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Hire Professional Voice Talent to Record Your IVR or Auto-attendant

by Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern - September 8, 2014

Hire Professional Voice Talent to Record Your IVR or Auto-attendant

By Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern
+1 650-529-4099
Konstantin.Kishinsky@brightpattern.com


Our professional services team at Bright Pattern routinely receives requests for referrals to voice professionals to record IVR and auto-attendant prompts. We’re always glad to receive these requests and help fulfill them, because it means that the contact center we’re working with understands the importance of using a professional voice to represent its brand.

Sadly, too many organizations neglect their voice recordings, using whoever is available with “a good voice” to lay down prompts. However, it is indeed critical for the contact center manager to consider how that voice will relate to, and convey, the brand to an external audience. Most people, after evaluating all the considerations, come to the conclusion that hiring a professional voice talent for the job is worth every penny.

For example, a company must consider if they want their voice recordings to convey a formal, serious, casual, or other tone. What best reflects the brand? Only a professional voice actor – and it is acting – can provide different reads of the same script in different personas, to help you figure out what sounds right for your brand. A professional voice actor also usually has the right production and editing tools to deliver the final product in the right form, and even collaborate with contact center staff on the initial reads of the script, to arrive at the right persona in real time.

Leslie Wadsworth of Voice by the Sea Studies, a 25-year voice acting veteran, explains that, “using a professional voice talent is paramount for organizations looking for an IVR or auto-attendant voice. I mean, come on, when you need a plumber you don’t call your uncle, unless of course he is a plumber. You call a professional. When you need a mechanic, you call a professional. The same goes for voice talents. Hire a professional, you’ll save a lot of time and headache when you hire a voice talent who has IVR experience, understands the client-vendor relationships, understands personas, which is the personality of the voice, and can deliver the finished product in the correct format and in a timely fashion. That is what you are paying for.”

She also explains how to work with a voice actor to find the right persona, “the voice talent needs to be able to recognize, suggest and be able to switch personas easily to communicate the most effective way the client wants their platform to be heard. One of my clients is highly successful in this area through the use of their message mastering sessions. This is just quite fascinating and we have seen such productive results from this. These sessions placed my client and the potential IVR vendor together for a scriptwriting session using my client’s best practices in the IVR world. I’m actually on the phone during these sessions where the potential vendor actually has the opportunity to hear their script being spoken. So this allows a fantastic collaboration of people to massage the script right then and there until the right words, tone and persona is expressed.”

And, if you can find the right voice actor, you can get really compelling results. “If you find a talent with an acting background in theater, stage, television, you are really getting a full package. Because, really, that’s what we’re doing. We’re acting with our voice,” Leslie said.

Some of Leslie’s clients have even asked her to record voice mail greetings for individual telephones.

Hiring the right person for your voice recordings can save you a lot of time, save you from headaches, and give your brand a boost. Look for someone that can read a script with different personas, to give you some choices, and someone that can deliver high-quality professionally recorded files in the right format. Ask prospective voice actors how much IVR work they’ve done, whether or not they have stage or other acting experience, and whether or not they have a professional studio.

Your brand will thank you.

Bright Pattern provides next-generation cloud contact center software, ServicePattern™, which includes native multichannel support to improve customer experience, and scales like no other offering on the market, to 5,000 agents and above.

Author:

Konstantin Kishinsky, CEO, BrightPattern
+1 650-529-4099
Konstantin.Kishinsky@brightpattern.com

Konstantin has a strong background leading engineering and advanced application development teams. Konstantin has served in key management roles including Director of Engineering at Genesys Telecommunication Laboratories, Inc. (Alcatel since 2000), VP of Product Development at FrontRange, and Founder and CEO of Cayo Communications, Inc. Konstantin attended the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, earning a Master’s in Engineering Physics. He holds six patents and has published seven scientific articles.

 
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