It’s a simple fact.
More often than not, when calling into a business or institution, your initial contact is with some type of automated telephone-based system. In order to speak with a live person, you must wind your way through a menu or two before you even know how to access that person. The foundation of these menus is either touch-tone or speech recognition. In recent years, businesses are moving from touch-tone to Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, as most people would rather speak than press buttons on a keypad. As a result, it is imperative that your ASR platform includes the use of professional voice talent to interface with your customer base. The following explains three important ways professional voices can significantly impact your brand and your business.
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Connect Emotionally
All business transactions contain some element of emotion. Customers need to feel their problems are being heard and understood. Multiple steps in the buying process must be successfully taken before a customer commits to a purchase. And many times, they engage in repeat business solely based on the experience they had with customer service. Because interactive voice response (IVR) call flows, more closely resemble human conversation, utilizing professional voice talent for recording IVR prompts ensures that what the caller hears is natural and employs a broad range of emotion. Our Voice Artists are trained to vary their expression, tone and inflection based on the transaction at hand.
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Point Your Brand in the Right Direction with Professional Voice Recordings
While most people do prefer to speak responses rather than use a touch-tone keypad, the spoken word can be misinterpreted. We have all experienced the frustration of responding to a voice prompt, only to be pointed in the wrong direction. This is extremely frustrating and irritating, and, unfortunately, memorable. You don’t want to join the ranks of brands to avoid simply because the ASR is so poor. Remember, every transaction is emotional. The voice your customers hear is their first, and sometimes only, interaction they will have with your brand. The voice they hear should be perceived as helpful, understanding and pleasant. Many times, businesses think they can an internal voice, but doing so can negatively impact credibility. Employing professional voice talent ensures higher user satisfaction, better transaction completion rates, and positively reinforces your brand values. By using professional voice recordings in your system you ensure that the voice of your brand is well represented and your message comes through loud and clear.
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Become Your Own Customer
As it is with anything, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can make all the difference in perception and opinion. In other words, become your own customer. This means that you should know what your ASR voice recording sounds like. How does it function? Are your voice prompts clear and directive? One of the best ways to hear what your brand sounds like is to set up a coached session, in which you work directly with a voice talent to provide real-time coaching and feedback. It enables you to identify subtleties in speech call flow. It allows you to hear what your customers will hear, thus ensuring that your brand – your name – is represented as it should be.
In addition to coached sessions, at Marketing Messages, we can create short “dialog demos,” in which simulated conversations between caller and Voice Artists are modeled before the full recording session is conducted.
- This can help identify the best “persona” who matches the demographics of specific caller communities, as well as your company and brand.
- These demos also assist you by experimenting with different phrasing that you wouldn’t necessarily encounter in touch-tone interfacing.
Marketing Messages is earnest about helping you discover the right professional voice talent by offering custom demos. These demos feature both your chosen Voice Artist and a hypothetical caller who model a two-way transaction based on a short script that you provide. This enables you to choose the professional voice recordings best suited for your brand, as well as hear how the script will flow. Request a custom demo here.