The Customer Experience in New Media; Win an iPad!
Hey, awesome blog reader: What are you doing for lunch on September 22nd? If you said “I don’t know,” here is what you should do. Check out the details of our SOCAP lunch and RSVP. This will be a fun-filled afternoon of lunchin’, learnin’ and prize givin’.
We’ll be talking about how customer care-focused companies are incorporating all sorts of cool, emerging media—social stuff, business video, chat, Web- or video-based tutorials, forums—are helping to provide a better customer experience and reinforce the brand image. Submit your example to win dinner for two anywhere in town!
Get on it! People are literally driving in from Portland! (Not literally, but probably Tennessee!)
Off the Wall, On the Money: Tell a Better Story with Bold Video Concepts
Did you know that GM Voices, in addition to being the worldwide in Voice Branding solutions, can also help you tell a better business story with creative video?
Creatively, the sky’s the limit. And lately, we’ve done a lot of bold and unique stuff, both for our own marketing efforts and for partners and customers.
Take a look at one of current video demos, “Bolder Video for Better Results.”
SpeechTEK Starts 8/8 in NYC, ClueCon 8/9 in Chicago
If you’ve happened upon this blog post in a very timely fashion, there’s a good chance you’ll be attending SpeechTEK or ClueCon. And, likely, you’re only going to one conference. We know it was a tough decision for you.
But thanks to the wonders of planning, GM Voices will be attending both shows! We love speech technologies and open source telephony equally—it would be like choosing one child over another!
At SpeechTEK, stop by booth 214 and say hello to Misters Jay Steinworth and Kevin John. Also, please evaluate all our new signage and displays. This blogger worked hard on them. Feedback appreciated!
At ClueCon, a less formal affair, find the newly hitched Mrs. Jessica Harrison (née Goulding) gabbing with attendees and taking in the presentations.
Yessir, we’re crisscrossing the country to talk Voice Branding with you, and also to give you a boss light-up pen. We’ll see you everywhere soon!
Check out this SpeechTEK video with several GM Voices cameos!
Being a Fly on the Wall at a GM Voices Talent Review Meeting
Gathered mid afternoon in Studio A, GM Voices’ talent manager, its top directors and audio engineers gather around the console in plush furniture, respective coffees and teas in hand. The lighting is dim, the proper audio-sampling ambiance created. It’s time to get to business.
This is GM Voices’ monthly talent review, a group evaluation of all the demos received in the preceding several weeks. We’re looking for a few good voices, but the obstacles for these prospective roster additions are many. This is only the first cut, and it can be unforgiving. The quality of voice is the primary component, sure. But is the read style natural; the voice demo is produced by reading from a script, but can our panel suspend their disbelief? Is there a market need for this style of voice? Does the voice stand apart from the other gender offerings in this language on our roster? If the demo was recorded internationally, is the studio setup acceptable?
First up is an Italian male voice. The read is clean and professional, but our reviewers agree that it lacks the hard-to-describe “it” factor of the best voice talent. Besides, we’re staffed strongly with Italian males. This voice goes in the “maybe,” pile. He might get a formal audition (the next big step), but it’s doubtful.
Next is a Hindi female voice. She has really good studio arrangements. The read is clean; the sound is distinguished, almost aristocratic. But something seems amiss. “Where did this talent go to school?,” asks our talent manager. “I hear a European influence.” Uh oh. This might be a deal breaker. It’s important that our talent maintain a local, in-country sound. Mark this voice as “investigate further.”
Then, a German male. He has a good sound, but his voice is combined with post-editing, music and sound effects that make it difficult to evaluate on its own merits. We’ll see if he has something a little more streamlined to pass along.
Our reviewers perk up. On deck is a Gujarati male. Interesting. Gujarati is an Indian language not formally offered on our language list. For reasons long and varied, we haven’t yet found the right talent. But maybe this is the guy. His standard read sounds good. So does his studio. In the demo, he also includes some commercial character voices that get a few laughs. Most of our recordings are play-it-straight voice prompts, but any acumen for the “acting” component is always well received. There is more research to be done, but it looks he’ll get a formal one-on-one audition with a GM Voices director.
Following the meeting, our talent manager works on the yeses and maybes. For international languages, the talent need to be authenticated as “native.” Assuming it’s a go, it’s time to talk business—contracts, commitments, compensation, assurance, insurance. All that fun stuff.
Several weeks later, it’ll all begin again. Maybe next month there will be the elusive Gujarati female.
GM Voices set the bar pretty high for trade show themes at last year’s SpeechTEK. (Check out what we did here.) This year, we’re going back to the basics: green shirts, warm smiles, light-up pens, and, of course, voice prompt solutions for any speech-enabled technology.
We’re getting prepped for this year’s show, and it presents new logistics. SpeechTEK has moved from the Marriott Times Square to Hilton New York. A new, unfamiliar floor plan, but we’re ready! While reading up on the keynotes (David Gergen? Nice!) and conference tracks, we found a video embedded on the homepage. Most excellently, GM Voices has several cameos!
Check us getting namedropped at 1:31 and then see our magical booth at 1:54!
Then, hear what our CEO Marcus Graham has to say about SpeechTEK, a New-York-in-the-summertime tradition.
The Founding of GM Voices Highlights a Year of Important Moments
President Reagan is sworn in for his second term. Hulk Hogan and Mr. T team up at the very first Wrestlemania. New Coke debuts and fails. Live Aid brings our most talented (and mulleted) musical personalities together to raise money for Ethiopian famine relief. Everyone agrees that Back to the Future is awesome. It is 1985, a year of many cultural landmarks.
Perhaps less celebrated, but nearly as important, is the founding of GM Voices. It’s 1985, and voice automation is still in its infancy—no IVR, TTS, GPS. Actually, acronyms had not even been invented yet. But what did exist was after-hours messaging—“our business is closed.” And it all sounded bad. Enter one man. Like Marty McFly, Marcus Graham came with a vision of the future; a day when branded caller experiences would be omnipresent, a day when companies would have no choice but turn their customer relationships over to automation.
Enter one business—a Rich’s department store in Atlanta. Marcus, a former DJ at Georgia State University and as aspiring voice talent, calls Rich’s after hours and is shocked by what he hears. “This recording is not fitting of the Rich’s brand,” he thinks. Then, a commercial breakthrough: “I can record their messaging in my buddy’s studio, make it sound professional, and I can probably make some money.” And so it was, and so it shall ever be.
Since 1985, GM Voices has exploded as voice automation proliferated across customer-facing technologies—telephony, telematics, business narration and multimedia. The Back to the Future series, while entertaining, was not a predictive force—why did it feature hovering skateboards and not IVRs fronted by natural-sounding, brand-consistent voice prompts from GM Voices? It is a slight we often think about.
Watch this video rumination on 1985, the year it all got started.
GM Voices Makes the Open Road Sound Better than Ever
As we blog, GM Voices is en route to the Telematics 2011 Conference to show developers how to enhance the in-car experience with voice prompts and commands that sound great on GPS, telematics and remote diagnostic applications. GM Voices provides the high-quality recordings for many of the top in-car applications. Not the portable devices, mind you, but the integrated luxury technologies that are made to sound great in top-of-the-line vehicles.
Recording for telematics is different than recording for telephony, but the goal is basically the same—to provide users with a natural-sounding, brand-consistent experience. Check out our GPS/telematics webpage and watch Marcus Graham talk about our road-tested GPS experience.
“Explore the space” with GM Voices; our process and facility make all the difference.
Anyone with a tape deck and a microphone in a basement can profess to be in the voice recording business. Technically, it may be accurate, but really, is that the kind of operation you want to entrust your customer contacts with? There really is no comparison when you consider the size, scope and service level of GM Voices.
GM Voices is headquartered from a 10,000 square foot production facility in Alpharetta, GA, just north of Atlanta. In addition to all the space dedicated to standard business stuff (sales, accounting, marketing), we boast a dozen combined recording studios, isolation booths and editing suites, all stocked with the latest and greatest recording gear.
Whenever we host a guest and are able to give a tour of our studios, the visual component of value proposition is communicated–voice recording is a serious business that warrants dedicated account management resources, a trained group of engineers and the experience to make your speech application connect with callers in any market.
Check out this short video overview of CEO Marcus Graham discussing our digs.
Returning to Chicago August 9-11 for ClueCon Open Source Telelphony Developer Conference; Make Your Plans and Register Online Now
Last year, GM Voices made the trip to the Windy City for ClueCon, a friendly gathering of the world’s top open source telephony developers. While we’re not quite as technical as the deveolopers at GMV, we do fit into the space nicely and are big fans of open source, whether powered by FreeSWITCH, Asterisk, OpenSIPS or Kamailio, to name several. In fact, GM Voices’ very own Callie is the voice of the FreeSWITCH project; hers is the voice of all the standard voice prompts of the software.
In 2010, our president Darrell Hensley (flanked by Callie), spoke of the importance of professional voice on open source applications. Our creative team also attended, interviewing the FreeSWITCH founders and several prominent presenters. Check out our complete ClueCon 2010 video library.
This year, our very own Jessica Goulding is making the trip to meet, mingle and learn about the latest and greatest open source features and technologies.
ClueCon is refreshingly different than what you expect from technology conferences. It’s warmer, less stuffy, and more focused on community. Check out Brian West outlining the ClueCon philosophy in the video below, and then head over to the ClueCon homepage to learn more and make your registration arrangements. Get a Clue!
The ‘Why’ and ‘Who’ that Defines Your Company Should Shape Your Voice Brand, Not the ‘What.’
The ultimate goal of any brand is to transcend the base functional benefits of its products and establish an emotional resonance that brings customers back time and time again. Any company that has established this connection—and let’s be honest, it’s kind of rare—has an ingrained swagger. You can immediately throw out details of its identity; its target audience, its reason for existing. These companies market with a mission. If you’ve ever heard of the “golden circle”—you understand the principle. By clearly defining why your company exists, everything else seems to come naturally—a look, a feel, a loyal buying tribe, and an internal brand compass that maintains a sense of purpose and relevance.
Let’s get horticultural. If your overall brand is a tree, the brand essence would be the roots or the trunk. The Voice Brand, the image you project to customers through your phone automation, would at least be a prominent branch. And if those roots go deep, if your brand is strong and well formed, Voice Branding—selecting a voice your speech applications—should be a fun exercise. Likely, you have an idea of what your voice would sound like. Your other customer touchpoints—advertising, an in-store experience, anything—paints an audio picture, so to speak. GM Voices can help you hone in on the sound to perfectly align with these touchpoints, a sound that immediately reaffirms your identity in the caller’s mind (and ear). If your brand occupies this rarefied territory of actualization, there are no excuses for a Voice Branding disconnect.
And then the other side of the coin. If your brand is too focused on outside-in marketing—a heavily commoditized, product-centric, unemotional image—choosing a voice may be difficult. Likely, anything branding related will be difficult, because it hasn’t been defined. Talk to GM Voices about a persona development project. In defining the attributes that will shape your voice to the marketplace, it may uncover some guidelines that will help you target buyers with a more clearly-established identity and purpose. We enjoy these creative consulting engagements, and would be happy to speak to you about your brand.
Check out this short video about the persona design process:
Dozens of voice actors record in our studios each week, providing clients a consistent voice for any application. More than 90 languages and dialects are offered, with hundreds of voice actors comprising our roster.
We invented the term and concept of Voice Branding, a single-voice customer experience consistent with a company’s brand image.
We pride ourselves on being great storytellers, and we hope this forum helps us spin a few yarns and make some noise. Visit our home base: www.gmvoices.com.
