Delivering healthcare services has become more competitive and demanding, with a strengthened focus on putting the overall patient experience at the center of the healthcare provider’s marketing and communication strategy. Here are some of the ways that professional voice recordings have evolved in support of these important shifts in healthcare priorities.

Transitioning Healthcare On Hold Messaging from Selling Services to Imparting Patient Care Information

Since the COVID pandemic, there has been a growing need for expanding the communication vehicles through which information is communicated to patients that help them to proactively protect and improve their health, especially patients who are older, are afflicted with chronic conditions, and/or live in marginalized communities.

During the height of the pandemic, we saw a huge number of our customers in the healthcare field, from large tertiary hospitals to medical practices ranging from dental clinics to medical specialty centers, come to us asking for new healthcare on hold messages that would help convey vital information in a succinct and comprehensible form.

With more people than ever needing medical information, and the very act of going outside and interacting with others posing a danger, the phone systems became a vital outlet for communicating such information to as many patients as possible.

Guidance and protocols for protecting against COVID were the central priority, but providers also accelerated a trend that pre-dated the pandemic by a few years: focusing less on selling medical services and more on helping the patient through critical and sometimes lifesaving information. Some examples of this practical advice include:

• Recognizing stroke symptoms and getting immediate help
• Preventing falls in the home
• Protecting adults from both tick and mosquito-borne illnesses (for ex. Lyme’s disease)
• Adequately preparing for medical appointments
• Getting vaccinated for COVID, flu, shingles, etc.
• Preventing tooth decay and loss
• Lowering blood pressure

Providing this kind of information serves a dual purpose: 1) keeping patients healthy, and 2) reinforcing the provider’s brand as empathic, caring, and patient-focused.

Keeping healthcare on hold messages current is critical to keeping patients informed.

To be effective in making your healthcare on hold messaging more effective, it is important to continually update the information to reflect new healthcare developments and knowledge and mirror evolving messaging projected by the provider’s other marketing and communications channels. Many challenges patients encounter are seasonal, so most of our healthcare clients update at least quarterly. Marketing programs and communications are often initiated or updated quarterly as well.
Using on hold messages to address the needs of diverse and underserved stakeholders.

As the American population becomes more diverse, and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs increasingly take hold, there has been a growing push within the healthcare community to focus on historically marginalized and underserved populations. Many neighborhoods across the country are home to ESL (English as a Second Language) patients, so more and more healthcare organizations are recording their on hold messages in a variety of languages and dialects, or at least including non-English paragraphs within their English Messages-On-Hold programs.

Doing so is a good idea for at least one practical reason. If you are servicing a community of predominantly Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, or Haitian Creole speakers, among others, then you need to offer assistance that has the best chance of being understood by your callers. It is entirely likely that your organization will have to be of help to a patient or patient’s family who does not speak English.

We have also seen firsthand how much more supported patients and their families feel when the voice on the other end of the phone sounds like them. Callers feel much more comforted if they hear a voice that is personalized and empathetic, even if the message is recorded vs. live.

Also, diverse voice talents and professional translators can lend perspective that English-only speakers do not have. They know how to vocalize concepts in a way that would resonate more with native speakers in underserved communities, ensuring that your messaging is heard, and heard 100% accurately.

In addition to offering over 80 languages, we offer English-speaking voices that would be recognized as People of Color. Click here to hear sample demos of our Black and Hispanic voices

Use One Consistent Voice Across Your On Hold Messaging and Auto Attendant/Call Center Systems

In creating a branded, personalized voice that people will associate with your organization, it is a good idea to make sure that the same professional voice artist who handles your on hold messages also voices any auto-attendant prompts or phone-tree recordings that you need. That way, your patients and other stakeholders will be treated to a unified, consistent caller experience that is both pleasant for the customer and brand-building for your organization. If you’d like to hear sample voices across both applications in a healthcare environment, visit our Healthcare Voice Services webpage.

Find Out More

Get in touch with us today and we’ll be happy to discuss the important shift in healthcare messaging that the industry is undergoing. We enjoy answering any questions you might have and developing the best possible on hold messages for your audience.

We’re here to help whenever you need with whatever you need.

Marketing Messages has also expanded into the podcasting field with our podcast division, ModPod. Podcasts are a great tool for spreading the word about your services, your industry, and your organization. If podcasting is something you have any interest in, feel free to schedule a consult with us today.

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The Importance of Being Exact

It should go without saying that professional voice recordings should be as accurate as possible, no matter what industry a voice prompt is going to end up being utilized by. At Marketing Messages, we pride ourselves on being as communicative as possible with our customers, creating as many avenues as possible to identify the correct pronunciations of names, brands, locations, etc.

That being said, there is a special urgency when it comes to crafting messages for pharma companies, given not only how vitally important medicine and drug treatment are to so many people, but also the extreme levels of regulation surrounding the pharmaceutical industry from both a legal and safety standpoint.

Pharma companies often approach us for the standard call center greetings, call center recordings, and functionary IVR prompts, but other frequent genres of recording include data privacy statements, efficacy claims, and lengthy swathes of legal information that has to be returned word-for-word exactly as written.

Because of the international reach of many of these companies, even the most boilerplate of messages will need to be translated and recorded in anything from one to three to ten to sometimes dozens of different languages – languages that differ wildly in syntax and sentence structure, not to mention entirely different alphabets and different forms of pronunciation for the English alphabet.

Troubleshooting Potential Problems

Given how important clarity and accuracy are to this industry, what can pharmaceutical companies do to give themselves the best opportunity for a perfect first effort every time?

This is where going local helps with going global. The best way to craft a message for a specific country is to work with talent who are from that same country. Who better to judge that a Latvia message is comprehensible to a Latvian audience than someone who lives, or has lived, in Latvia? What better call center voices to greet your customers than voices that know the accent and inflection that native callers will themselves be speaking with?

This is a level of expertise and nuance that cannot be recreated with speech-to-text software, or the other workarounds that we have seen companies try to utilize rather than working with qualified professional voiceover talent.

And we have seen many companies attempt to use Google Translate or other free programs like that to have their translations done quickly and cheaply. But while such software might translate word-for-word accurately, they do not account for things like syntax, structure, or the way that a native speaker for a given language can change the entire meaning of a word just by how they say it and how they inflect.

These workarounds may result in voice prompts that are literally accurate, but that play as absolute gibberish to an actual resident of the country you are trying to communicate with.

The Cost of Delays

The best-case scenario after putting out a recording with inaccurate scripting or incoherent performance is that it gets replaced as quickly as is possible.

But such delays can be costly, especially for the pharmaceutical industry, where new regulations and product changes happen rapidly and have massive safety implications. The information that a pharmaceutical company provides to their customers and partners has to be accurate, and they literally cannot afford to have faulty messaging on display.

By planning ahead and making an effort to bring localization to global pharma projects, pharmaceutical companies can avoid delays, mistakes, and interruptions that compromise their messaging.

Global Voices

At Marketing Messages, we are proud to offer dozens of unique voices from around the globe, along with a host of professional translators. Our voice talents and translators are scattered across the globe, bringing authenticity and real character to every message they record.

Spend some time visiting our voice talents page for a sample of the many wonderful voice talents we have to offer.

And call or email us today for more information on how your company can use everything from IVR and auto attendant prompts to onhold messages. We have templates and examples for multiple industries and we will be happy to chat with you about whatever project you’ve got cooking up.

The post The Pharma Industry Is Global – Bring Real Localization appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Need for Spanish Professional Voice Recordings

Let’s start off with a clear cut example of the need for Spanish professional voice recordings in Healthcare. In an article published in 2018 by the Chicago Sun-Times, reporters found that 6 in 10 Hispanic adults had a difficult time communicating with a healthcare provider “because of a language or cultural barrier, and when they do, they often turn to outside sources for help.” The survey used as a source by the article stated that “half of those who face those barriers turned to a family member or to another healthcare provider for assistance. In addition, more than 1 in 4 looked to a translator, public resources in their community or online sources for help…”

Wow. That is so much effort and energy being expended just to communicate. These sorts of hurdles and headaches would be annoying under the absolute best circumstances, and are reason enough for any company that expects to do business within Latin American communities to prioritize a multi-lingual staff and to load up with Spanish professional voice recordings.

But it is unfortunately true that folks calling to healthcare providers are generally not experiencing the best of circumstances. Whether they are calling because of appointments, prescriptions, or because of some kind of urgent need, this is, at best, incredibly stressful and fraught. And at worst, we are talking about life or death situations with no time to waste. So, we are forced to ask ourselves, how can we best close these communication gaps?

Utilizing Professional Voice Recordings

The simplest way to address a Spanish-speaking clientele is to have Spanish-speaking employees who can answer the phone. But this ‘simple’ approach gets complicated quickly. The phone can ring all day, every day, often with countless people calling at once. Dedicating an entire portion of your workforce just to answering calls is unfeasible and impractical.

That’s why many organizations use auto attendant prompts and IVR prompts to greet and guide callers. If properly set up, these systems can be the best resource possible to making these calls as efficient, quick, and successful as is humanly possible. Callers won’t be trapped on hold, and employees won’t have to spend all their time answering phones.

The benefit this offers to a healthcare provider is, frankly, incalculable. This is especially true for users that do not speak English as a native language.

Planning for a Multilingual Audience

There is no better way to show the community you serve that you care about them than to make the extra effort when it comes to communication. You can make your clients work harder to get in touch with you, or you can work harder to make this process easier for them.

As we discussed earlier in this article, no one is calling in to a hospital, medical practice, or pharmacist because everything is going perfectly. There’s a very good chance that some, or even most, of the people calling in on a given day are making that call during the worst day of their life. Time is of the essence, clarity is an absolute necessity, and every step towards getting help should be as easy as possible.

Making the effort to have professional Spanish voice recordings, tailoring voice prompts and IVR recordings for callers who speak English as a second language, it may seem like the barest drop in the bucket. But those small bits of extra effort can add up to be lifechanging. It’s one less stress factor someone will have to contend with during a period of their lives defined by stress. It’s one less aggravation, too many of which might dissuade someone from getting the help they need.

Let Us Help

Here at Marketing Messages, we have bilingual voice talents who can toggle between English and Spanish text within the same voice prompt. Listen to their audio samples here. Whether you need your recording in Spanish or English, we’re here to help.

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That’s why Marketing Messages works with remote voice over talents who are also scattered across the globe. From China to Eastern Europe to just about any place you could imagine, we make it a point of pride to recruit knowledgeable and experienced voice talents who can handle the often-complex requirements of our customers in the pharmaceutical industry.

Accuracy From Remote Voice Talents

One of the most important requirements is being word-perfect in the reading of the prompts. While some customers in other industries may come to us with scripts in rough shape that require polishing and editing, the disclosures and privacy statements that pharmaceutical companies need captured as professional voice recordings have been exactingly crafted and exhaustively parsed. It is vital that these messages be recorded with the utmost accuracy and clarity.

For the same reason, it is also vital for the voice over talent to perform the name of the company and its product names correctly. This is easier said than done, given the complexity and specificity of the names of many pharmaceutical companies and their various drugs and other offerings. Many times, a name might even be made up of letters completely foreign to a respective voice talent’s native language.

At Marketing Messages, we have developed strategies and processes to guarantee consistent performance from the global remote voice talents.

Local Voices, Universal Appeal

Coordinating many voice talents across the globe requires intricate planning and a sound and repeatable process, which is why so many biopharmaceutical companies outsource this work to us. But even with all our experience and all our carefully maintained production systems, there are always obstacles and headaches when dealing with international projects.

Beyond solving these linguistic and logistical challenges, the biggest advantage is simply the level of humanity that can be brought to these recordings by a native speaker with professional abilities. More and more we are finding our customers (and their customers) prioritizing personality and empathy in their professional voice recordings.

Call Center Engagement

Call center greetings should not be robotic recitations. Instead, the customer interacting with the voice prompts should feel as if they are in contact with an actual person on the other end of the phone. Call center voices should be as personable as they are professional, helping to create an experience that is warm, inviting, that helps a customer feel as if their needs are being addressed and the company they are dealing with has their best interests at heart.

The voice talents can prove helpful in this even beyond simply voicing the script. As residents of the very countries where these recordings will be deployed, the voice talents can identify mistakes and oversights in a call center script. A translation that may be word-for-word ‘correct’ may miss intricacies specific to regions and dialects that throw the entire meaning off.

On many occasions we have had global voice talents inform us that while a provided translation is ‘correct’, it does not align with how people in their country actually speak or like to be addressed. Taking these considerations into account almost always results in a better final audio product.

Remote Voice Over Talent for Global Reach

It is vital that companies with a global audience utilize global resources to create the best audio experience possible. With our network of global remote voice talents, we are able to craft messages that for audiences of not just hundreds, or even thousands of listeners, but for actual millions of callers who rely on these recordings for everything from business to their active health concerns.

With that sort of need, it is our responsibility to make such an effort, and we encourage our global customers, especially pharmaceutical companies, to give serious thought to making that same commitment.

To start off, why not check out our library of available voice talents. And let us know if you’d like to know more about creating recordings suited for today’s global market.

The post Pharmaceutical Companies Are Global; Our Remote Voice Talents Are Too! appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Reporting the Numbers

Even as America has become an increasingly more diverse country, the healthcare industry has remained stubbornly resistant to similar change. In an article dated from March 2021, the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences found that 64% of physicians are male and 56% are white. The majority of nurse practitioners, physical therapists, and occupational therapists are female, but only 25% are non-white.

According to the St. Augustine article, referencing data from the most recent U.S. Census, only 6% of physicians identify as Hispanic, despite Hispanics representing 19% of the population. Only 5% of physicians identify as Black or African-American, despite 13% of the population being Black.

“People who are part of gender, racial, religious, and sexual minority groups may face obstacles in the healthcare workforce, including discrimination, fewer job offers, and uneven promotion opportunities—as well as challenges accessing the quality education they need to enter the field in the first place,” the article states.

Effects of COVID

The COVID pandemic has only exacerbated this preexisting reality, as communities of color have suffered from the effects of the pandemic at a much more pronounced and costly (in every sense of the word) than White communities.

“Given this harrowing reality, combined with the positive energy of current social movements around correcting systemic iniquities, it’s a particularly important time for health administrators to develop cultural competency,” the St. Augustine editorial states.

Diverse Voices

Professional voice recordings are part of that cultural competency. They are the first public face that is presented to someone contacting your organization for the first time. The auto attendant prompts that a caller will navigate are the guide they need to use to get whatever services, medicines, or appointments they will need.

And oftentimes, the caller will be in the midst of either a sudden or long-term health problem while making these calls. That was already the case before the COVID-19 pandemic, but now there are added layers of stress and discomfort on top of virtually every personal and professional interaction, especially as concerns hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, etc.

There is no way to calculate the psychological and emotional burdens that can be eased for a caller when that voice on the phone sounds like themselves, or like someone they might know, rather than a clipped, mechanical recitation from a voice that has no connection to this person or to anyone in the surrounding neighborhoods and communities.

Doesn’t that make a hospital seem that much more imposing? That much more stressful an institution to have to spend time dealing with? Doesn’t it make more sense for a healthcare provider to try and make itself feel at home among the people it will serve, and the culture into which it will exist?

Putting in the Work

In an article by Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, “The Importance of Diversity and Inclusion in the Healthcare Workforce”, Dr. Stanford writes that the first, critical step to increasing diversity is simply making the choice to make it a priority.

It’s an effort that we at Marketing Messages have also been making, with a recent push to recruit more African-American professional voice performers. We’ve already seen enthusiasm from some of our regular customers for more diverse voice selections, and it’s an effort we will continue to make.

So make the choice to put in the work. We live in a global world, and all share in beautiful and diverse communities. Having professional voice recordings that reflect those communities should be a priority for any company existing in this modern age, but voice diversity in healthcare is especially critical.

The post Why There’s a Need for Voice Diversity in Healthcare appeared first on Marketing Messages.

Messages Tailored to Inform Clients and Patients

To be sure, we certainly see standard voice message scripts from hospitals and medical practices. Hospitals, like any other complex structure, need phone directories to different departments and individuals, including individual doctors. There will need to be messages tailored to inform clients and patients of locations, directions, emergency numbers to contact, and hours of operation.

But then there are other needs, specific to medical practices. Scheduling is a major concern for hospitals, including post-op appointments and follow-ups or outbound appointment reminders for patients who already have an appointment on the books.

For internal communication, we have also seen hospitals request voice recordings that can be utilized for staff to call in and schedule their own time off. Here’s one example of that kind of auto-attendant message: “You have reached the Outpatient Therapy Services staff call-out line. If you’re calling out for the day, please leave a message after the prompt with your name and reason for calling out. Calls are picked up Monday through Friday from 6:30 AM until 6:30 PM. Please contact your supervisor on his/her direct line in addition to leaving a message on this line.”

Healthcare clients also utilize professional voice talents for messages related to testing results, outpatient lab services, prescription refills, patient surveys, ordering medical supplies, and, in some cases, informing patients about dental eligibility and benefits information.

Professional Voice Prompt for Healthcare Example

An IVR prompt system related to benefits might look something like this:
“Type 1 benefits include preventive and diagnostic services. Quartet Dental will provide coverage up to…
“Type 2 benefits include minor restorative services – including periodic maintenance. Quartet Dental will provide coverage up to…
“Type 3 benefits include major restorative services. Quartet Dental will provide coverage up to…”
And so on, for every option and combination of information that you might need.

And finally, our clients in the healthcare industry utilize voice narration for health services information, be it the hotline for information about that year’s flu, or, in the case of this past year, Covid. Voiceover recordings are also implemented to assist in medical records requests or to post information for prospective employees or students.

Professional Benefits

A massive benefit to using a professional voice talent for customer-facing messaging is the professional’s ability to modulate their performance based on the needs of a given message. As we have seen, there are many, many different kinds of voiceover recordings, and a different delivery might be preferred depending on what is being communicated to whom.

One of our esteemed voice talents, Roxanne, regularly voices English and Spanish messages for a children’s hospital, and she makes a point to be extra calming and reassuring when she performs for them.

Other hospitals and practices might prioritize a delivery that is rock-steady and thoroughly unemotional as it delivers information to patients. A smaller facility might prefer language in their messages that is casual, conversational, maybe borderline folksy as it addresses a small community and region, while a larger operation might wish to be as clinical as possible.

These are the kinds of discussions that can be had about the different sorts of professional voice prompts utilized by the medical and healthcare industries. But they are the same kind of discussions that can be had by any customer in any industry. There are always opportunities to do more with your professional voice recordings and on-hold messages. The only question is whether or not you will make the most out of those opportunities.

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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.

The PPACA (Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) will require healthcare providers to increase the breadth of channels through which they communicate to Limited English Proficient (LEP) patients. Studies have shown that LEP patients have more negative health outcomes, higher re-admission rates, and longer hospital stays than the general population. Therefore, as the individual mandate proscribed by ACA brings more LEP patients into healthcare coverage, healthcare providers are pursuing any and every means possible to ensure that these patients receive the information and guidance they need to get and stay healthy. This reality has been reflected in the marked increase we’ve seen in the number of providers employing professionally recorded healthcare voice prompts in languages other than English over the past 6 months.

The mandate here is not only a matter of providing timely services, it is a matter of cost as well. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) cited over 2,000 hospitals for failing to substantively reduce their readmission rates, with over 300 incurring a fine equal to 1% of their Medicare payments. Therefore, it is critical to give LEP patients the best chance of avoiding readmission by ensuring they are able to follow post-discharge instructions and receive access to healthcare services.

How multi-language prompts aid clients

So how can multi-language voice prompts and messages help patients and clients? By providing recorded voice services in the LEP patient’s native language, healthcare providers can:

• Reduce the cost of bilingual call center agents for routinely handling repetitive tasks, such as call routing to different departments.
• Provide critical medical information – such as flu hotline, test results, and pre-and post-surgery instructions.
• Improve health outcomes by providing automated reminders to take medicine, refill prescriptions, and schedule follow-up appointments.
• Ensure LEP patients make it to these appointments by providing driving directions and hours of operations.

Live agents vs. automated prompts: Can they co-exist?

Most regulatory mandates or guidelines around LEP clearly encourage health call centers to minimize hold times and lower disconnect rates – presumably by providing callers access to staff who speak the native language of LEP patients. For example, the North American Quitline Consortium (NAQC) conducted a timeliness study to measure enrollee beneficiary call center phone lines and pharmacy technical help desk lines to track these metrics. The study is conducted year-round, with quarterly compliance actions taken when an organization fails to maintain an average hold time of 2 minutes or less, and when an organization has an average disconnect rate greater than 5%.

In addition, federal and state regulators are requiring that healthcare providers put interpreters and additional native language-speaking call center staff in place to serve LEP patients, and states are beginning to respond:

• In Oregon, where over 500,000 individuals speak Spanish, Russian, or Vietnamese at home, the state health exchange has ramped up the number of staff to ensure that guidelines established by the NAQC are met.
• In Florida, where 26% of the population speaks a language other than English, the department that handles Medicaid applications has significantly expanded its call center operations with bilingual agents.

Voice Prompts as an effective complement to live agents

So on the surface, there may appear to be a dilemma here. If the requirement is to get the LEP caller to a live native-speaking resource, why provide them access to automated systems with IVR prompts in languages other than English?

Here are a few arguments:

• Multi-lingual call distribution prompts gets non-English speakers to the right native speaker more quickly. If a non-English speaker caller can’t be directed to the right department, he or shel may not get to an interpreter or a call center resource that speaks his/her language.
• If routine transactions can be handled with pre-recorded voice prompts and on-hold messages, more multi-lingual agent time can be spent on more complex interactions. Interpreters and multi-lingual call center agents with the right skills are scarce resources. The less time they spend, transferring calls and answering routine questions, the more they can spend consulting with the caller and providing comfort and support.
• With a well-designed call flow, the caller can get the information they’re looking for without being put on hold. If a patient needs directions in Spanish but an English speaker picks up the phone, guess what happens while the agent looks for someone who speaks Spanish?
• Should the caller be put on hold, a Messages-On-Hold program can convey key information at a much lower cost. In addition to promoting its services in general, one sports medicine practice includes details relating to concussion symptoms as part of their on-hold messages.

In summary, providing professional voice prompts and on-hold messages in languages other than English is an effective tactic that supports a multi-channel strategy for improving patient care and lowering the cost of supporting LEP patients. Please feel free to visit our Voices Page to check out our sample audio demos for Spanish, French, and more than 60 other languages and regional dialects.

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Professional Voice Prompts deployed in voice telephony applications afford healthcare providers, payers, and their technology partners a low-cost way to supply valuable information to patients, as well as to streamline compliance processes. All without taxing existing internal resources.

Historically, the use of voice systems has been functionally limited and unimaginative, focusing primarily on basic caller greetings and call distribution (“for appointments, press 1, for patient hours, press 2”, and so on). However, more progressive patient-centric providers are thinking critically about how to improve patient care by expanding the scope of voice prompts within their patient-facing systems, as well as using professional voice actors to sound more professional, accessible, and caring. A number of hospitals we work with now make the following information available to their patients through these systems:

• Flu hotline – One hospital places their patients a touchtone away from flu information that includes a listing of symptoms and how to treat them, immunization protocols, plus advice on the efficacy of over-the-counter drugs.

• Outpatient lab services – This includes what patients need to bring to appointments and how to obtain and where/how to send medical records. 

• Driving directions and service hours – A tertiary hospital can offer dozens of services across multiple sites: urgent care, radiology, physical therapy, etc. A well-designed auto attendant system can guide patients to the right locations at the right times.

• Hiring information – One hospital even provides voice prompts that educate prospective physicians and other staff on the process of applying for open positions and how to track an application throughout the interviewing process.

There is a new sense of urgency for health care providers, payers, and “med tech” companies to be more creative and flexible in leveraging voice systems. Changes in the nation’s healthcare policy present new challenges to these organizations. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) represents an opportunity to help its stakeholders sort through the myriad of options, and the information and processes associated with them. The ACA requires that all Americans acquire healthcare, and mandates the establishment of state exchanges through which patients can choose from a variety of plan options. In addition, the law mandates a new set of required benefits and establishes compliance protocols for reporting.

While central websites have been set up to inform the general public, such as www.healthcare.gov, we believe that forward-looking healthcare providers see the opportunity to generate goodwill among their patients by providing them localized, over-the-phone ACA information in their native language. Here are some examples of such information:

• Enrollment deadlines and other information –  Key dates have been established for plan enrollment. However, patients of hospitals in certain locales may have state-specific enrollment milestones and requirements that could be cost-effectively communicated via voice systems. Plan-specific deductibles, out-of-pocket costs, and penalties for non-enrollment could also be communicated in this manner – enabling patients to make the right choice.

• Qualification requirements – There is a myriad of rules governing who is eligible for certain plans – including changing income thresholds for coverage qualification. Make this information available any time a patient calls in.

• New benefits – ACA mandates the coverage of pre-existing conditions and certain preventive care measures. Informing stakeholders of these changes in the course of a patient phone call not only generates goodwill but may reduce the overall cost of coverage.

• Additional sources of information – A good voice system can point patients to resources that could help them make choices. For example, the Kaiser Foundation Family Calculator enables patients to determine cost savings associated with various plan options, based on their personal situations.

ACA also requires organizations to report employment hours as part of its compliance regime.  Many human resources departments are now updating their caller prompts to enable this information to be collected over the phone.

The benefits of professionally-recorded voice prompts

Healthcare choices can be a source of stress and confusion. If you’re a patient faced with looming deadlines and confusing options,  do you want to hear a robotic or disinterested voice when calling your provider? And, on the provider side, do you really want time-strapped internal resources to be employed to record and track voice prompts when plan options change and the next round of ACA rules/regulations need to be instituted? Plus, we can’t neglect serving constituencies who speak languages other than English.

Professional voice prompts are recorded by voiceover artists who are trained to sound positive and helpful to callers. They are also proficient at recording with a consistent tone, inflection, and pronunciation across multiple sessions, spanning years, so that changes can be made over time without compromising the integrity of the voice user interface.

Patients are reaching out to the healthcare community through a myriad of channels – including interconnected web-based systems, mobile apps, and social media – but the telephone is still a critical component for patient outreach. Expanding the scope of information accessible to patients is an effective and low-cost vehicle for keeping them informed, up-to-date, and most of all, healthy.

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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

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