Your onhold messages and auto attendant prompts are part of your company’s identity. They are the first thing new customers will encounter when they reach out to make first contact, and they are likely the part of the company that said customers will have the most interaction with. If these recordings are a reflection of your company and the face that you show customers, partners, employees, etc., then you should be careful to select a voice artist that will represent your brand.
As we’ve argued many times, it is always a good idea to use professional voiceover talent for your voice prompts, rather than trying to assemble your own recordings with amateurs who happen to be available. But once you commit to looking for a professional, how do you go about identifying which voice is going to match your brand identity?
Know Your Own Brand
When looking for a voice, whether for longer onhold messages or for shorter call center recordings that will address customers with active questions and concerns and direct them where they need to go, you first have to decide what kind of personality you want to present to your customers.
Do you want to communicate steady, unwavering professionalism? Or is it in your brand interest to convey more energy, more pep?
We’ve seen a marked rise in customers who want their call center greetings and onhold messages to feel more off-the-cuff versus monotonous and atonal. Businesses increasingly optimize creating a friendly atmosphere, and customers increasingly want to feel human connections even when navigating through a phone tree or sitting on hold.
Professional voiceover talent can hit whatever tonal target you desire, but first, you need to be clear on where they need to aim.
Make Smart Use of Demos
Once you have a clear idea of what sort of voice you are looking for, you can approach a firm like Marketing Messages and get a sense of the voiceover talent that is available. For instance, you can find short audio samples of all our voice talents.
A professional firm will have many voices available to you as options, and you may find that there are multiple voice artists who fit the idea you have for what you want. Or, you may find that there is a voice that seems to fit, but you have a particular speed, cadence, or personality that you want them to be able to hit, and you’d like to know that this is the right person for that job before you commit to a recording project.
A good way to troubleshoot these uncertainties is to ask for a demo of your script before recording the entire project. You could, for instance, ask for a couple of IVR prompts or a paragraph from your onhold messages script. In this way, you can dial in on exactly what you are looking for. Trained, professional voice artists can provide a range of performances, and then replicate the speed and energy that is asked of them across an entire project.
Represent Your Brand
Whether a caller is waiting on hold or speaking to pre-programmed call center voices, these greetings and messages are a major part of your company’s brand. Your voice artist represents your brand. So your objective should not just be finding a professional voiceover talent to record your voice prompts and messages. Your objective has to be finding the correct talent, the one that reflects the image you are trying to convey to your customers, your partners, and even your own employees.
If you establish a clear vision for what you’re looking for (or, listening for, should we say) and then partner with established professionals who will work with you to establish the right tempo and attitude, there is no reason why your audio can’t embody all the best qualities of your business that you are trying to put forth.
Contact us today and we’ll be happy to discuss your audio needs, and pair you with the right voice artist to get your message across.