hours just to discuss the same thing again. 

• It may serve as your corporate defense

Companies who strive to reach new heights in their industry would inevitably face litigation along the way. At these times, solid evidence would be needed for their defense. Meeting minutes can serve that purpose because the facts of the meeting are included there: who were there when it took place, how members decided on certain actions, et cetera. This can prove the company’s true intentions and get them off the hook. 

It may seem like a mere document and you may even encounter difficulties when writing meeting minutes but summarizing your meeting gives the whole team a guide that would drive them to act in order to fulfill a common goal. It’s seemingly mundane but the truth is, it provides great benefit in the long run. 

Meeting minutes, to put it simply, are written records of a meeting that can serve as an official document of a company or an organization. Meeting minutes primarily consist of the highlights of the meeting, starting from the attendees to the agenda, to the decisions established by the team, the next steps to act upon, and more. Although it may seem simple and straightforward, creating meeting minutes is time-consuming, takes precision, and utmost concentration. Traditionally, meeting minutes are created by professional note-takers who write or type in shorthand while the meeting goes on. These note-takers would then convert their notes into more detailed minutes. 

Fortunately, conference calling technology has enabled organizations to conveniently record and archive conference calls for documentation and distribution. Most conference call services offer Record and Replay features — now executives and key stakeholders of a meeting can simply get on the phone and record their teleconference. With a recorded conference call, you can send it to people that could not attend to keep them in the loop or keep it as a reliable reference tool in case of any uncertainties. Best of all, a recording is undoubtedly easier to review than hurried notes so creating meeting minutes is easier than ever. 

So how can recording conference calls help you create better meeting minutes?

Attention is on the meeting – not notetaking.

Recording your conference call will give all the attendees leeway to pay full attention to the discussion. Since team members will not have to jot down notes for the minutes as the meeting progresses, their attention will be directed solely to the meeting. This will result in a more engaging and productive discussion, where every item on the agenda is tackled, every concern is brought forward, and every opinion and suggestion is voiced out. In return, your meeting minutes will be more thorough and will have more meaningful content. 

The meeting minutes will have accurate details.

If the meeting was recorded, you will be able to gather more accurate details as you create the meeting minutes. You can also use it to recall certain parts that you feel you might have missed in the discussion. 

This is important in the meeting minutes since any discrepancy can affect the whole company. With a conference call recording, every suggestion, decision, concern, and update is crystal clear. 

Save time by getting help from a transcription service.

For a smoother approach, you can also opt for a reliable transcription service to help you. Instead of letting a team member write the minutes of the meeting, send your conference call recording to a transcription service that can provide well-written meeting minutes. 

TranscriptionWing’s InSummary meeting minutes service can help you get the most out of your recorded meetings. TranscriptionWing’s professional editors use the audio or video recordings of your conference calls to create notes that summarize your meeting content. We can also apply customizable templates, such as logos, fonts, or document formatting according to your preference. 

TranscriptionWing is an all-human transcription service, you can expect that your meeting minutes will be professionally-written and checked by our expertly trained transcriptionists and editors, with none of the errors that you would usually get with an automated (AI) transcription. 

Start recording your conference calls now and see the improvement in the creation of your meeting minutes! 

A problem that has long bugged many companies’ heads and C-level executives is how to make earnings calls – that is, calls discussing a certain company’s financial results and performance during a given period of time such as a quarter or fiscal year – more accessible not only to the investors, businessmen, business journalist, and other such people with more than passing knowledge of the business world and an understanding of the ins and outs of the trade, but also to the general public itself, who frankly couldn’t care less about whether Company A earned so and so this year while Company B lost this amount of money in only a quarter.

There have been many solutions proposed for this problem, and many of these solutions do work, mainly because they were created by people who know what they’re doing.

Here are some of the solutions that industry experts – or rather, people with at least an ounce of common sense – recommend doing so that your earnings calls are more accessible to the public:

Making earnings calls an online session

This item on this list might seem like an unnecessary one; after all, isn’t it the case that every company in the world does earnings calls this way in this day and age with the Internet being as popular as it is – via online sessions and not phone calls?

If you thought yes to the question above, you thought wrong. Sure, companies who use phone calls exclusively for their earnings calls are the exception, not the norm, today. These companies may use phone calls for their earnings calls exclusively for the most mundane and practical reasons (saving cost by not having to invest in the many tools and gadgets needed, not to mention the applications and the subscriptions and the like) to the somewhat unusual ones (the bosses don’t trust the Internet and are afraid that conducting earnings calls via the Internet lets other people unrelated to the company in any way listen to the information they share in these calls).

Some of these reasons may be justified in the case of certain companies, and some may not be. After all, there is indeed a cost related to procuring equipment and the like for Internet-conducted earnings calls, and there is always the risk inherent in using the Internet that your data is sent somewhere you may not want it to be sent to. The point here, though, is that there is no need to stay away completely from conducting earnings calls online, for there are many advantages to having these be conducted online, or at least for having an online option to listen to these earnings calls, foremost among these being the fact that the more ways for people to join earnings calls, and not be limited by the method of doing so, the better. Also, earnings calls conducted via the Internet often have clearer audio as compared to an earnings call conducted via a phone line, although this may vary from place to place.

Making an archive of some sort for earnings calls

Another seemingly basic and cookie-cutter thing that some companies, for no inexplicable reason, fail to do is to make available to the public some sort of archive of all of their past earnings calls, or at least those relevant for a certain period of time. This archive can be a downloadable archive file format such as a .zip or .rar containing all of the earnings calls for a given quarter or year made available on the company website, or a podcast posted on the company website or in podcast-sharing sites with the proper password protections and somesuch in place to limit who has access to the calls, or even something like transcripts that are easily searchable (more on this later). What’s important is that there is some sort of an archive so that people who don’t have the time or the patience to join an earnings call live can refer to that archive so that they can hear all the details mentioned in the call and thus have the relevant information for themselves. An archive would also be useful to those who indeed joined the earnings call because now they can double-check the contents of the earnings call themselves so that they do not get wrong information.

Having earnings calls transcribed

This item actually falls into the second item on this list, but this is the easiest way – the basics of the basics, if you will – to have your earnings calls be more accessible to the public, and thus it warrants its own entry. Having your earnings calls transcribed – that is, rendering in a written format all that was said in an earnings call – is a surefire way to increase accessibility of earnings calls.

The first reason why transcripts are important for earnings calls is searchability. Unlike audio, transcripts are easily searchable. One only has to know the right terms to search for, type that term in in the search bar of whatever word processor, and there it will appear. Or if so inclined, one could also do speed reading and simply skim through the whole thing in search of whatever it is that they’re looking for.

Transcripts also show up faster on search engines than audio do. As of right now, there is no extremely reliable way for search engines such as Google or Yahoo! or Bing to look for certain bits of information in an audio file such as an .mp3 that was posted somewhere. These search engines, however, excel in finding bits and odds of text, sometimes even from websites completely unrelated to a given topic.

Transcripts are also easier on a person’s schedule. Anyone who has ever done or has listened to earnings call for at least one time knows that they take long, sometimes inordinately and inexplicably so. It often takes hours just for one earnings call to finish, time that can be better spent elsewhere. Transcripts provide a great way of shortening the time needed to process the information from these earnings calls by leaps and bounds by converting hours-long audio into a document that can be skimmed through in a matter of minutes. Now, instead of having to skip back and forth through the audio hoping to locate that one crucial bit of information, one only has to have a quick look through the document to find that one missing piece.

Following the above list is one step towards making your earnings calls more accessible to the public. Make sure to follow the best practices in conducting earnings call sessions. The next step, of course, would be to make sure that you are doing the above things the right way, which means giving as many options as possible for people to join earnings calls, having the archive be easily accessible, and having a good transcription of earnings calls. After all, what sense does an earnings call transcript make when it isn’t even done properly when the numbers are skewed and the terms all wrong? Consider doing this step in the house, or if not possible, then getting a good transcription company that is able to provide you quality earnings call transcriptions at a reasonable rate.

Writing meeting minutes is generally an easy process – by which I mean there’s the general guidelines and whatnot of writing them, and one simply has to follow those – except when it is not because of some challenges that sometimes seem to come out without warning from the woodwork. 

Here are some of the most common challenges that can be found in writing meeting minutes:

1. Too much information is given by participants

Most conversations follow a straightforward and linear pattern: Person A talks and Person B listens, then Person B talks and Person B listens. Granted, this path can diverge from time to time, for maybe Person B may interject while Person A is talking and thus move the conversation towards another topic, or maybe Person A suddenly switches topics midpoint in his sentence so Person B has no choice but to follow along with it.

Put in one or two more people in the conversation, and the discussion becomes even more convoluted because now you have several people with different backgrounds and different ways of thinking all trying to one-up, if you will, the other participants in the conversation.

Meetings are the same as the latter situation, except even worse because now you have a veritable legion of people all raising different issues that they feel is important, all the while getting farther and farther away from the main points of the meeting. That is all well and good, but not when it derails the discussion and moves it away from the main topic. It becomes then a question for the minute taker of what to write down, given the fact that the issues being raised might be legitimate ones. Should he note them all down and hope for the best? Should he religiously expunge all discussions irrelevant to the main topic from the minutes? Or should he just give up and have someone else transcribe the whole meeting verbatim for him?

2. Participating in the call versus minute-taking

A unique quandary can face the minute taker, especially when he or she is also deeply involved in the subject matter – say it is his or her project, or he or she has a task that is closely related to the subject – and has more than passing knowledge of the many layers involved in it: should he focus on the minute-taking or put the pen down and the figurative pointer up?

There is no easy answer to this little challenge here, but there are indeed some workarounds to this. A simple and rather obvious one is to have someone else in the meeting – preferably someone in the same room as the minute taker is – take over minute-taking duties while the original one makes his or her presentation and does a little bit of contribution in the process. Another is to simply give the information to a trusted colleague so that colleagues could make the presentation on the minute taker’s behalf.

3. Having to take minutes of a meeting that is badly-chaired

The chair – also called the moderator or facilitator – of a meeting wields great power in his or her hands. That power is the power to steer the meeting towards a certain direction. And as a certain superhero says, with great power comes great responsibility. The great responsibility of a chair is making sure that the meeting tackles all the important points that must be tackled according to the agenda.

It is, however, rather easy to forget this responsibility as the chair.

That is why cooperation between the minute taker and the chair is extremely important in any meeting. The minute-taker must remind – and keep on reminding, if need be – the chair to do his job of chairing the whole thing, which means telling everybody to not talk over one another, not start side conversations in the background, have their speakerphones or whatever they’re using to dial in on mute whenever they don’t have anything to say to prevent unnecessary background noise, and otherwise stop doing all the things that can ruin an otherwise good meeting.

4. Running out of paper (or juice) and having nothing at hand to replace it

Different minutes takers use different tools to get the job done. Some go with the old-fashioned and time-tested method of minute taking with pen and paper, while others swear by the wonder of technology that is known as a laptop or mobile device and meeting minutes services such as InSummary. 

Whatever the tool used, whether digital or analog, there is always the risk of not having sufficient supply for the tool paper for analog, battery life for digital). Extra care must thus be taken to ensure that the minute taker is prepared for this kind of eventuality.