That Righteous Flavor Saver Helps Him Taste the Rockies All Day Long

(Learn about Movember at www.movember.com, join our group “GM Voices & Friends“; Read about GM Voices’ involvement at www.gmvoices.com/movember)

For decades, Sam Elliott has made his bones as a throwback to a better, simpler America, when men were men and moustaches were symbols of status and potent virility. Elliott and that bushy horseshoe ’stache are icons of Western and cowboy film and iconography. Rumor has it that Sam’s moustache is a quicker draw of the six-shooter than even the man himself.

And Elliott is no stranger to the world of voice overs. His is the voice of Coors, and he’s leant that measured Western twang to many companies seeking a Voice Brand imbued with charimastic manliness.

We at GM Voices crack open a can of ice-cold Coors Light and commend the moustache and talents of the incomparable Sam Elliott.

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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:

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Voice Branding 101 Starts Here

Head over to GM Voices proper and check out our new white papers page. You’ll find CEO Marcus Graham’s “Speech Recognition, the Brand and the Voice,” which also appeared in William Meisel’s “Speech in the User Interface” collection. (See a short video on that book here.) This entry outlines how to choose a voice for your speech application.

Also included is “Building a Better (Voice) Brand,” tips and tricks for improving your automated voice and customer experience.

We’ll keep you faithful blog readers apprised of our latest epic screeds as we produce ‘em.

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Client dial-in ensures the best read style for your application. Also: How the GM Voices creative team cajoles voice actors for persona auditions.

A unique benefit to working with GM Voices for brand-consistent voice prompts and phone greetings is our production telephone patch. Our client dial-in allows customers to listen in and/or direct their talent’s recording session. For people who are really keyed into Voice Branding, this provides peace of mind and opens the door to the “Hollywood” aspect of GM Voices. It’s just cool to ride shotgun in a studio session, y’know?

During an expanded Voice Branding initiative, GM Voices will audition voice actors from a persona report, a document that includes vocal characteristics and a biographical summary of a fictional virtual representative. This helps our voice actors “become the persona” after a pre-session reading. But, if that wasn’t enough, our creative team sits in during the recording sessions to ensure a brand-consistent performance that matches the specifications of the persona report. It’s a mutually beneficial experience for both our “office” employees and our talent; the office types learn the strengths of our performers, and the performers learn more about the corporate aspect of Voice Branding. Basically, it’s a thorough process that guarantees that the audio delivered for customer review was recorded with a lot of thought and care. It’s these little extra steps that put GM Voices above the competitive set.

If you missed it a few blog posts ago, check out our persona samples page. Here, you can listen to how our voice actors change their styling for three persona examples.

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An open letter to every company with automated customer contacts. This is who we are. This is what we do better than any company in the world.

Hello,

You have happened upon the official blog of GM Voices. We are the global leader in professionally-recorded voice prompts for IVR, auto attendant, speech recognition and other automated voice systems. We have provided natural-sounding recorded voice for phone greetings and voice messaging for over 25 years. Other businesses may specialize in voice recording, but none are so uniquely positioned to improve your automated customer experience. We do what what we do specially for customer contacts and marketing voice messaging.

Our business is one of process perfection. IVR phone systems require frequent updates. That’s why we offer next-day turnarounds of ready-to-load audio files in any format. We work in a global economy, where customers shop for quality of product and experience, disregarding borders and the past. That’s why we record in 100 languages and dialects, all in-country and in-context. We’re attuned to the fact that your corporate image is wholly unique. We’re attuned to the fact that your customers are wholly unique. That’s why our roster of professional voice actors are trained, certified and available by the hundreds.

Our QA process and audio expertise is thorough and incomparable. Our audio engineers were educated specifically for our business. Voice files are edited to sound crisp, clear and professional, every time. Our archiving ensures that any audio update sounds seamless compared to previous orders.

We help companies communicate with world-class Voice Brands. We affirm your customers’ decisions to do business with you in the f irst place. We help your application achieve a higher rate of caller containment, lowering your expenses. We record for expansive and deep call menus, and quick-and-easy auto attendants and on-hold messaging.

We’re available right now to take your call (770.752.4500). We’re available to elevate your customer communications.

Any language, any media, any market, any application, any platform provider. We’re GM Voices. We’re your voice to the world.

Listen to Our Voices (Full Media Player)

Listen to Quick Samples

Listen to Voice Persona Styles

Listen to Business Narration Samples

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This is a good book.

Defending the process, recognizing the fine line between extraneous pretension and essential brand ascription.

Two weeks before I started working at GM Voices, I was loaded with a hernia-inducing pile of books. They ranged from generalized marketing and public relations to very specific tomes on IVR, ASR, Voice Branding and speech technologies. I read most of these books, all or in part. Perhaps the best of the industry-specific reads was Bruce Balentine’s It’s Better to Be a Good Machine Than a Bad Person. It’s lighthearted, conversational and written in way that’s easily understood by non-technophiles (me). It provided a solid foundation of the stuff we try to humanize; the essential automation that many people hate, and our mission to make it so they don’t hate it as much.

One issue I had with Balentine’s book, however, was his critique of the persona development process. It’s baloney, he says. Irrelevant. Even the word “persona” is pretentious to Balentine. People just want to enter their account number. Personality (voice) traits and biographical informers are unnecessary.

I disagree with most of his assessment. GM Voices recognizes that we’re not making movies here. This process can proceed with comical over-analysis. So with respect to the company’s brand and its customers, we therefore proceed with just the right amount of analysis and development. Indeed, it’s a fine line between thorough and extraneous. But we’ve found this balance.

But so is this.

Voice represents companies on some of their most crucial customer touchpoints: Television and radio advertising, direct and event marketing, trade show presence, even on the very products they sell. It’s understood that the voice will carry the hallmarks of the brand to affirm the identity of the company in the customer’s mind. Do businesses and consumers find this frivolous? No. And it’s no different over the phone, where depending on the company, hundreds or thousands of customer contacts are handled each day. Does it matter where the voice of the IVR went to college? Maybe not, but a brand-consistent sound is paramount to us. And these details help our very talented voice actors achieve this sound.

And it’s not just us: Our client’s marketing directors are usually on the same page. It doesn’t take much convincing that the voice of the IVR should resonate with buyer demographics and unify the essence the brand from other contact channels. I may be more jaded than most, but I know when the hip technology company makes an effort to present the same image on their automation. I also know when the luxury lifestyle retailer drops the ball by having what seems to be my grandmother on the IVR. Of course, everything fails if the VUI is poor or if the scripting is a failure. What I’m saying is that voice complements design. Branding is not a hindrance to containing calls or getting things done. These are not mutually exclusive goals. Persona development is an important part of the overall customer experience.

And if improving the customer experience and optimizing the Voice Brand is prententious, well, pass the stinky cheese and come over to my house to watch Inside the Actor’s Studio, because it’s about to get crazy up in here.

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Is your phone system a star? Take this quiz to find out.

Often when we host visitors at GM Voices studios, we give away goodie bags filled with assorted swag:

This is one quiz you can't afford to fail.

GM Voices folders, notebooks, pens and pads, mints, Voice Branding in America and promotional iPhones (kidding). We recently developed a new addition to our folders—a Voice Branding quiz that separates the customer experience champs from the customer experience chumps. It’s a fun, quick 10-question assessment of your current phone system.

It’s Hollywood-themed and hosted by CEO Marcus Graham’s Hollywood bigwig cousin, Bobby “Blockbuster” Graham. You may have heard of him. He’s bigger than Scorsese.*

Download the PDF here and let us know how you sound.

Is it time for an overhaul or a firm handshake?

*Bill Scorsese of Poughkeepsie, NY.**

**Fictional.

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If your company uses prerecorded greetings or messages, it has a Voice Brand, whether it was crafted with care or with indifference. Unfortunately, the people who need to be most keyed into Voice Branding, C-level execs and marketing managers, are often too high in the clouds to evaluate or even recognize the very public front a telephone presents to customers. After all, Voice Branding is the ground floor; for many customers, especially in a global economy, it’s the front door of your enterprise. So who’s answering your front door? Put yourself in a customer’s shoes: Would you be excited to give yourself business?

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It seems like whenever I tell someone that my company produces the prerecorded voice prompts and messages heard on automated phone systems, I get a response like this…  

Is this your customer?

“I hate those things” or “I usually just start pressing 0.”

I guess it does hurt my feelings a bit.   You know, I am a sensitive sort of guy.  I usually just respond with…

“Oh, you must have called a company that hasn’t hired GM Voices for our user design enhancement services!”

Don’t get me wrong, we love what we do here at GM Voices where we create the best voice brands in the country. Our natural-sounding voice actors create virtual personas that help our customers speak with brand-consistent voices every time a customer calls.

Unfortunately, for every well designed IVR or speech recognition system in the marketplace, there are a dozen poor implementations that are irritating millions of callers day in and day out.

The voice self-service industry has got to do a better job identifying what issues lend themselves to automation and which ones can be better addressed with a live, thinking customer service rep.  And for goodness sakes, we’ve got to stop making it so difficult to get to a live agent on the phone.

It’s really all about taking care of customers. When voice automation works effectively, the customer is happy and keeps buying. At some point, companies that use it poorly will lose customers to the companies that see the real value in the customer experience.

Read this article (now blogged) that appeared in Newsday in New York.  It’s just the tip of the iceberg. After you read it, click on these comments to see what the average person on the street thinks of voice automation and the conspiracy to keep calls from talking to real, live, human agents.

Marcus Graham

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