One of the best ways to make sure that the recording process will go smoothly for the creation of your audio projects, be they Auto Attendant prompts, IVR prompts, On Hold Messages, or any number of other voice recording forms, is to take the time to thoroughly review and format your script before submitting it for voicing.
Marketing Messages is a full-service company, and we review each and every script before sending them out to be voiced. However, when a script is rife with grammatical errors, odd phraseology, and confusing language, it eats up valuable time in the recording and production process. We have had customers cost themselves entire days as their scripts had to be drastically overhauled and rewritten, and then checked over thoroughly once again.
A good rule of thumb, especially for customer-facing Auto Attendant prompts, is to try and use the fewest words and the simplest language possible. Always be sure to omit needless words whenever possible while trying to communicate with your customers.
The easiest way to find problems is to simply read your own script aloud. It’s the strangest thing, but your mind is trained to iron over all the kinks in a sentence as your eyes pass over it. Did you know that, often, readers look at only the first and last letter in a word and their brain just fills in the rest without actually reviewing the letters? And the same applies double for grammar! The best way to catch out awkward word choices and clunky phrasing is to simply read the script out loud. You will be stunned by the number of things that seemed to work when you wrote them and checked it over visually, only to be stilted, misstated, or spelled incorrectly when you actually try to read it.
Another easy way to catch misspellings and awkward grammar is to just pop your text into Microsoft Word. Our Auto Attendant and IVR prompt templates are in Excel, and we often have customers send at least their initial versions of short scripts in the body of emails before updating to the proper format. But spellcheck and grammar check are either nonexistent or unreliable in these formats. So all one needs to do to catch the most glaring of errors is open up Word, copy-paste your text in, and just look for any red and blue underlines that point to a mistake.
These are just some of the easiest ways in which you can review and format your script, whether Auto Attendant, IVR, or Message-on-Hold, for glaring errors. For the rest, the Marketing Message team and our talented Voice Artists will always check and double-check to make sure that your message is being communicated as clearly and cleanly as possible. Talk to us about your script today!