The pharma industry is a global, massive, high-impact industry. It’s an industry that directly affects some of the most pressing needs of its customers’ lives. More than almost any other industry that we work with here at Marketing Messages, pharmaceutical companies have a vital, pressing need for their recordings to be completely accurate right out of the gate. That drive becomes more complex when you start to consider the global sprawl of many of these companies, an element that makes even simple projects rife with opportunities for inconsistencies and errors. Making an effort to bring real localization to global pharma projects goes a long way towards insuring voice prompts meet every standard of accuracy.
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.