These days, help is hard to find. Budgets are tight and every business dollar must be accounted for. It’s hard to justify the cost of a receptionist when auto attendants can connect callers directly to the right person. But not every phone system is well thought out, and some of the ones that are may not be optimally utilized for a phone call with professional voice. You’ve likely had a bad call experience or two. Ever find yourself thinking, or maybe saying aloud, “Ugh, stupid phone. How do I get a live person?!” or “I’m sick of talking to computers. Help, operator!”
Not too long ago we received a call from a somewhat confused individual with a lot of complaints he wanted register as to the quality of the on hold messages and menus he had to interact with when he called into various companies. Believing that Marketing Messages was responsible for his long hold times, annoying music, and confusing menus that prove impossible to navigate, this caller thought he had a bone to pick with our company. Nothing could be further from the truth, so we thought this was a great reason to explain some services we perform vs. those that fall outside the scope of our control.
Have your phone call answered by a professional voice!
To answer this caller’s concerns, we explained that we ensure all our clients have a professional voice answer their phone calls. We remove the breaths and pauses and other background noises from the speech so that the professionally recorded greetings are clear and succinct. We allow the IVR systems and auto attendants to sound more natural and easier to understand. We have a large library of enjoyable music that has been carefully cultivated to weed out the annoying tunes.
Marketing Messages provides professional audio of virtually any kind that you can imagine. You need some messages on hold? We can record that. You need hold music? We provide that too. If you are a small business who only needs to record a few auto attendant prompts that will inform customers about store hours and closures, we can take care of that no problem.
Or maybe you have much more involved needs, like IVR prompts. These are piecemeal audio clips that will smoothly mesh based on customer responses, guiding the caller through various interactions. When we create those pieces for you, they will fit together seamlessly.
We have decades of experience scripting, recording, and editing the short phrases. Our talented roster of Voice Artists knows how to inflect the speech such that when concatenated it all sounds fluid and conversational. Ideally, your customer experiences a phone call with professional voice and optimal routing. In other words, nothing like the poor customer interaction experienced by our bedraggled caller.
All that without getting into the more specialized, industry-specific professional voice recordings that we create… We’ve done large-scale translations for the World Health Organization, captured lengthy voice narration for use by medical professionals in their public presentations, and cultivated a repository of audio prompts for hearing aids in 24 different languages. We’ve worked with banks to create their call center recording which takes a customer through labyrinthine departments and processes to get to where they need to be.
In every case, the final product is so much better having utilized a professional voice talent, professional translators, and professional audio engineers, all working together to deliver crisp, clear audio that also captures the intention and tone desired by a customer, whether that’s unaffected monotone or something warmer and more personalized.
Here’s the bad part.
But what we don’t do is program the call flow on behalf of the customers. We can create the best audio imaginable (and not to toot our own horn, but…well…we’re good at what we do), but how that audio is finally deployed is in the hands of the companies we are working for, and the telecommunications specialists that they are working with.
We can record IVR prompts in such a way that they flow seamlessly together, but if the customer does not program them properly, then nothing about the audio’s quality can make the process of trying to navigate those prompts any easier.
The same is true for on hold messages. The voice talent can deliver a terrific performance, and a customer can choose music that’s totally pleasant and relaxing…but if a company has extremely long hold times and you are left on the line for five, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, any message is going to become excruciating regardless, again, of the sound quality.
Set Yourself Up for Success
Here at Marketing Messages, we work with our customers to get their scripts in the best shape possible, and then we work with the voice talents to make sure that the performance of that script is the best possible version, resulting in a phone call with professional voice. Ultimately the final deployment of that audio is in the hands of our customers. So, if you don’t want your own customers to become irate and give up on your services because just calling in proves to be too much of a hassle, be thoughtful and careful about how your voiceover recordings are being used, and what sort of experience a customer receives when you answer their call.
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