COMPANY RESPONSE TO COMPLAINTS ABOUT BABBLETYPE - jfeldcamp

Hi.

My name is John Feldcamp and I’m the CEO of Babbletype. I’ve been reading this discussion thread over for the first time and have decided to respond to the comments below. I’m doubtful if I’m making the right choice in doing so, since there are certain people who, once they decide you are the enemy, don’t much care about the finer points of what may or may actually not be true. But on the other hand, MT Stars has brought us many great people that have done well at Babbletype, and so for those folks, past, present and future, I’ll try to provide some detailed responses. I apologize in advance for the length. Brevity is not my strong point.

First, there are legitimate concerns here that deserve a response, but there is also invective. About half of the content here was written by two people who have axes to grind, and their concern is with grinding those axes, not with objective commentary. I will respond just enough to defend ourselves here, and not to inflame things further.

With regard to the first person, Hardlesson, the lady worked with us for a few days (literally a few days) in June of 2012, and in that time she QA-reviewed 152 audio minutes. I’ll answer cost and payment issues later, but for now it’s enough to say that QA review is sampling transcripts against audio files (to determine pass or fail), and then for files that are good enough to pass, reading and editing the document into a delivery-ready form. It’s quick, easy work, and the 152 minutes above takes most of our QA people about an equivalent number of minutes. Call it two and a half hours. Hardlesson invested a lot more time than that, as did we with her, and it was readily apparent that this work was not something she could do well. I’m sorry about that, but I also can’t fix it. The test she refers to investing 3 hours in, as a case in point, was 5 audio minutes long and takes most people about 20 minutes to complete. As to training, for us that’s merely live work with a lot of guidance, and we pay the unit rate for the work in question. Long and short, Hardlesson tried to do work that really didn’t suit her for a couple of days, and then quit in frustration, which I fully understand. The real problem happened after that. She had reported working for us to her unemployment department (Hardlesson did the reporting, not us), and that reporting impacted her unemployment payment standing. When she then quit, the change in standing remained, impacting her prior benefits. Hardlesson then demanded that we mislead her state unemployment department and say that she had been terminated, which we did not do. She also threatened a smear campaign if we didn’t comply, and you can see the result of that here. She stated that our COO lied to the state unemployment department about her; quiet the opposite is true. Our refusal to do so was the source of her anger. I’m sure that Hardlesson’s situation was terrible and I’m sorry about that, but Babbletype was a bystander in that car wreck, not a cause of it.

With regard to the second person, Ladee Diane, this lady was doing occasional QA work for us of the same type described above, also in 2012. A point came where we had a problem that we needed to clean up. Ladee Diane wasn’t by any means the cause, but she did get caught up in it. The problem was that there were simply too many people on our contractor lists who showed up rarely or never, so that it was hard to tell who was actually working with us and who wasn’t. We decided to make a change, and only continue to work with people we could count on for a steady volume of work. That’s still true now. As part of that cleanup, we pulled off our lists a lot of folks who were very occasional in nature, so we could concentrate on a smaller team of folks who did the lion’s share of the work. Ladee Diane (and a few other folks) who were on the borderline got caught up in this cleanup. A few of those folks complained and are still with us today. Ladee Diane, however, went ballistic and proceeded to pour a stream of very rude emails at our team, at which point it was impossible to talk to her about a rejoining. The invective you read here is a very light version of what we received.

So, my point with the above is simply that there are agendas here. Once someone decides you are the enemy, fair and accurate commentary is secondary and perhaps not even possible. I’m sorry these folks had a bad experience, but the scale of their bitterness is not in line with the actual events. Again, I’m not writing this to start a fight — far from it. But we have a right to set the record straight.

Next, responses to legitimate criticisms.

Independent contractor work. This is true; we work mostly with independent contractors and pay on a unit basis. I agree that the world would be a better place is full-time jobs were possible instead, but it’s not. Like everyone else, our work waxes and wanes from day to day and week to week, and we would be broke if did this work with full-time people. I should know; I’ve tried. We work this way because it’s the only way my company (and most others in transcription) could survive. Wanting something different doesn’t change the market or the economics we all live in.

Benefits not provided. This is true. It’s independent contracting. We pay for work on a unit basis. Most folks work about 20 hours a week in any case.

Training not provided. Our work is not so complex that much training is needed. We have lots of documentation describing how we work, and project managers available to help and answer questions. The problem Hardlesson ran into was that she didn’t understand any of the tools (Express Scribe, Google docs) and didn’t know how to edit. We hire people who are supposed to already be able to transcribe and edit; we don’t train on it.

Low pay. We really do try to set our rates such that, on average, folks should be able to reliably earn around $10 per hour. But that’s an average. There are people who are a lot faster and who do better, and people who are really very slow and do worse. I can’t fix that. All of our rates are public, we send weekly reporting on what everyone who works for us has done, and we then pay, religiously, every week. Everyone wants rates to be higher; I understand that. But we don’t get to control what the market of people and companies who buy transcription are willing to pay, and that has been going nowhere but down.

Paying well below what we are worth, ruining the profession. The person writing this assumes that any of us have choices, which we do not. There’s a market, and customers vote with their feet. Demand for transcription has been going down, the amounts customers are willing to pay has been going down, jobs have been disappearing, and what people get paid to do the work has been going down. It hurts all of us, but we don’t get to control it, only respond to it. We work the way we do because it’s what the economics demand.

Editing work of overseas transcriptionists takes so long you can’t make any money. This is in reference to our QA process, which I’ve described above. The first step of that process is a minute or two or reviewing the audio against the transcript, to see if the content is good enough to pass. If it’s not, you fail it and don’t edit it, and we pay a fee on fails, so it’s hard to see how this is a real issue.

Owners getting rich from ripping off contractors. First, no one who owns a small to mid-sized transcription company is ever going to get rich. It’s impossible. It’s a small market and these are small-to-mid-sized companies struggling to get by. Thinking anything else is just self-indulgent. As to ripping off contractors, I have seen this done by others and I know this happens, but not by us. We are not angels and we are not perfect and we certainly make our share of mistakes, but we have never intentionally played any kind of financial game with anyone. It is not our way. We pay religiously and in full, as I said, every week. The worst that happens is that we make a payment calculation error (too much or too little) that we then need to fix. The amounts we pay, and the policies against which we pay, are fully available to everyone working with us.

Paying for a good rating on the BBB. I think this one speaks for itself.

Virtual Assistants having “dropped” Babbletype; not allowed to advertise. I don’t know who Virtual Assistants is and we have never used them to advertise anything. We work direct with individuals and never with intermediaries.

Hiring non-US citizens, part 1. Of course we do. This is a silly issue. If I need something translated from Romanian to English, there’s a good chance I’ll end up finding that translator in Romania. If I need a file transcribed that has a heavy South African accent, I have a much better chance of finding a transcriptionist in South Africa who can do it. We hire and work with people around the world, and I sincerely doubt any reasonable person would have an issue with us hiring Canadians, Europeans, Australians, etc., as the need required. I’m Canadian, and I hire plenty of Americans, so I hope not. So I don’t think this is the real issue. The real issue is hiring people from India or other such countries to do the work for much less than an American could do it for, which I’ll cover below.

Hiring non-US citizens, part 2. We do hire people from the Philippines specifically to do certain kinds of incredibly easy work (think telephone voicemails), where the customer demands an incredibly low price, because that, in turn, is what the competitive market demands. If some kinds of really easy transcription can be done for a quarter, then that is what the customers are going to demand for it. Our options are limited to taking the work or letting someone else do so. But beyond that super easy work, offshore people represent no competitive threat to native English speaking transcriptionists, because there are simply not enough of them able do the work well enough at any price. So real, serious, transcription is under no real threat from offshore workers. Seriously. The threats to that work are mostly from technology, and there’s nothing any of us can do about that. Doctors type their own notes into computers, and the amount of medical transcription goes down. Voice recognition gets better, and the amount of transcription available to do goes down. We can complain about it, but that’s like complaining that it’s raining. With regard to offshoring, the kind of work that’s under threat from offshore workers in India is work that literally anybody could do, and that really is under threat and there is very little any of us can do about it. But guess what — it’s also same work that computers can do. And, separating out transcription specifically in this worldwide trend is pointless. If you have ever shopped at Wal-Mart, you are buying things made offshore in exactly the same way, very nearly everything in the store — and that, at $100 billion in sales, is 10,000 times larger than transcription. I understand the politics of the issue, but this is the weather. Railing at it doesn’t change it, and we all need to learn how to live with it. For clarity, when discussing real transcription of serious recordings, nearly everything we do is done by native English speakers here or elsewhere in the developed world. Why? Because that is also the weather. The offshore people everyone rails about can’t do it anyway.

Challenging audio. The complaint here is that the audio files we have available to work on are challenging, which is to say multiple speaker focus groups, recordings with background noise, interviews, and the like. Yes, that’s the work we have. It’s what our customers give us, and it’s also the work that really needs native English speakers to do it. The easy stuff is all gone, and it isn’t coming back.

Babbletype charges 10% to deposit checks. This is fiction. When we hire people on oDesk (very rarely these days), oDesk does charge the contractor a 10% fee, which is how oDesk stays alive and offers its (valuable) service of connecting people who want work with companies who have it. In any case this is not something Babbletype charged, and Babbletype pays 90+% of our people using PayPal, and we shoulder the fees for those payments.

Orchestrated ads put together by marketing outfit. Read this response and then read the ads. They will sound the same. Why? Because I wrote them. As to way too much information, you can’t have it both ways. People misunderstand everything, including the two folks mentioned above to their detriment, so we try to be as comprehensive as possible.

Sorry for the length of this, but to wrap it up we are a real company working with real people and paying them real money to do real work. People with the right skills and who fit what we are looking for can earn around $10 per hour doing it while working when they want around other things they have going on in their lives. We are working to explain more, to be ever clearer, and to test more carefully at the outset because we don’t need an army. We are looking for small numbers of people who fit what we need that we can develop real, rich, long term relationships with.

Thanks for listening.

Sincerely,

John Feldcamp

CEO

Babbletype