E-learning can be very simple and inexpensive, and often combines audio and visual elements. If you run a business, you can host an e-learning course on your internal network or on the internet. An effective combination of media for e-learning courses is a step-by-step slideshow, such as a PowerPoint presentation, supplemented by voiceover narration. Running aspects of your training in-house via e-learning offers a number of benefits:

• Developing an e-learning course is generally less expensive than allocating senior staff time to training, or bringing in an external trainer.
• An e-learning course can be designed to meet your exact training needs, and easily adapted when those needs change.
• E-learning is cheap in terms of employee time. Rather than taking a whole day or more to complete a traditional training course, employees can complete an e-learning course in stages, as and when they have free time during the working day. They can do it all from their desktop PCs or laptops – the only extra equipment you may need to provide are sets of headphones to allow them to listen to the audio aspects of the course.

E-learning production values

When it comes to developing an e-learning course, you have three basic options:

1. Design and create the whole course in-house;
2. Outsource it all to a specialist service provider;
3. A combination of options 1 and 2.

Many businesses choose to develop at least some aspects of their e-learning courses in-house. However, this brings its owns problems: although many companies have in-house graphic design specialists and software that can be used to create the visual aspects of the e-learning course, far fewer have the equipment, software or expertise to record good quality narrative.

Of course, it’s possible to record a basic narrative in house using a PC and a USB microphone. However, the inferior acoustic quality and standard of voice presentation is likely to lead to a production that sounds very amateurish. If you want to produce a truly professional, immersive e-learning experience, it’s important that the audio aspects of your course are properly produced.

That means bringing in outside expertise in the form of a specialist voice over recording studio with a good selection of professional voice over artists. Most e-learning courses are made up of a series of slides or interactive units that the learner works through at his or her own pace. The voice over studio records and produces the voice over for the narrative, and the visual images are synchronised with this narrative to give a polished audio visual production that acts as a virtual teacher in a cyber classroom.

If you are working with a professional voice over studio, there are two ways of recording the voice over for your e-learning course. One way is to design all the visual aspects of the course first, and provide the studio with a script with each section written to correspond with the duration of the relative slide or video frame. If the script is written to time accurately, the required pace of the read will fit perfectly with the visuals.

The other way is to create a production that is led by the narrative, by recording the voice over element first. This way the narrative will be certain to be read at the correct natural pace with little chance of it having to be ‘squeezed’ to fit the visuals. The visual images are then designed around the narrative.

Working with a recording studio on your e-learning project should be straight forward and an enjoyable experience. If you are not local to the studio you wish to use, you can often be ‘patched in’ to the recording session via your telephone using the studio’s technology. You or your creative team can then listen in and provide advice and direction from the convenience of your office.

Adding music

The other advantage of using a professional recording studio for your e-learning productions is that music and other sound effects can easily be added to give that professional TV documentary feel. All studios will have production music and sound effect libraries and some can even offer the option of composing an original music soundtrack, it all depends on budget and time constraints.

If you need the services of a professional yet affordable voice over recording studio for your e-learning projects, Clocktower Creative can help. Our fully equipped studios, highly skilled sound engineers and varied selection of voice over artists are available to add quality and value to your courses. For more elaborate productions we have a comprehensive music and sound effects library and can also compose bespoke music to order. For full details, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or visit clocktowercreative.co.uk.

Have you ever called a company only to hang up in frustration because, instead of getting to talk to someone, you’re subjected to minutes of irritating beeps, uninterrupted tinny muzak, or worse – complete silence, wondering if you’ve been cut off?

If this sounds like YOUR business phone system, how many prospective customers could you be losing to your competitors simply by not keeping their interest whilst they’re put on hold? If you’re going to reduce caller abandonment and possibly gain more business from the people who call you, you need to do two things:

• Let them speak to a real, live person as quickly as possible.
• Make the time they spend on hold as useful and engaging as you can.

The first isn’t always easy. You can only employ a certain number of telephone staff, and there are going to be busy periods when they have to deal with a substantial backlog of calls. It’s in the second area – giving your callers something interesting to listen to and focus on while they wait – that you have the power to make a difference.

You’ll find that relevant, interesting and informative on-hold messages are really effective at keeping callers on the line by minimising their perception of waiting time. As well as giving callers something relevant to listen to, it reassures them that you value their enquiry and will keep their wait to a minimum.

Statistics show that an effective on-hold message recording results in a 45% increase in caller retention – in other words, far fewer callers getting frustrated and hanging up. According to research published in Teleconnect magazine, 88% of callers preferred to listen to an on-hold message rather than background music alone, and 16-20% of callers made a purchasing decision based on the recorded information they heard while on hold. When you look at it this way, the time you have your callers on hold becomes an opportunity rather than an inconvenience. You don’t want to make it any longer than necessary, but you can make the most of it.

Effective on-hold messages

So if you’re writing and recording on-hold messages for your phone system, what strategies should you have in mind?

• Short, clear messages work best. It’s not a good idea to give your listeners a very long message to listen to, for a couple of reasons. First, you might not keep their full attention – a clear and crisp message is more likely to sink in than a long, rambling one. Second, if they are listening to a long message they might think that they have to listen to the whole thing before they actually get to talk to somebody, which can add to their uncertainty and frustration.
• A better tactic is to intersperse short, useful messages with sections of music. Alternating ten second bursts of music with fifteen second recorded messages works well. A strategy like this gives your customers useful information and/or a sales message as well as the clear impression that they are in line for someone to take their call.
• Reassurance is good: as well as telling waiting callers about your products, services and special offers, remind them that their call will be answered soon and – most importantly – that their business really does matter to you.
• You can also use an on-hold message to reduce the burden on your phone system by suggesting to customers that they visit your website.
• When choosing the background music make sure you choose a soundtrack that suits your main audience. You might be a huge fan of thrash metal, but if your business is targeting the over-60 age group it’s unlikely to go down very well with the majority of callers.
• On the subject of music, watch out for licensing fees! If you want to use most popular music tracks for your on-hold message recording, you’ll need to get permission from the copyright holder and pay a substantial fee. However, excellent quality royalty free music tracks are readily available at a fraction of the cost.

Finally, remember that quality counts. You want to promote your business as a professional enterprise, so it’s really important that your on-hold messages are recorded in a clear, professional way. It’s always best to use a commercial voice over production studio that has a good track record in this specialist field.

Clocktower Creative voice over studios have more than a decade of expertise in producing high quality on-hold recordings for a wide range of businesses, and can also advise on issues such as music licensing and effective scriptwriting. Why not get in touch with the team at Clocktower to find out how they can maximise your on-hold marketing potential!

For more information and contact details go to clocktowercreative.co.uk

The first thing to do is understand that writing for a voiceover is very different from writing for the printed page. When you’re reading a book, magazine or web page you can go at your own pace, and even skip back and re-read bits that aren’t clear. Audio is different. When you write a voiceover script, you need to remember that your listeners have to understand your words the first (and maybe the only) time they hear them.

So your number one priority is to write English that is clear and simple.
That sounds easy, but it isn’t. If you aim for simplicity, the big danger is that your voiceover ends up sounding like a reception teacher talking to a classroom of four-year-olds. That’s patronising, and the last thing you want to do is patronise your listeners, especially if you’re trying to sell them something.

The trick is to aim for a conversational effect. That doesn’t mean you have to be chatty or informal. It means using the style and tone of voice you would use if you were having a direct, honest, face-to-face conversation.

The best way to do that is to be as concrete and direct as possible, starting with the words you use. The difference between a good voiceover script and a bad one often comes down to word choice. Keep your words simple, preferring short ones to long ones. Avoid business and marketing jargon. Above all, use concrete words rather than abstract ones.

That means steering clear of words like cost-effective, efficient, impact, focussed, competent and cutting-edge. They are difficult for readers to grasp right away, and you’ll be making life hard for the voice over artist who has to get his or her mouth round them. Choose words that are easy to listen to, and easy to say: fast, low-cost, free, now, great.

You also need to limit the length of your sentences. In general, short is good, but if every sentence in your voice over script is short, you’ll find the whole thing sounds stilted and a bit weird. Aim for variation: one good technique is to use a relatively long sentence followed by a very short one:

Come to Dave’s Garage for Manchester’s best prices on tyres. Best prices guaranteed!

When you’re writing your voice over script, the best tool available to you is reading aloud. Write a draft, then read it out. Don’t whisper or mumble – blast it out in a good, strong, clear voice. When you’re doing dry runs like these, take care to enunciate clearly, just like a voice over artist would. That means making all the syllables of a word stand out crisply and clearly, while still maintaining a relatively natural tone of voice. If you’re doing it properly, you should find that you’re using your teeth and the muscles in the lower part of your face and jaw more than you would in normal conversation.

You could even record yourself on a Dictaphone or by using one of the simple freeware audio applications on the market.

Ask yourself: how does this sound? Are there any parts of the script that seem jumbled or untidy, even if they make perfect grammatical sense on the page? More important, did you find yourself tripping up or struggling to say particular words of phrases clearly? Those are the danger points in your script that you need to revisit and perhaps rewrite. If you have to work hard to say something clearly, the audience for your eventual voiceover – whether it’s part of a radio ad, an e-learning tutorial or a podcast – might have a hard time understanding it.

In summary:

1. Always remember that your audience only gets one shot at understanding your voiceover – listening to recorded speech isn’t like reading from the printed page.
2. Make sure everything is clear and simple without being patronising. Use clear, direct language and varied sentence lengths. (Avoid sentences that are too long – anything more than 20-25 words may need to be cut in two, and you should aim for an average length somewhere in the region of 8-15 words.)
3. Remember that reading aloud is your most valuable tool. Write an initial draft, read it aloud, spot the problems and rewrite accordingly. Keep going through this process. If possible, get other people to read it aloud and listen to it, too – they might spot problems you miss.

If you’re struggling with your voiceover scripts, feel free to get in touch with the experts at Clocktower Creative studios. They have more than a decade of experience in the writing, recording and production of voice over narrative for business – from radio commercials to on-hold marketing. They’ll be happy to offer advice or take over the writing work for you.

For more information and contact details go to clocktowercreative.co.uk