What is transcription software?

Call transcription software performs the speech-to-text transcription of your sales calls — live or prerecorded, audio or video files. Transcription can happen in real-time or after the call has ended.

Is it legal to transcribe calls?

The legality of transcribing calls depends on the call recording rules for your region or geography.

For instance, the states of California, Massachusetts, and Washington require all parties involved in a call to give consent for call recording and audio transcription. Similarly, the EU GDPR requires you to disclose that there will be a real-time transcription of the phone call or video meeting.

So, it’s good practice to disclose your intent to record and transcribe calls and get affirmative consent from the participants.

What are the benefits of transcription software?

Transcription software converts phone calls or video meetings into text automatically, which is crucial to optimize sales enablement, coaching, training, onboarding, and performance. Here are some of the key transcription software benefits:

1. Analyze sales calls backed by data
‍Sales managers and reps can review sales calls quickly to evaluate call quality and rep performance. Moreover, sales reps can use the transcripts to analyze their strengths and weaknesses and understand how to improve.

Modern sales call transcription software also comes equipped with features such as keyword-based search, conversation hints, and more to make call analysis faster and easier.

2. Enable effective sales coaching and training
Sales managers can use call transcripts and speech analytics to understand what went wrong and use these as learning moments to coach their reps. They can also review a rep’s performance, adherence to the call script, objection handling methods, and get context on the essential sales call metrics.

For example, if the call:listen ratio isn’t ideal, managers can quickly scan through the transcript to understand why and pick instances as a reference to provide more meaningful feedback.

Managers can also tag reps in comments for specific moments in the calls and offer thoughts or suggestions.

3. Simplify onboarding new sales reps
‍Call transcriptions are a quick and searchable way of helping new reps get the most out of call recordings.

Managers can build playlists of the best sales calls to give a near-on-field experience of sales calls. They can also use sales call recordings and transcripts to highlight the best sales practices, navigating tricky situations, and ways to enhance customer experience on call.

4. Support product and marketing
Sales calls are a goldmine for other teams too. For instance, product teams can understand customer concerns and pain points to craft better experiences. Meanwhile, marketing teams get an insight into the buyer’s mindset to get the messaging right.

A call transcription software captures these insights and helps other teams improve their performance and productivity.

5. Ensure compliance and avoid risks
When sales reps are on the verge of losing a deal, they might bend a few sales rules, promise something that you don’t deliver, and flout your company’s compliance standard. Such miscalculations can affect your reputation and also involve legal ramifications.

An intelligent call transcription software lets you scour through calls using keywords and phrases. This helps you track whether your team’s following the script and not offering fake promises or assurances that go against your rules.

What are the key features of call transcription software?

A solid call transcription software must be equipped with the following features:

1. Real-time call transcription with AI-driven speech recognition
Real-time call transcription with speech analytics is essential for live coaching during calls.

For instance, a live sales assistant can pull some helpful insights from your sales data to navigate tricky situations such as objections, pricing or competitor mentions. These moments play a deciding role in converting the prospects and helping you bag more deals.

The transcription software should also let you bookmark specific timestamps or call clips and share them as learning moments or feedback with your team.

2. Keyword-based search
Sales managers don’t have the time to power through hour-long sales calls and find useful insights. That’s why the transcription software should enable keyword and keyphrase searches so that managers can quickly scan through calls and find the information they need.

3. Custom vocabulary rules and in-line transcription edits
Despite the accuracy of NLP-powered algorithms, even the best transcription tools aren’t 100% accurate. So, the transcription software should offer features such as:

• Configuring preset rules to autocorrect misspellings and common mistakes
• Editing transcripts directly
• Adding notes against competitor mentions, features, acronyms, and more for better context

What are some best practices to improve the accuracy of call transcriptions?

Even the best transcription software can make mistakes. Some factors, like accents or language (homonyms and homophones), cannot be helped. However, there are other factors that you can control to enhance the audio transcription accuracy:

Use good-quality microphones or noise-canceling headphones with a mic while recording calls to minimize background noise. For video calls, join in using the web or mobile app, rather than dialing in from the phone.

Avoid interrupting the others as much as you can to ensure that there’s no overlapping dialogue. Otherwise, the AI gets confused and might transcribe inaccurately.

Depending on how your software has been configured, it might prioritize one speaker and skip the words from the other speaker, leading to transcription errors.

It’s important to speak clearly into the microphone so that everything you say gets captured and is coherent.

Sometimes, accents and variations in speech rate can throw the call transcription AI off its game as most automatic speech recognition (ASR) software aren’t trained to handle different accents.

So, it’s good to slow down and add adequate pauses between sentences. If required, you can add some context when discussing technical terms, acronyms, or foreign words.

Eating or chewing on food noisily during calls can distract the ASR software (besides being rude to the humans participating in the call).

In addition, the chomping noise can affect audio quality. While humans are trained to ignore it and focus on the conversation, an AI can misinterpret it, influencing the call transcription quality.