Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems are a regular part of the utility business now. Utility and energy companies have found that IVR systems can be useful in cutting down the need for live operators and ensuring that billing is handled in an efficient and timely manner, but there is more that can be garnered from these systems than simply streamlining a billing system. In fact, there are a plethora of different applications for IVR systems that many electric, gas, and water utilities have deployed with great success.

Service Options

While many customers call into utility and energy companies to pay and manage their bills and energy usage, there are a plethora of other reasons that a consumer, or other stakeholders, may be calling in. Through an IVR system, an energy company can streamline the call-in process and allow consumers to get to the business at hand in a timely and efficient manner. Some companies are utilizing IVR systems for:

• Gas leak reporting
• Repair and equipment requests
• Service setup and disconnection
• Sales and installation processes

Through short phrase prompts, consumers can call in and quickly deal with having their service needs met without ever needing to sit on hold. As an added bonus, those who do need to speak with a live operator can be fed through the prompt system quicker to ensure they reach the person uniquely qualified to serve them. Because the majority of callers won’t need to deal with a live customer service representative, this leaves reps available and ready to deal with those calls that do require human interaction.

Customer Education

With many utility and energy companies looking to the future, customer education is quickly becoming a top priority. An IVR system can enable utilities to set up educational messages that each customer can be directed to when they call into the system. One company creates IVR-based messages in the fall to teach consumers about what they can do to prepare their homes for the winter. Another company that is seen as a “green” energy company provides energy-saving tips and details pertaining to utility-sponsored efficiency programs.

Meter Seals and Lock Band Removal

While dealing directly with the customer base seems to be the most popular utilization of IVR systems, there are internal applications that can help a utility company run in a smoother fashion. One innovative electric utility utilizes its IVR system to provide access and authorization to third-party service providers that work directly with the energy company. One example is meter seals and bank lock removal services that are performed by third-party licensed electricians.  When the electrician calls in, they are prompted to enter their personal information. They are then read back what work needs to be performed, where it needs to be done, and the type of access that is required to complete the task. This capability has drastically reduced the amount of associated administrative overhead associated and makes the process go faster and more accurately.

Substation Authentication

IVR systems can also be used to provide authentication and access to personnel and third-party providers in substations and other, controlled access areas. While most utility companies take security seriously and have restricted access areas, there are instances in which individuals who would not normally be granted access must be able to access restricted areas. Through an IVR system, the utility company can control access and keep necessary data regarding who had access to these restricted sights, when, and why.

All visits must be tracked for compliance purposes, and an IVR system allows for an efficient and automated way of doing just that. Such a system can track everything from meetings to training, fence repairs, painting services, and private tours of the substation.

Why should energy companies use professional voice talent for utility IVR voice prompts?

The above scenarios often require short phrases to be strung together in a way that sounds natural and elicits a sense of comfort and familiarity with the caller.  To accomplish this, many utilities choose to employ professional voice services when they want help with the creation of energy IVR prompts. Professional voice talents have training and experience creating these prompts with the proper inflections and tone that mimic the traditional back-and-forth nature of a true conversation. This creates a comfortable caller experience that eliminates the robotic and monotone nature of many automated phone systems.

In addition, professional voice talents work hard to ensure that the entire messaging system is cohesive. For the purpose of branding, businesses generally want the voice prompts to remain consistent across all customer-facing phone systems – and over the lifetime of these systems – in terms of style, pace, and intonation.  Many energy companies turn to professional voice recordings when their voice user interface becomes fragmented and artificially sounding over time – usually, the result of cobbling together prompts spoken by multiple, untrained internal resources that come and go throughout the life of an energy IVR system.

IVR systems are simply another tool that can be utilized by energy and utility companies to provide service that is both quick, accurate, and efficient for all those stakeholders.   Thinking creatively about how to expand your usage of IVR, and considering the use of professional voice services in doing so, will increase the value of your system as an asset for satisfying the energy consumer.

The post Using Energy IVR Systems Only For Utility Billing? Boring! Try These Ideas Instead. appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Beyond determining the month and year of the last update, I ask a few additional questions, all starting with, “Since You Last Changed Your Onhold Messages…..”

• What has changed with your product?
• Have you introduced any new product, services, or feature enhancements?
• How many product promotions have you offered?
• Have your competitors changed their offerings? Have new competitors emerged?
• Has your marketing strategy changed?

Indeed there are some businesses that don’t change much over time – but for the most part, I am struck by how much has happened in their business since delivery of their last production. Yet, the client’s caller, reaching out in 2014, experiences a kind of On-Hold Groundhog Day; the caller hears, “Client’s Product, Circa 2011”, even when thousands of dollars have been poured into the other elements of the company’s marketing mix between then and now.
Here are at least four reasons to keep your Messages-On-Hold up to date on a regular schedule:

• Highlighting new product introductions and promotions via on-hold messaging yields incremental revenue at a relatively low cost. If a customer calling in about one product and listens to an on-hold message about another newly introduced product that he or she may have not otherwise heard about, that’s easy money. If you are trying to get your customer to expand the breadth of products they buy from you, and one of those products costs a couple of hundred dollars, all you need is ONE sale to pay for a Messages-On-Hold update! If customers buy $2,000 of new products they otherwise would not have heard about, try to beat that marketing investment using other promotional vehicles! Now….update your Messages-On-Hold twice a year instead once every five years, and measure the revenue impact. Makes sense!
• It’s a great way to continually educate a customer on something new. Messages-On-Hold is not for just promoting products and services, it’s about educating customers. From a marketing perspective being able to communicate something is a chance to stay fresh and top of mind.  One of our medical practice customers educates their patients about how to recognize stroke symptoms. A cable company reminds their customers to recycle their modem to restore their Internet service before talking to a technician. A sky-diving company informs their customers about weather conditions for that day’s jump. The customer now is better informed having called your company.
• Communicate current and correct information. There are a few things worse from a marketing perspective than having your customer call in and hear incorrect or outdated information from an on-hold message, but not many. One networking software company I called into recently promoted a feature associated with an operating system that is, this very month, being discontinued (I won’t say which one!). Embarrassing? Yeah, but easily correctable. Keeping your Messages-On-Hold current prevents this from happening and keeps egg off your face!
• Your competitors are not standing still. Messages-On-Hold acts as a cost-effective broadcast medium to announce products and product features that are designed to counter competitive moves. If your competitor comes up with a feature that gives them an advantage, and you have a response, a on hold messages update is a fast, inexpensive way to get word out, akin to moving chess pieces on the marketplace game board before your Queen gets captured.

So when you’re putting together your marketing budget, think about new product introductions, promotions, customer information requirements, and competitive activity when considering how often you plan to refresh your on-hold messaging. If your refresh happens only once a year, think twice… or better yet, think four times a year. Also, buying deeply discounted Messages-On-Hold programs in packages (we offer them in groups of 4, 6, or 12) is much less expensive in the long run.

It’s short money for long dollars, and makes your Messages-On-Hold program a truly hard-working contributor to your sales and marketing strategy.

The post Where Was Your Product When You Last Changed Your On-Hold Messages? appeared first on Marketing Messages.

It’s exciting to be part of what appears to be a real rocket ship – user attendance doubled versus last year to 2,000 participants, and the energy the Twilio team brought to every customer interaction was truly impressive. The journey served to confirm our belief that integrated, hosted applications are the wave of the future in telephony, and the high-quality custom IVR prompts that only a professional voice talent can provide will enhance the caller experience for users of these systems.

Here’s me with some of the folks on the Twilio partner team.

I was struck by the diversity of the Twilio user base, everybody from entrepreneurial voice user-interface designers for small companies to project managers for Fortune 500 corporations. For the lean-and-mean startup, our professionally-produced, pre-recorded voice prompts breathe life and emotion into the company’s emerging brand, and sound more professional at a surprisingly low cost. For large corporations, combining the low cost of a Twilio-enabled application with our multi-language voice prompts supports cost-effective expansion into international markets, whether augmenting a North American call center application with Spanish voice prompts, or employing voice messages in Mandarin or Cantonese as part of an APAC expansion.

I also see the potential of adding auto attendant prompts and custom on-hold messages to Twilio-powered communications software. Twilio employs a system they call <Queue> to dynamically route calls to appropriate resources while hold music plays simultaneously, until the call is dequeued. This presents a great opportunity for companies of all sizes to promote and cross-sell new products to callers via our Messages On-Hold™ offering. The nice thing is that armies of professional services staff aren’t required to build this capability.

The small and medium size companies that represent much of Twilio’s user base have traditionally not had the resources to introduce professional voice actors and studio-quality audio into their telco applications. Marketing Messages’ low overhead approach brings the economics of these capabilities within their reach. As these companies grow, they will no longer be able to use internal resources to record their voice prompts; this approach doesn’t scale, and these untrained, internal resources just don’t project a professional image. Marketing Messages will take on all the nitty-gritty tasks of preparing voice scripts, coordinating multiple recording schedules, proofing voice messages, and naming/delivering/archiving the audio files.

During their main stage presentation, user after user came up to demonstrate Twilio’s capabilities. One cool example: Twilio has integrated pictures into their offering. Salesforce.com showed how they employed this photo-showing capability within their work order function that guides the equipment repair process. What does this have to do with professional voice prompts or Messages-On-Hold? Nothing – unless we imagine a whole integrated process which starts with a customer phone call that gets efficiently routed to the person managing that customer’s work order, right?

So, we’re happy to be part of the Twilosphere. And we stand ready to help companies large and small to fold professional voice prompts into their hosted software solutions.

By the way, if you need a place to stay in San Francisco, check out the Phoenix Hotel. It’s in a dicey part of town, but it’s the original “rock-and-roll” hotel – vinyl records on shelves along every wall, and one of the best burgers in town, hosted by awesome bartenders and wait staff!

The post Marketing Messages Partners With Twilio appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Bears are so smart they probably know that relative to humans, computers are bad at voice translation. Some bears might even translate languages better than most computers. Though they’re pretty shy in the wild, so it’s unlikely you’ll encounter one that translates the specific languages you have in mind for your telecom application, IVR system, or even for an auto-attendant. For on-hold messages, they’d likely do a fairly decent job since meaning and intent are more important than exact ideas. But for a menu-driven application requiring voice prompts your best bet is to have a qualified human translator do the job. How would I know that computers are bad at translation?

Some years ago I was working with a German voice talent and in the middle of voicing some fairly standard IVR prompts, towards the end of a prompt, she burst out laughing. I asked her what was so funny and she said her script read,

“Push the symbol of the bear.”

Because our talent didn’t have a copy of the English script, she wasn’t sure at first what the original, intended verbiage was supposed to be. We stopped the session and found the English copy for comparison. What the client wanted was one of the far more generic professional voice prompts, “Press the pound key.”

This is one of our more shining illustrations of why using a computer for language translation is problematic.

See? Voice Translation By Computer Can Be Bad

Using a computer to translate one language into another is a common practice because it’s “easy”. Often, native speakers of the output language are not always readily available, or are perceived to be expensive – especially when there are free computer translators on the internet!  And yet, the above example demonstrates that fast and cheap doesn’t always deliver the desired result, let alone a coherent one.

We see time and time again how the nuances of language – grammar, context, current vernacular – are not something about which a free computer translation service can make a good contextual judgment. In case more convincing is needed, let’s push some verbiage through a popular, ‘good’, free translation service (in other words, a computer) and see what comes out of a back-and-forth, English to Spanish, Spanish to English set of translations.

Here’s the Spanish:

“No utilice el ordenador para hacer las traducciones. Contratar a un humano en su lugar. Ahora, sólo para una prueba, tanto a través de una popular, ‘buenas’, servicio de traducción libre (en otras palabras, un ordenador) y vamos a ver lo que sale de una y otra vez, inglés a español, Español a Inglés conjunto de traducciones.”

And the same, back to English:

“Do not use the computer to do the translations. Hire a human in its place. Now, only for a test, both through a popular, ‘good’, free translation service (in other words, a computer) and we’re going to see what comes out of time and time again, English to Spanish, Spanish to English set of translations.”

It’s not all wrong but it’s also not all correct. When read aloud, it just doesn’t sound right.

Now imagine this kind of mangled content representing your company in emerging markets. In fact, try it out for yourself. Take some of your marketing literature and translate it via machine a few times back and forth and see how it can evolve into sometimes subtle, sometimes complex, sometimes bizarre, and down-right unintelligible gibberish.

Real people are good at voice translation for IVR and Call Center applications, whereas computers are really bad at voice translation

We recommend engaging a human for translation. Unlike computers with rigid rules and a limited database set of interpretations, good human interpreters know that translating the word-for-equivalent word of a script may not convey the true meaning of the original speech. Idioms, colloquialisms, and even single words have shades of meanings that need to be considered in the context of the whole, at which native speakers still excel over automation.

As local resources often prove time-consuming to discover, vet, and coordinate, consider going with a company that has access to dozens of native speakers who do voice translation. Talk to us if you have questions about your next translation and recording project.

And share with us some of your odd computer translations of your own literature in the comments!

–        Written by Dan Nelson

The post Computers Are Bad At Voice Translation appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Inaugural Blog Post targeted IVR and AA Developers!

We inaugurated the Marketing Messages blog with a FREE white paper for IVR and AA developers! Did you miss out back in 2017 when this started? Well, we wouldn’t want you to miss out altogether just because a few (OK, a lot of) years have passed since the initial offer and so (insert trumpet fanfare here) for a limited time only if you send an email to production@marketingmessages.com we’ll re-activate this offer. All you need to say in the email is that you’ve read this blog, and want a FREE white paper and within one business day we’ll not only send you the white paper, but we’ll also include one free custom audio greeting recorded by a veteran voice artist. Mind you, that custom audio prompt needs a script, so you’d best include the copy or else it will be hard to record!

For IVR and AA developers needing pre-recorded prompts for IVR and Auto Attendant applications, check out the link on our home page.

In the coming months, our eager troupe of blog writers will post about what we do at Marketing Messages, and how our exemplary customer service and production teams can help Voice Brand™ your company. Sometimes there will be a flurry of topical posts, other times when we’re swamped with large projects we may only post sporadically, but rest assured all the prose is carefully constructed to inform and educate you while trying to stay light, engaging, and informative.

Also funny, sometimes, if we’re all lucky. Guess it depends on the day and frame of mind. I’d like to think that I spend my day encouraging happy tones and pleasant speech patterns which will allow the professionally recorded voice prompt to easily and smoothly guide the caller through the flow without ever risking a hangup or demand for the operator. My goal is to help each IVR and Auto-Attendant developer receive their carefully constructed call flow voice recordings absolutely ready-to-use upon delivery. This means each file has been recorded accurately, edited carefully, volume-adjusted accordingly, files named correctly, and all guaranteed to please.

One of the best parts is that I’m goal-oriented and achieve a very high rate of success. Try our services and see for yourself.

In addition to the above Best Practices guide for developers of AA Voice prompts, recording for IVR, surveys, and auto-attendant/PBX messages, we’re also already scribbling our take on how to get the most out of your scripts & recordings for

• Translations and recordings in 80+ languages
• Narration for Online Training, including eLearning
• Flash applications
• Website audio
• PowerPoint presentations
• Podcast Services

Check back regularly for something new.

Thanks!

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