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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Six GM Voices Preferred Voice Actors show you how they adjust their performances for different voice persona biographies.

Just like you see in movies, an actor assumes a different identity to meet the requirements of a role. It’s no different at GM Voices, where our voice actors tailor their delivery to best suit a company’s brand and target audience.

We’d like you to check out our new voice persona sample landing page, where this process is demonstrated with six of our best weekly voice actors. Listen to the different vocal characteristics of each style, how they match the biographies of their persona roles. This is the Hollywood component of GM Voices, and it’s essential to helping individual businesses achieve unique Voice Brands.

GM Voices works with the most talented voice actors in the industry. They don’t just have pleasant voices; they can create characters that meet the challenges of any company and any industry.

Check it out. Neat, no?

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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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