Professional Call Center Recordings Ensure a Brand-Affirming Caller Experience

Why should you use a specialist firm like Marketing Messages for your professional call center recordings?

It’s a fair question. With the ever-improving abilities of personal devices, surely you could just sit down and put together some passable recordings of yourself reading whatever necessary verbiage you’ve written, right? But that attitude ignores both how tricky it can be to achieve actual professional-sounding audio, and it undersells just how important your call center recordings are to your company and brand. Call center recordings requires a higher level of attention to ensure a positive, branding-affirming calling experience, and that is the kind of attention that specialist firms excel at providing.

Technical Prowess

Call center systems generally have a life of three to five years before they require replacement. To make sure that customers have a continuously affirmative experience, you will want to make sure that the auto attendant prompts and IVR prompts sound the same, from the oldest recording to the most recent. This requires continuity of volume, pacing, spacing of prompts, and acoustic characteristics.

This is the kind of fine-grain editing that a professional, specialist, firm can achieve. At Marketing Messages, our production team edits each file individually to ensure a smooth final sound that lines up with your existing audio’s tone and pace.

This technical prowess is also incredibly important when it comes to the concatenation of call center prompts within a system. Call center systems often involve concatenating or joining, short phrases with system-supplied variables or other short phrases.

For example, a banking system will have numerous pre-recorded audio elements but need to have spaces between these clips in which the system can insert client names, financial amounts, etc. This especially bears out if you are trying to create messages for languages that you are not familiar with. Having a guarantee of quality, vetted by professionals working with native speakers, takes a load of pressure off.

And if you are implementing a speech recognition system, that only means the technical requirements are that much more important and need to be adhered to with that much more rigor and care. Speech recognition systems involve more and shorter prompts than a touchtone system. Because speech recognition systems tend to involve much more extensive error correction for times when the ASR engine doesn’t recognize the caller, a voice prompt needs to be absolutely perfect.

Fortunately, our pros are in the know.

Voice Talent

When creating new recordings, you cannot overstate the importance of utilizing a professional voice talent. It is a very specific skill set to be able to keep all the variables consistent over the life of a call center system, while also juggling the finely inflected shorter prompts. That is why it is so important to find a voice (or voices) that fits your needs and to then keep that voice consistent as your IVR prompts are updated and expanded.

Here at Marketing Messages, we know a thing or two about consistency. We have the longest voice talent tenure in the business, with core talents who have done exemplary work for us going back 10, 15, even 20 years, even as we are constantly refreshing our roster with sterling new talent.

The most important element for a professional resource like us is quality control. Our standards are extremely high, and we expect the voice talents we work with to hold us to the same high standard. The result is a mutually beneficial relationship that can last for years and years, working together to provide the highest quality final product for clients across dozens of different fields.

And across dozens of different languages as well! As business grows more and more globally incentivized, our roster has expanded to include 85 different languages. Even if you do not have any active plans for global projects now, it is always worth considering as a possibility. It is always better and more efficient to work with one trusted provider rather than trying to source each individual language from a separate vendor.

Even if you are truly certain that you will only need English voice recordings, working with a professional firm guarantees not only quality control, but also a wide range of options that you can finesse to get the exact right sound you want for your brand. You may even elect to use different voice talents for different product lines or applications, maybe using a male voice for one and a female voice for another, creating the optimal customer experience.

Scripting

That thoroughness and quality control go into the scripting process as well. Scripts are meticulously reviewed to identify errors, of grammar, word choice, spelling, etc., and for call flow inconsistencies. There is a process and set of standards in place for communicating exact pronunciations to voice talents so that voice recordings are correct on the first try.

And those same standards are applied when assembling voice translations. Here, again, we find an area where some might rush to a shortcut. Why not just pop your text into Google Translate and find someone who can read Spanish or French or whatever language you need?

Well, to put it bluntly, Google Translate often spits out text that reads as absolute gibberish to actual native speakers. It may be word-for-word accurate, but Google Translate does not accommodate for the massive changes in grammar and sentence structure that vary from language to language.

If you want to see what I mean, put some text into Google Translate and change it from English to Japanese, and then translate the Japanese back into English. Even if the words are still theoretically correct, the phrasing will be odd and disjointed and will sound unnatural coming out of your mouth.

This is especially critical for a call center recording or other IVR prompt recordings since they are going to be built around inserting text around pre-existing pieces of audio. You have to be aware of how different languages fit together in order for the recordings to flow together properly and convey necessary information to your customer.

No, the absolute best way to go with certified translators who will understand and communicate intent, not just wording. Using the same provider to handle your translations along with your recordings is a smart way to minimize errors and ensure that cultural nuances are addressed.

Service Benefits from Professional Call Center Recordings

Really, the key benefit to working with a specialist firm for your call center recording, or any professional audio needs, is not just any one of these services. It’s all of these services, together, shared under one roof and delivered quickly, efficiently, consistently.

And it’s in the long-term relationships that can be developed with one house, one house dedicated to you and your needs. You want to work with someone who gets to know your systems, your processes, and your personnel. You want to work with someone who will invest in you and evolve with you as your company and your needs change.

It is the same kind of long-term relationships that we have developed in our own company. We have a lot of years in this business, individually and especially collectively, and that knowledge base and that shared vocabulary is a big part of what makes us such an effective team together, each with their own area of expertise but all made better by the team around us.

Conclusion

So why should you use a specialist firm like Marketing Messages for your professional call center recordings?

Beyond all the reasons listed above, it comes down to this simple fact: Your company matters. Your business matters. Your customers matter.

And you deserve to be treated as if you matter. You deserve to have your scripts polished to perfection, and you deserve to have those scripts voiced by exceptional talents who will convey the identity of your company and the importance of your message. And you deserve to have the smoothest, highest quality audio delivered to you with no muss and no fuss, ready for deployment.

Because you matter. And your messages do too.