In the first two parts of our blog series about the ATC sales process, we discussed what to expect during a sales call and what to bring to the call as a client. In the third part of this series, we felt it was important to delve into the onboarding phase should you decide to move forward with ATC as your transcription firm. Understanding the nuances of each project is mission-critical to our success in transcribing your content.
So now you’ve made an important decision on the firm that is going to complete your transcripts, but what happens next?
- How do you get the work to the company to transcribe?
- How do they know what guidelines to follow?
- How do they know where to send completed transcripts?
- Who do they invoice?
There’s a lot involved in the onboarding process, and to get that process moving we offer a 2-page Client Onboarding Form to help us manage your project while also giving us the key insights to be able to complete your project to near perfection (I’ll never way we’re perfect, but we’re damn close).
File Transfer and Platforms
Firstly, you’ll want to track the files you’re sending our way for transcription. An easy method for that is using an Excel spreadsheet. You’ll want to have columns that represent information that is important to you, for example: File Name, Length of Recording, Interviewer Name, Interviewee Name (Narrator), Subject of Recording, Notes about the recording (for instance if there are any accents or pronouns that we should be aware of that might not be common knowledge), and any other information that will be helpful for you and also helpful for us to easily discern the content of each file.
You’ll then need to decide on the platform by which you’ll securely transfer your recordings to ATC. There are many different platforms, and we do not recommend platforms, but we can share the names of platforms that other clients choose to use. We do recommend that you speak with your IT department if you have one, or reach out to an IT consultant with any suggestions that will meet your needs around file transfer speed and security. The main platforms clients use are DropBox, Google Drive, and Box. These platforms all offer various levels of access, security, and storage space.
Guidelines
Next up is guidelines. Give us two clients and we’ll have three sets of guidelines that we have to follow. One for client A, one for client B, and one that neither of them will follow. You may have your own transcription style guide in place. If so, we ask that you send it to us for us to marinate on in advance of starting your transcription project. The team will diligently review all the details, see where any differentiations exist from your style guide to our in-house style guide, and then update the key points for the transcriptionists to be aware of on our transcriptionist portal. If you don’t have a guideline, we’d be more than happy to offer our own in-house style guide that many clients choose to have us work from. Otherwise, check out these options from a couple of our clients:
On the Client Onboarding Form, you’ll advise us of the person to whom we should send the transcripts. This may be yourself, or you may have a team of people that need to receive the transcripts as they are completed.
Invoicing
Similarly, you’ll need to advise us before we start the project of all the details around invoicing, and to whom invoices should be sent for payment. If a purchase order is required by your institution to start the project we’ll need all of that documentation completed in advance, so that there are no delays in payment. As a small business, cash flow is mission-critical to our continued success, and we need to make sure that there is fluidity in that process without holdups or delays in payment.
In summary, the Client Onboarding Form is going to be the main document we follow to create your account and learn the fine details of all aspects of your project. While this is a lot of information, we promise, this process is rather smooth and seamless.
At any point you’re always welcome to contact a member of the team for assistance, and we’ll always do our best to answer your questions or get you the answers as quickly as possible. We’re friendly, communicative, and our goal is to help make this as easy a process as possible for you each and every time you have recordings to send our way.