An IVR voice over is the first thing most people ever hear from your company, and in a lot of businesses it was recorded on a desk phone by whoever happened to be free that afternoon. Callers notice. A clear, professionally recorded phone menu does two jobs at once: it makes the company sound established, and it gets people to the right department without three wrong turns. Here is what to record, how to write it, and what it actually costs.
The Eight Recordings Every Phone System Needs
Most IVR orders arrive as "we need a greeting", then the caller hits a dead end two menus later because nobody scripted the rest. The full set is short, and it is worth doing in one session while the voice and the room sound identical:
- Main greeting: who you are, and straight into the menu. No mission statement.
- Main menu: the department options.
- Submenus: anything behind option one, two or three.
- Queue and hold: what plays while they wait, and how often it repeats.
- Out of hours: your actual opening times, plus what to do instead.
- Holiday closure: the one everybody forgets until the day before Christmas.
- Voicemail: what to leave, and when you will call back.
- Error and no input: what plays when someone presses nine or says nothing.
Record all eight together and your phone system sounds like one company. Record them piecemeal over two years and it sounds like four.
Write the Menu So People Can Actually Follow It
The single biggest fix costs nothing: put the department before the number. "For sales, press one" lets the caller stop listening the moment they hear their reason for calling. "Press one for sales" makes them hold a number in their head while they wait to find out what it was for. Read a menu both ways out loud and the difference is immediate.
Four more rules that survive contact with real callers:
- Five options is the ceiling. Past that, people stop listening and press zero.
- Use the words your customers use, not your org chart. Nobody calls to reach Client Success.
- Always give a way out to a human, and mean it.
- Keep the greeting under ten seconds. The menu is what they called for.
Write the script before you book the voice. Rewrites after recording are the most common reason an IVR project runs long.
How To Choose Your IVR Voice Over
Phone audio is compressed and often played through a small speaker, so the qualities that matter are not the ones that matter in an ad. You want clear consonants, a steady pace and warmth that survives a bad line. Three of our most-booked phone voices, each strong at a different part of the system:
Every artist in our voiceover collection has demos you can play before you commit, which beats hiring from a photograph.
Menus in More Than One Language
"For English, press one" only works if somebody recorded option two properly. Machine-translated prompts read by an English speaker are worse than not offering the language at all, because the caller who needs it can hear that no one bothered. Use a native speaker, and have a native speaker check the script before recording: department names and opening hours are exactly where literal translation falls over.
Our voiceover roster currently covers 34 languages and regional variants, from Spanish and French through to Arabic, Hindi, Polish and Ukrainian, so a second or third language prompt set does not have to mean a second supplier.
What It Costs and How Fast You Get It
An IVR voice over is priced per recording, not per hour, so a full eight-prompt set from a single artist starts at around twenty pounds a voice and scales with how many prompts and languages you need. That is the part people get wrong in both directions: they assume a phone system rebuild costs thousands, or they try to save the money and record it themselves on a laptop.
Turnaround is usually the bigger constraint, and it is the easy one to fix. Most of our voices carry a fast delivery tag, so a scripted prompt set ordered in the morning is often back the same working day. What slows projects down is script approval, which is why writing the menu first matters more than picking the voice first.
One thing worth ordering at the same time: the audio between the prompts. A menu recorded professionally that dumps callers into silence or a radio station undoes half the work, and on hold messages for business fill that gap with something that actually sells while people wait. Our guide to on hold messages that keep callers from hanging up covers what belongs in it.
One Voice Across the Whole System
The phone menu, the hold loop, the out of hours message and the voicemail should all be the same person. It sounds obvious written down, and it is the detail most companies miss, usually because the recordings were made years apart. Matching them is the cheapest upgrade your phone system will ever get, and it is the same thinking behind our business audio services: one voice, everywhere the company speaks. Pick your IVR voice, send us the script, and have the whole system sounding like one company by the end of the week.
