Behind the Scenes…

Flickr photo courtesy of Hilary Perkins/"Cowbite"

I am not a big fan of reality TV, but a new reality competition on television called “The Voice” compelled me to tune in just because of the name. It’s “hook” is that the celebrity coaches must decide whether or not to select a talent for their team based solely on what they hear. The four celebrity judges are turned away from the stage before the talent enters. The singer then sings their heart out and if a coach likes what they hear, they turn around during the song and a potential match is made between the talent and one or more of the star-maker coaches. The idea, we presume, is to whisk us back to the days when star status was built on raw talent and not the biggest hair, the most revealing skirt, large jewelry or MTV-type video footage that is in no way actually related to the music we hear.

You might say I am jaded after many years in talent management and production, but I know it takes a lot of work to make things look that easy. A lot of preparation happens before we see the “All American” guy and his guitar or a girl and her dreams. The idea is to make it appear spontaneous and easy. The truth is by the time the talent has entered the stage much preparation has taken place behind the scenes that affect what the coach and the audience will experience between the intro and the big finish. There are many whose unseen contributions of editing, casting and producing the show influence the final few minutes we see: casting professionals and producers who listened to thousands of hopefuls who never made it to air; other handlers are consulted about which songs the selected talent sings, the order in which they appear, how songs will be arranged and what sort of accompaniment will be used. This work shapes the final cut. The one we experience. That’s exactly why they don’t just have the hopefuls send in an MP3 for the audience to hear.

The same sort of preparation should go into creating the best CRM applications. Those applications that are effortless to use have a lot of unseen artists working to prepare and deliver the talent to thunderous applause…okay well maybe the applause is only in our minds but you get the idea, right?

I am often asked to provide audio samples of our voice talent for clients launching new CRM applications. I am reluctant to do this without first exploring the client’s expectations of what the application should do for their customers and how they want their customers to respond. Selecting the voice is actually a very small (though important) part of giving life to a new application. It should be the final step in an arduous process of deciding what the customer should experience while using the application and how they will perceive the company hosting it. Great care should be taken when designing the user interface, writing the prompts and choosing the vocabulary. This preparation serves as the foundation to flawless performance in the mind of the user.

Ask yourself: “Does our application make my customer turn around in his chair?”

During her twenty years in the IVR and phone switch industries, Barbara Hawkins-Scott has been selected as the signature voice of several Fortune 500 companies. A unique background blending directing, production, acting and talent management has served to develop an outstanding group of voice talent and audio engineers for Syntellect’s MediaVoice.