Tom Baker at Vonage explores who should record IVR messages.
Who Should Record IVR Messages?
You have a lot of options available to you.
You can use internal team members, typically people within the contact centre or marketing department are normally the people who would do it.
And say, right, okay, you are now the voice of the business, and if you’ve got someone who’s got a voice that you really like and you think is going to represent the business really well, you can get them to record messages.
Generally, not always, but generally, the quality of in-house recorded messages will be lower than those of professionally recorded messages, but they will have a nice human charm to them, which is great. They are also significantly cheaper.
If you go to professional voice actors, you have the advantage that you know you’re going to get very high-quality audio, but you’re going to have to pay for it. It’s going to be an outsourced service that you will be charged for.
For both of those, there are pros and cons. For in-house recording, it makes it very easy for you to change the audio. For professional audio, there’s likely to be a lead time.
So if you need new audio on very short time frames, you generally don’t do it with professional audio because you’re going to need to get your voice actor, the one that you’ve selected, and then you’re going to have to pay for it, and that takes time.
The other thing that you have to bear in mind with both of those solutions is that these people could leave. The professional voice actor that is the voice of your company could leave the outsourced voice talent company that you’re currently subcontracting to.
And the key team member with the fantastic voice who is representing your company within your contact centre, within your marketing team, wherever, they could get an offer and they could leave.
So you are potentially going to need to consider what to do if you have to replace all of your audio and if you replace it in-house, there’s a significantly lower cost versus replacing it externally.
The third option is text to speech.
Text to speech engines have been getting a lot better. The advantages to them are that you can generate audio now in near real time. If you want to display dynamic welcomes to your caller in your IVR.
For example:
Hi Tom, welcome to Bob’s Company. It’s great to see you again. Do you want to speak to the person you spoke to last time? Hypothetical Steve.
You can do that kind of thing with a speech to text engine. The problem is that it is still noticeably not human. They’re getting a lot more humanlike, but they are obviously not human, and some people don’t want their companies represented by that kind of experience, which is perfectly fair.
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