In recent years, the vocal delivery for telephone voice messages has moved towards more natural, conversational human interaction. This trend calls for a new approach to scripting that prevents voice over talents from sounding monotonous and robotic and reflects how people really talk to each other. This approach is referred to as ‘Conversational Scripting’, and we have seen it grow in demand more and more each year. With a few simple steps that we will illustrate here, conversational scripting can be made easy.
Why Is Conversational Scripting Growing in Popularity?
Conversational Scripting makes the voice the caller hears on the other end of the line more naturalistic and empathetic, and can result in better outcomes for the caller. Having this more humane approach also reflects positively on a company’s brand and allows a company greater opportunity to communicate the personality they wish to convey to customers and partners. It can be applied across all “voice enabled” applications.
For IVR systems used in a call center environment, conversational scripting helps connects the IVR prompts into a natural interaction in a way that ensures that problems are solved and information needs are seen to. And for onhold messages, it makes the words the caller hears sound less like a radio ad and more like advice from a reliable source or a good friend.
A company’s contact center greetings, IVR systems, and onhold messages are some of the areas where customers and partners will spend the majority of their time, and more and more customers and partners have made it clear that they want and expect a human experience even for these automated processes.
How Do You Create a Conversational Feel?
Great voice talents can deliberately speak in a more informal, conversational manner, but if the script itself is using very formal language, there’s only so much a voice talent can do to make it less so. There are any number of techniques that you can use to give your script for voiceover that extra little human touch.
You can use contractions to take the formality and stiffness out of messaging.
For example:
Before: We are sorry, but we cannot come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we will call you back as soon as we are able.
After: We’re sorry, but we can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message and we’ll call you back as soon as we’re able.
You can also write your messages in such a way as to convey real empathy for your caller. Don’t just give them information, but actually try to put yourself in their shoes and be as communicative as possible.
Before: The office is currently closed. No one is available to take your call. Please try again later.
After: We’re sorry we’re not able to take your call right now. We’re currently in a regularly scheduled meeting, so no one can grab the phone at the moment. We should all be back by 2 PM, so please give us a call then!
Communicating With Your Voice Over Talents
If there is a specific tone, pace, or energy that you wish to convey through your professional voice recordings, the best and simplest way to get those results is to communicate those preferences to your voice talent. Trained, experienced voice talents know how to modulate their performance to suit whatever a script calls for. While the industry standard has long been crisp, clear, and somewhat monotonous, voice talents are capable of injecting whatever emotion you would like to hear into their performance.
At Marketing Messages, we encourage our clients to not only give specific instructions in terms of pitch and cadence, but to sit in on coached sessions or to utilize demo recordings. That way, everyone involved in production, from the customer to the voice to our production team, can be working together towards the same established goal and steadily and effectively dial the performance into the exact tempo and style that is desired.
Check Out Our Comprehensive Guide to Conversational Scripting Made Easy
For more on conversational scripting made easy, download our guide here. We’ll be more than happy to have that conversation (see what I did there?) about what you want your professional voice recordings to be.