As someone who voices telephone prompts every day, I get orders in which the client has written a lengthy explanation like:
“….this phrase comes after ‘Please enter your…’ and before ‘followed by pound.’”
It’s a lot of effort to explain where the prompt will occur—especially when I have such an amazingly simple remedy, and it has everything to do with the correct use of punctuation. At the risk of making this blog entry sound like a lost episode of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the proper use of ellipses, commas, and periods will save you a lot of time, and ensure you get the right inflection from your voice talent.
Take the phrase: “your PIN number.” When it’s “free-floating” (no punctuation anywhere around it):
your PIN number
one gets absolutely no idea of where you intend the prompt to be placed in the sequence. However, with ellipses at the beginning and a period at the end:
…your PIN number.
…we know that a phrase has preceded it (such as “Please re-enter..”) and this phrase caps off the sentence nicely. Similarly:
Your PIN number…
(Capitalized; ellipses at the end) tells us that it is beginning a thought and will likely be followed by something like: “….is incorrect. Please re-enter your PIN number.”
Along that same line, ellipses on either end:
…your PIN number…
…is wedged into the middle of a sequence which might flow like: “Please enter…your PIN number…followed by the pound sign.”
It seems persnickety, but it will tell someone like myself—whose job it is to make these prompts concatenate as smoothly as possible—exactly where you need this phrase to fall into the sequence you intend. (And no, writing them all “neutral,” with no discernable beginning or ending, will not solve the problem. It actually leads to the lifeless, android IVR automaton that everyone is thankfully moving away from.)
There’s no big science to writing IVR scripts, but by following simple conventions of punctuation, you will avoid lengthy notes to explain what you mean, and you are almost assured to get the performance out of your talent voicing the prompts.
Allison Smith is a professional telephone voice, having voiced platforms for Verizon, Qwest, Cingular, Bell Canada, Vonage, Twitterfone, Hawaiian Telcom, and the Asterisk open-source PBX. Her Web site is www.theivrvoice.com.
