Tone of voice in customer service is the identity and personality of your brand across all platforms. Your brand might be in womenswear so your tone is light and fun, and you might even use slang words and reference new trends. On the other hand, a bank might want to keep its tone clear and concise whilst maintaining professionalism and a sense of warmth to encourage trust. Either way, tone of voice is vital to get right for any brand.
Customers engage with many areas of your business – from marketing to customer care – so it’s crucial these all feel like the same entity. However, as customer service consultants, we often see customer care teams choked by restrictive scripts and a lack of autonomy.
This is often because management wants control over what their agents are saying, something we absolutely advocate for. You can’t simply let your advisors go off the rails. But finding a balance is essential if you want to maintain your tone of voice, especially for brands in certain sectors like fashion retail or health and beauty. So, how do you do it well?
How to Determine Brand Tone of Voice in Customer Care
Tone of voice can be difficult to manage in customer care due to the sheer number of variables in play. These largely arise from the fact that live communication leans more heavily on improvisation than, say, the carefully crafted messaging of a marketing campaign.
On top of that, it’s quite the task to project a singular tone of voice from every public-facing individual in your workforce. Employees have their own personalities too, and they can’t, nor should they, be squashed.
Harshly scripting your customer interactions is doomed to leave your customer support agents sounding robotic. This can make customers feel like your brand doesn’t care enough to treat them as individuals. That’s why we advocate for the use of a set of guidelines and prompts, rather than strict scripts and rules.
Align Your Tone of Voice with Your Brand Guidelines
Most medium to large brands will have a set of rules when it comes to your brand. Just ask your marketing team! These guidelines will lay out a couple of things that can help you determine what kind of tone of voice to aim for.
Firstly, take a look at how you speak to your audience via marketing channels. Whether it be an email campaign, social media posts, or even a TV advertisement, your brand will have a specific way it likes to portray itself to potential customers. Your brand’s voice is determined by market influences and sales tactics so, whilst you don’t necessarily want to transform all your agents into salespeople, you may want to take note of the general themes and adapt them to customer care.
Secondly, your marketing team will also have identified common points across your audience. This will include factors such as age, gender, location, economic situation, preferences and goals when engaging with your business. This insight into your audience can be vital when determining how to talk to customers when they get in touch.
If your customers are mostly young women looking for cheap products and quick service, you can train your teams to be casual and fast in their replies. However, if your audience is looking for a luxury brand that will provide them with a great experience, you may want to encourage a more formal language.
Only you know what tone is appropriate, but at FM Outsource, we can help you define that tone of voice as part of our services. We’ll read your business personality and suggest how that translates into tone of voice for customer care agents.
Encourage Informal and Honest Conversations
While structured guidelines are important, allowing agents a degree of autonomy is crucial for achieving a natural tone of voice. After all, they’re not actors! When agents feel overly restricted by scripts and guidelines, their interactions can become robotic and impersonal, and customers pick up on this. Empowering agents to engage in informal, honest conversations enables them to tailor interactions to each unique customer situation.
Furthermore, it’s actually what your customers want; up to 65% of customers prefer agents to use a casual tone when talking to them as opposed to a formal one. A more casual approach gives your agents room to create a rapport with your customers. Humour, empathy, and even small talk whilst finding a solution can go a long way to making a customer feel comfortable.
Autonomy and Accountability
Whilst casual, honest conversations matter on the day-to-day, what about when something goes wrong? Many brands are hesitant to admit mistakes and don’t want their customer care agents apologising without cause. However – just like in our personal lives – a sincere apology goes a long way to winning back that customer. But it has to be done right and for the right reasons.
This is why your agents must be chameleons! The ability to switch between friendly, casual help to a more formal, professional tone is vital. In fact, 78% of consumers would be unhappy if a request was denied in a casual tone instead of a formal one. However, any apology or attempt at accountability will crumble if the customer gets a whiff of a canned response. Whilst you can provide guidelines and suggestions, it’s vital that you let agents apologise in their own words and train them to be adaptable when something goes wrong.
Moreover, empowering your agents with the ability to make decisions such as small refunds, discounts, etc. can vastly improve the trust your customers have in your support function. As tempting as it might be to promise a customer the world just to get them on-side, it can easily backfire when it turns out you can’t deliver it. This will doubly frustrate the customer, so make sure you’re not setting them up for a nasty surprise when they ask for an estimated delivery time on their delayed order.
Ultimately, to give agents autonomy effectively, they must have good critical thinking skills and know how to show empathy in a professional manner. This means hiring the best, experienced advisors who are capable of delivering the level of service your brand needs.
Effective Training and Guides
Once you’ve determined what kind of tone you want to aim for, you have to tackle training this in your team so you can be sure it’s consistent across every agent.
Training customer service agents to embody your brand’s tone of voice starts with a well-structured and clear training program. This means explicitly defining the language and specific terms that align with your brand identity. For example, do you have a specific form of address for customers like as ‘guests’ or ‘clients’? Is there a specific, uniform greeting you’d like your agents to use? Should they always ensure that they ask the customer how their day is going, or do they instead focus on providing a fast response?
Whatever it happens to be for your brand, this vocabulary should be integrated into all your training materials and be included in popup guides within your customer service software to reinforce the use of your tone at all times.
Just as importantly, quality assessments (QA) should include evaluations of tone of voice. After all, if you’re not monitoring it, you can’t be sure that your training is working! Through QA, you can provide agents with constructive feedback and refresher training as needed. By doing so, you’ll ensure that every interaction reflects a consistent and authentic identity, reinforcing the overall customer experience.
In conclusion, maintaining a consistent tone of voice in customer service is essential for reflecting your brand’s identity and building customer trust. By clearly defining your guidelines and integrating them into comprehensive training, you empower agents to deliver authentic and engaging interactions. Ultimately, balancing structured guidance with flexibility creates a seamless, human customer experience that reinforces brand identity, enhances satisfaction, and builds lasting loyalty. Learn more about our customer service consultancy or reach out today to chat about how we can help your brand establish its own tone of voice.