Write It, Read It

As always, the simplest, easiest, best way to catch mistakes or isolated sequences of awkwardness during script review is to read aloud the thing that you have written. This may sound self-explanatory, and it is self-explanatory, but it really is amazing how rare this action is, on virtually every level of reading and writing. Reading aloud your words makes you realize the words you missed, the sentences that don’t work, or how clunky certain words sound stacked up next to each other.

This is especially key with conversational scripting. A sentence may look perfectly functional on paper, but then when you read it aloud you can catch stilted, overly formal language that breaks up the conversational flow.

As an easy example, how often do you, in conversation, say “it is” rather than “it’s”, or “cannot” rather than “can’t”. Microsoft Word and Excel won’t flag “it is” or “cannot” as mistakes, since they’re not ‘wrong’ per se. But informal contractions make up a large part of our regular speech patterns, and these small things can make all the difference in making a script seem friendlier and more personable. And it is these small things that really come to light when you read a script out loud and hear for yourself the places that are odd and awkward.

Collaboration

A great way to determine if your script will sound correct to someone other than yourself is to ask for input from someone other than yourself.

What sounds right to you might land awkwardly for someone else, and what seems complete to you may be missing vital information that someone else can spot. It is much easier to rebuild something than build it for the first time, so it is very common for our customers to realize that changes need to be made only after the audio has already been installed and garnered feedback from the actual users.

This goes especially for those customers who have very specific ideas for how they want a recording to sound, and what sort of tone and energy they want the voice talent to present. Even something as straightforward and functional as a call center script is an opportunity to convey a brand’s identity.

Which is why collaboration is so very important. Bring in fresh eyes to look over your script. Ask for demos from the voiceover talent so you can dial down to the exact sound you want. Have a clear line of communication with your partners so you can express precisely what you want. When everyone is on the same page as to what they are trying to achieve, it is much easier to actually achieve it.

Simple Conversational Script Part 3

Conversational scripting is a major trend across the various industries that utilize our services for their professional voice recordings. It may seem intimidating, but we can help you get that naturalistic flow that your messages have been missing and that your customers will appreciate. A simple conversational script can go a very long way. If you would like to start that conversation with us on this subject, you can download our free conversational scripting PDF here.

The post Simple Conversational Scriptwriting Can Be Hard, Let’s Make It Easy appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Be Direct

Don’t be afraid to have a specific vision (or, I suppose, a specific ‘ear’) for how you want your recordings to sound. The reason you are using professional talent for your voice prompts and messages is so you can have the highest quality possible audio, delivered with the utmost reliability. As professionals, voice over talents are used to receiving directions and guidance, and are able to adjust their performances to fit whatever tone and pace is requested of them.

Direction and guidance are not frustrating. What’s actually frustrating is when clients know what they want but can’t or won’t give those specifics and instead force the creation of multiple iterations of the same script until finally the voice talent stumbles over the correct intonation. But good, clear direction is always not only welcome, but actively encouraged.

The key is knowing what you are recording and who you are recording it for. Are you putting together outbound IVR voice prompts meant to interact with actual customers? Are you creating contact center greetings that will be the first aspect of your company that a client or customer experiences? Or are you crafting an onhold message that a client may have to listen to on a loop for several minutes while they wait? Knowing what you want goes a long way towards helping you get what you need.

Capturing the Conversation

But how to go about communicating the tone, pace, and energy that you want?

One super easy approach that we like to take is to host a live recording session with the client, the talent, and the engineer. In this session the client can speak directly to the talent, coaching such aspects as pace, energy level, and tone, allowing us to really zero in on the ‘conversational’ tone that the project leads are looking for. Sometimes, that can mean making adjustments to the script as needed to make it flow better while sounding more casual.

And once we are all locked into the desired sound, future recording sessions won’t require the same level of hand-holding. The voice talent can reference the existing audio and know the correct pitch and intonation they need to hit to line up with what has come before.

If a live session isn’t an option (be it from calendar conflicts, time zone discrepancies, etc.) we have several sample documents which detail the above mentioned ‘specific direction’ that you can use as a starting point. We’ll also examine whether script refinement is an option (sometimes this is a simple as converting a ’we will’ into a ‘we’ll’).

You’d be surprised how the slightest of changes can alter the flow of a script and take text from formal to informal.

Conversational Scripting Part Two

For everything from lengthy hold messages to short IVR recordings, conversational scripting is the trend that we are seeing across all the various industries that utilize our services for their professional recordings. If you would like to start your own conversation with us on this subject, you can download our free PDF here.

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What Is a Pronouncer?

Often, a clearly understandable “pronouncer” – visual or audio – is used to convey precise proper noun pronunciation to our Voice Artists. Pronouncers are used to document correct pronunciation and are shared between our company, our customers, and our Voice Artists.

How to Use Pronouncers to Indicate Correct Pronunciation

There are a number of pronunciation tips for Auto Attendant prompts and IVR Prompts. First, the scriptwriter should carefully review their script for any hard-to-pronounce words, and even words that have a chance of being pronounced in different ways by different people. Those that employ Marketing Messages for IVR recordings know that reviewing scripts for potential mispronunciation is a service we provide.

We also recommend reading the script aloud. Speaking the correct pronunciations along with any alternate pronunciations gives stakeholders a chance to decide what they want recorded, and equally beneficial – what they don’t want recorded.

Best Methods of Conveying Pronunciation

Written pronouncers for voiceover are the easiest and quickest way to indicate correct pronunciation. These can be fortified with phonetic writing and diacritical marks.

But our recommended, foolproof method is to find a perfect example of any words in question being said aloud. For example, if the CEO or Marketing Director can be found in an audio recording or online video saying any of her company brand names in question, we call this a “primary source.” Likewise, people that introduce themselves before a speaking engagement and pronounce their own name are also primary sources. Their own audio can be taken as gospel. They way say their name is the way our Voice Artists should record them. If the audio can be found online, our production team can extract the audio snippets so that our sales team can provide the audio to our Voice Artists.

We even provide a phone line for recording audio pronouncers. Our customers are welcome to call this line and speak the words in question into the phone. Like magic, their recording is instantly sent to our production team, which ultimately ends up being heard by our Voice Artists.

If you have any questions about finding and conveying the correct pronunciations for your scripts, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Our sales team will happily help you move forward to advance the cause.

The post What’s a Pronouncer? And Why We Use Pronouncers appeared first on Marketing Messages.

But yes, it is vitally important that the names of individuals, locations, and companies be pronounced correctly for customer-facing and internal recordings. While there are various methods that can be utilized to retrieve an audio example of the word in question, the simplest way to communicate a tricky name to a professional voice over talent is to write a pronouncer for your voiceover recording.

Write A Pronouncer For Your Voiceover Recording

Writing out a pronouncer for voiceover can be easier said than done, especially when you factor in the multitude of accents that vary from location to location. For the purposes of this article, we will restrict ourselves to examples in US English, but this matter becomes even more complicated when you begin to include global voice over talents whose basic relationship to the innate sounds of letters is totally different from an English-speaking American.

There is in fact an art to visually expressing an audible sound. One of the first steps should be to identify where the EMPHASIS is going to land when the voice over talent reads a particular word. Let’s use the word “emphasis” as an example. In this scenario, we’re talking about a company called “Emphasis Inc”, let’s say.

“Emphasis” is composed of three distinct syllables. “em” “fuh” and “sis”. So, reading that word out to yourself, where do you place the stress? Do you read it as “EM-fuh-sis”, or as “em-FUH-sis”? Or maybe even “em-fuh-SIS”? Where you place the stress dramatically changes the overall effect of a word on a listener.

At Marketing Messages, when we write out our pronouncers we always make a point of capitalizing the syllable that should be stressed. It is a simple, effective way to communicate the thrust of a word to a speaker who perhaps has never encountered it before.

And to back up even further, imagine you ask a voice over talent who is not a native English speaker to read some voice narration about “Emphasis Inc”. You will want the company name to remain unchanged even in a foreign language, so you are asking someone who has never encountered the word “Emphasis” to read it. Who is to say they won’t return audio read as “emp-HA-sis”? Or as “em-PHAS-is”?

To make the pronouncer completely foolproof, you might write it out as, “EM-fuh-sis”. But in writing out that version, I am of course assuming that you reading this say “emphasis” the way I do. Which brings us to our next piece of advice.

Don’t Make Assumptions

When you write a pronouncer for your voiceover recording, it is important to never take anything for granted. You should never assume that everyone will automatically say a given word the same way that you do. It is easy to fall into this trap, especially if you have worked at a company for a long period of time and its related names and terminology have become second nature to you.

But remember, not only does the voice over talent not work at your company, neither does a client calling in. Your office might be located in a town that you have known all your life and so you have never questioned how the name is said. But a customer doesn’t live in your town and does not have the same frame of reference. Having an audio file or Internet example that you can cite is a big help in both writing out the pronouncer and in coaching the talent.

Marketing Messages is based in Massachusetts, and here in New England we have a LOT of town names that people from New England pronounce in ways that make no sense to anyone from literally anywhere else in the country.

Here’s an example, a town not too far from us: Haverhill.
How would one pronounce that town name? Well, us folks in Massachusetts take it as a given that “Haverhill” is read as “HAY-vrill”. But if we were to ask a voice over talent who is NOT from Massachusetts to read that name, they will almost certainly come back with something like “HAVE-er-hill”.

For your assistance, below is a table compiled by NPR to show the way to best express certain specific sounds. For example, “long” is expressed with the same first syllable as the word “law”. In both cases, the sound is represented with “law”.

The post How To Write a Pronouncer For Voiceover Recording appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Ready to learn some pronunciation tricks for On Hold messages?

So you’ve done the hard part and written out exactly the voice message that you will need recorded. You’ve gotten your on hold messages or your IVR prompts worded precisely the way you want them, and now all that’s left to do is send the script out to a voice talent so they can provide you with the perfect professional-sounding final product.

But there’s one last step to consider, just to make sure that the audio is as precisely perfect as your wording.

That last step is reviewing your script to check for any names that might prove to be difficult for a voice talent to pronounce. When you work at a company or live in an area for long enough, the terminology used day in and day out becomes second-nature. But voice talents are scattered all across the country, and the globe, and they may not automatically know exactly the pronunciation that you intend.

For us folks in Massachusetts, we all know firsthand that the town of Gloucester is pronounced “GLAW-ster”. But no one outside of Massachusetts would ever guess that that’s how to say that name (where’d the ‘W’ come from?). That’s the kind of thing that needs to be specified in the script itself, rather than left up to a voice talent to figure out for themselves.

Along with locations, there are also product names, technical terms, and the names of people within a company that the IVR prompts will direct a caller to. Pronouncers are a huge help for the voice talent, especially global talents who have different rules of enunciation even if the letters are the same from language to language.

How a Message Sounds

The best way to communicate the correct way to pronounce a word within your voice messages scripts is to write out a phonetic representation, like you might find in a dictionary.

There are a few simple general practices to follow if you want to make sure your pronouncers are effective. For starters, always be specific about how you want vowels to be read. A long “e” (as in ‘taxi’) can be represented with ‘ee’ (as in ‘TAX-ee’), while a short ‘e’ can be represented with ‘eh’.

Consonants can also be tricky, as there are hard and soft versions of each letter. For example, note the difference between how ‘C’ sounds between “cigar” and “cash”. Again, these sorts of things may seem self-explanatory to a person who has spoken English their entire life, but we must often take a global perspective for our business and our customer base. A voice talent who does not speak English as a primary language but is trying to perform the name of your company will need clear instructions in order to achieve what you need.

Always Keep Your Meaning Clear

Lastly, always be sure to capitalize the syllable that will be stressed in a given word. We are almost unconscious to how much the stress within a word affects meaning, but it’s vitally important. Here’s an easy test: Try reversing the stress of common words and pay attention to how much your inflection alters it.

Take the word “hello”. Imagine if we greeted each other with, “HELL-oh” every time we saw one another? Doesn’t really convey what you want it to convey, right?

At Marketing Messages, we have tried to make this process as easy as possible by including a special extension where a customer can call in, read out the tricky word pronounced exactly how they want it to sound, and we can provide that audio directly to the voice talent before they voice your on hold messages or your IVR prompts.

As always, the goal is to get done as efficiently as possible to get the best professional product possible.

The post Pronunciation Tricks for On Hold Messages and IVR Prompts appeared first on Marketing Messages.

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!

The post Review and Format Your Script Before Voicing appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Obviously you can’t always give a customer a one-on-one experience and will at some point or another need to utilize custom Auto Attendant prompts and interactive voice prompts to receive and assist. But it is important to make sure that even these voice recordings provide a personable and engaging experience to someone calling in for assistance or information.

The easiest and most foolproof way to know if your message is going to sound natural is to read it out loud. It sounds simple, but you would be amazed at how rarely people try this! Our professional voice talents frequently catch awkward or confusing language, often just by reading the script out loud for the very first time.

And don’t be afraid to bring in a second set of ears! If you are worried that something in your script is awkwardly or unnaturally worded, you can always ask an office-mate or neighbor to spare a moment. Their reaction will give you a taste for what a customer calling in will experience.

It may seem like a small thing, but professional recordings help to shape the customer experience—whether you are in retail, banking, healthcare, or any other industry. They are a part of your company’s identity and should reflect the image you want to project. Your business has a personality, and that personality should be present even when a customer is interacting over the phone.

One small trick to loosen things up and give things a more personal flavor is to use contractions. Instead of “cannot”, write “can’t”. Instead of “it is”, write “it’s”. Again, this might seem like the most minor consideration possible, but these tiny informalities give a message just that little extra human touch. When language is too formal, it puts an audience’s guard up and tells them that what they are hearing is cold and impersonal. And that’s not the reaction you want a customer feel, is it?

Our professional voice talents give your messages personality! It’s part of the job that we are more than happy to do. But even the best voice talent can only do so much if the words they are tasked to speak don’t sound natural coming off the human tongue. So take that little bit of extra time to look at your script and ask yourself if it seems like a communication from a person, or a read-out from a robot.

The post How to Avoid Robotic-Sounding Voice Prompts appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Getting the Show on the Road: Where to Start with a Conversational IVR Scripts

First and foremost, the most important way to make your language more conversational is to make it more personal and realistic. For instance, use contractions wherever possible. Real people don’t say things like he is not and you are welcome in conversations: they say he’s, isn’t, and you’re. Your scripts should do the same. Another thing to think about with informal language is using clichés and sayings that people actually use, such as cool, be with you in a sec, and keep an eye on it.

Moreover, part of the point of personal language is to make customers feel like you care, instead of feeling like they’re a number in a line. One way to do this is by dropping the formal third person (he, she, the customer) in favor of the more personal second person (you). So what does this look like? Here’s an example:

Old formal message on hold script: “We understand that our customers’ time is valuable, and appreciate you holding on the line. Please continue waiting, and a representative will be available shortly.”

New conversational message on hold script: “Thanks for waiting. We know you’ve got a million things going on right now, and we’ll be here in just a few moments to give you our full attention.”

Choose Colorful Language to Paint a Picture

Engaging customers with your scripts is all about using descriptive language that creates vivid images in their minds. For example, instead of telling a customer that her package is expected to be delivered today (which is functional but bland), why not say “your parcel is in the hands of a cheerful and whistling mail carrier as we speak, so expect a knock on the door any time now.”

The important thing is that you help callers visualize what you’re telling them. Another great way to achieve this is by including earcons (auditory icons) of everyday noises, such as a doorbell ringing, a plane taking off, or a dog barking.

Don’t Shy Away from Humor

People like funny, and humor makes conversations more interesting and more personal. Humor is a great way to personalize your voice-user interface, especially meta-humor that emphasizes the idea that callers are interacting with a recording or machine. Here’s an example: a customer calls your organization and is greeted with the message, “Hey, thanks for calling. You’ve had a busy day, so why don’t you let me do the talking.”

The best practices for organization-consumer relations have evolved over the last few years, and customers today are looking for a different experience when they interact with the brands they like, and that includes your IVR scripts. The best way to ensure your scripts are engaging and that they enhance the customer experience is to make your scripts conversational, personal, humorous, and above all, human.

Give us a call at Marketing Messages to help you with your IVR scripts.

The post 3 Tips for Giving Your IVR Script More Personality appeared first on Marketing Messages.

… or “How our new voice prompt scripting format can change your life!”
– by Hutch (your friendly script writer and customer services guy).
I’m sure that Marketing Messages is not alone in the realm of production houses when it comes to receiving text and scripting in a variety of ways. Believe me dear reader, we have received scripts for IVR Prompts, Auto Attendants, Messages-On-Hold, and narrations in every electronic and on every paper medium you can think of – even scanned restaurant napkins, faxed to us for us to decipher! Well… I may be stretching the napkin thing a bit, but it’s been close, and the deciphering bit is very true.

Marketing Messages Committed to Transparency

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Often when we receive scripts or voice prompt copy for recording, the text is written beautifully and laid out logically. However, writing for the reading eye is different than scripting for a voice talent who will record the spoken word.

One of the key elements in writing for the “spoken” word as opposed to the “readable” is always to read the copy “out loud”. Hearing the text is the best way to assess if that text is exactly how you would like it to be heard by a listener or a caller, and to achieve the necessary result for the voice prompt OR promotion. We always ask that our clients read the text that they provide to us “out loud” before finalizing their copy. Here are a few reasons why.

Web Addresses, Email Addresses, and URLs

We often receive scripts or text for prompts that contain URLs that have been copied and pasted into the text body from an internet browser. This will usually result in a web address or link written as http://xxxxxxxx.xxxxx/xxxx  or something similar.

How this website is supposed to sound is a key element of company branding. It’s never a good idea to assume a voice talent will intrinsically know how the brand should sound. For example, does the client need the “HTTP, colon, slash, slash dot” etc to be spoken? Oft time, the answer is no, as the majority of the population is not only aware of internet protocol, but also only needs a little information to find the website in a search engine. For example, type into your browser “marketing messages” and you will be directed to the correct link to our own website. Furthermore, a caller listening to a voice prompt that contains a long URL may not have a pencil and paper to write down long strings of information. So, generally speaking, a web address or URL, when spoken, does not need to have the “HTTP, colon, slash, slash dot” part or even the “www” as part of the voiced prompt. It’s important to be specific and to include in the script only the words to be voiced, and in the way the scripter wants a caller to hear them.

If for some reason, our clients need to have the full URL as a part of their message, we always prefer it if is written or spelled out in words that are clear for the voice talent, with spaces and dashed to indicate words to be spoken versus words to be spelled out, or letters to be pronounced individually, e.g. “h-t-t-p colon, slash, slash.. etc., etc.“. This ensures the voice talent will speak the web address exactly as the scripter intends.

Pronunciations

While we try to guide our clients to think of the end product, the spoken word, rather than the written, at the same time we also try to eliminate guessing at the pronunciations.

When it comes to products, company names, street names, staff names, etc., there can be no second-guessing. To the client, the pronunciation of a proper name may be obvious because the client hears and says that proper name every day. Not so to a voice talent or studio engineer!

Spoken Word: Scripting In The Voice You Want To Hear

As a precaution at Marketing Messages, we analyze script verbiage very closely in order to home in on any words that may be ambivalent in nature OR just difficult to pronounce. Occasionally we will refer to the website howjsay.com, which gives a very proper (British English) audio pronunciation of most words in the dictionary. There are also pronouncer websites for American English such as forvo.com or Merriam-Webster.com and probably quite a few more that provide an audio example for pronunciation.

Alternatively, we would ask the client to call us (or we would call them) to give us a spoken pronunciation on the phone, from which we save an MP3 file and then play it back for the voice talent (or supply the MP3 to them, if they record remotely) so that they can refer to it and get it right the first time.

One of the services we offer is our dedicated Pronunciation Voice Mailbox on our phone system. Clients can call us at 617-527-3023 or 800-486-4237 and ask for Extension 130. If our voice mail is on, they can just enter 130 at the main menu. Then all they have to do is leave us an informal message with their company name and the desired pronunciations for their project. We then copy that to an MP3 and send it to the talent.

Last but not least, if the client can sound out or phonetically spell the word or name in question, we can write it down for the talent.

The more precise information we have, of which pronunciation is an integral part, the more efficient we and our voice talents can be. Proper scripting of websites and pronunciations means your voice recordings are delivered with each word spoken accurately the first time and can be implemented without delay.

Did I forget to cover some other aspects of how spoken word scripting for voice differs from traditional copywriting for just reading to oneself? If so, please let me know.

And of course, you can get a lot more info by contacting us directly as well.

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