Market researchers face a lot of pressures. Quality is of course a given in every project — without it, research is indistinguishable from voodoo. But budget pressures are also constant. Researchers face ongoing demands to accomplish more with less. And of course time is the eternal enemy. Clients want answers faster than you can generate data, much less analyze it. 
    
Our view is that transcription is an unavoidable requirement of any form of research where human beings are talking to one another. Without it you have no data, and without data, you have an opinion, not a report. 

But we understand the constant budget and turnaround pressures. Researchers need quality transcripts, they need them fast, and they also need to be able to afford them. 

In the price-quality-turnaround triangle, the general rule is that you can always have two. You can have high quality and low price, but not fast. You can have low price and fast turnaround, but not with good quality. And so on.

But there’s an exception to that rule, because there are really four factors, not three. The fourth is flexibility. If everything is fully flexible, if you can have anything you want, then yes — pick any two. But if what’s on offer is not fully flexible — if it’s a carefully designed product built in a factory, for example — then you really can have all three, because the company offering it knows how to build it just that way. 

A product orientation

This is the approach Babbletype takes. We do not try to be all things to all people. We do not offer to deliver anything anybody wants. Instead, we offer a small number of carefully designed products intended specifically for the market research industry. 

We specify products. We design custom tools and processes to manage production of those products. We analyze costs. We streamline. This makes us extremely efficient at delivering those specific products. Which in turn enables us to control quality and deliver work quickly while keeping costs under control. 

Balancing conflicting needs

There is still give and take, of course. In designing our products, we have worked hard to find an optimal balance of price, quality and turnaround — one well suited to the needs of most researchers. Prices need to be as low as possible, but not so low that quality or turnaround are hopelessly compromised. Quality needs to be as high as possible, but not so unreasonably severe that prices go through the roof while turnaround goes through the floor. We’re selling research tools, not jewelry. And turnaround needs to be fast, but not so unreasonably fast that quality or price are impacted. 

We offer reliable turnaround times for all products — two days for transcription and three for translation, which is enough time to do good quality work without any excess costs, and fast enough for the needs of almost everyone most of the time. 

We offer excellent quality, guaranteed 99% accurate transcripts that are perfectly suitable for any commercial application. We produce our work only with human beings, not software, and only with native speakers, not offshore, because either of those options would fatally compromise quality.

And within that context, we offer our products at reliably low prices that are typically well below other comparable options available in the market.

Clients who need much more stringent, near-publication-ready content can have it, and clients who need much faster, single-day turnaround can have that — as additional options, so that the majority of other clients who don’t need those things don’t have to pay for them.

And that’s our approach. Carefully designed transcription products for the market research industry offering an optimal balance of quality, turnaround and price. We specialize. We don’t try to sell everything, and we make everything we sell.