I was put on the spot a little bit earlier today when fielding a call from an academic researcher who telephoned to ask for a quotation for eight hours of one to one interview transcriptions. She started the conversation by saying “tell me why I should use your service and not X.com“.
This was my response, although I have embellished the content a bit..
Specialists for Academic Transcription
University Transcriptions are specialist transcribers for academic clients. We concentrate on academic transcription work and we have been doing it for almost 20 years. We are preferred suppliers to a large number of universities in the UK, Ireland and around the world.
Personal Service
We offer a personal service. Our Managing Director Anna Gresty is available on the end of the phone if you need to ask a question. If we have any questions about the work we will contact you to discuss. We do not employ robots to answer questions on our behalf or hide behind our website.
Competitive Prices
Not only are we academic specialists offering a higher level of expertise than most of our competitors we also don’t charge anything extra for our superior services. Quite often we are not only competitive but also cheaper than some of the larger multi-national companies who are attempting to sweep up the majority of the work in this market. We also publish our prices in full on our website.
No Hidden Extras
When we give you a quote for the work this is the price you will be charged. We do not add on extra costs at a later date (unlike some of our competitors).
Our Transcribers are Human
Automated transcription is great when it works. Unfortunately it does not work very well yet for interviews or groups of people where there are two or more speakers. We offer UK based transcribers for UK clients and all our English to English transcribers are native English speakers. A sizeable proportion of our transcribers are graduates and all of them have at least two years transcription experience to date. We also have a large number of secretaries both from legal and medical backgrounds as well as some non-practising doctors and lawyers.
Our Transcribers have Names
If you have an ongoing project we will allocate the same transcribers to your project so that they get used to your specific terminology. Our transcribers work on recordings in full and we do not separate the recordings into five minute blocks (some of our competitors use this method).
Secure UK Data
Our data is completely secure, kept on a server based in the UK and is not released to any third parties at any time. We have data processing agreements signed with most universities and we are registered Data Controllers with the UK Information Commissioner’s Office.
EU Service Available
We have an operation based in Dublin, Ireland to service our EU clients. Our company is GDPR accredited. Your data can remain in the EU and not be transferred anywhere else.
Professional Indemnity Insurance
We are insured to UK university approved levels – £5 million.
And Finally.. our USP
We are a Cyber Essentials, ISO27001, ISO9001 and ISO14001 accredited company. We are a recognised public sector supplier – Bloom and Select Accredit approved.
But perhaps our unique selling point (USP) is our personal service to our clients. Large enough to handle bulk orders, we are small enough to care.
Time and again we get feedback from longstanding clients to say that it is such a breath of fresh air to be able to call or email and speak directly to our management team. Some of our 110 transcribers have been with us for longer than some of our clients, and that’s a long time! We like to think that this is because we are nice people and want to help you.
