Striking the right tone in customer service interactions can be challenging. You need to make sure you’re clearly understood, empathic, and helpful. At the same time, you want to represent the brand appropriately.
It’s a lot to manage at the same time. Do you use a more casual, informal tone, or stay professional? Do you strive to provide the most informative response you can, or keep it concise?
Let’s talk about why customer service voice matters across all channels. Then we’ll explain how you can use simple techniques to draft productive responses, and keep your approach consistent across the entire support team.
The Role Tone of Voice Plays in Customer Service
First and foremost, tone of voice provides a cohesive brand experience. The way you communicate during support interactions should be consistent with other interactions customers have with your business.
Let’s say your brand aims for a convenient experience — and that value is reflected in your product, on your website, and in your marketing materials. Your customer service tone of voice should also reflect that branding. If a customer has been primed with a certain set of expectations (immediacy, easy of use), they’ll expect the same from your support team.
In the above example, you can see how Shippie leverages self-service via live chat. The approach is reflective of the branding on the website, promising to “handle customer support” so you can “focus on your business”.
The customer service voice here reinforces the brand’s values. Even though this interaction begins via a chatbot, the tone has been carefully crafted. There’s a casual feel thanks to the use of emojis, as well as direct questions focused on solving the issue promptly.
If the customer reports a more advanced issue that cannot be handled by the chatbot, an email is routed to an agent who is brought in to assist. You don’t have to go digging for an email contact (the support is still being ‘handled for you’).
And the same tone of voice (casual, helpful, concise) is used by the humans agents who follow up. All of this has a few results:
- It creates clear and consistent brand messaging. Shippie’s support channels reflect the brand’s casual and approachable tone, which is echoed across web content and social media. Customers have been primed with a certain set of expectations, which are then met and reaffirmed through support communications.
- It reinforces their values. Shippie’s website and social media place an emphasis on the value they provide to customers. They want to reduce stress and responsibilities to free up company time. Their support interactions focus on short, straight-to-the-point answers, and leading questions that help agents make sense of the issue right away.
- It impacts communication in a positive way. Consider the impact of positive vs. negative language. If you’re told there’s “nothing” an agent can do, you probably won’t feel valued as a customer. Empathy is essential, and Shippie’s chatbot is set up to reflect the same tone that its agents use — apologetic for any error or delay.
Bringing It Home: How a Carefully-Crafted Customer Service Voice Benefits Your Brand
In our example above, using a specific tone consistently establishes and reinforces the company’s brand image. It can do the same for your own small business. Understanding exactly what benefits are possible makes it easier to set goals and determine if this aspect of your branding strategy is working.
Reinforces Brand Messaging and Starts Conversations Off Right
Your customer service voice can set the tone for all communications, and guide your customers in a particular direction.
If you approach an inquiry with a casual but helpful tone, you’re more likely to prompt a similar response. If your brand presents a very professional image, your responses will need to balance a formal tone with empathy and personalization.
In other words, your customer service voice will largely depend on your audience segment and the services you offer. A high-end cosmetics retailer may strive for a professional and clear tone when dealing with returns or questions about allergies/sensitivities.
Conversely, a B2C focused on meal service for the elderly might focus on mirroring, empathy, and effective communication. And they probably already demonstrate that in their branding.
If a customer walks away from an interaction thinking “help was accessible and straightforward”, this colors their perception of your brand beyond the single interaction. So aligning your customer service voice with brand messaging is crucial.
Impacts the Customer Experience and Guides Communication
Voice and tone are intimately connected to the words you choose. That’s especially true in written communication, where ‘voice’ is something of an illusion created via language.
Consider the impact of positive language versus negative language in the customer experience — customers don’t want to be told “no”. You probably weren’t too pleased the last time you got the cold shoulder from a company you regularly do business with.
Words and phrasing can dramatically impact a customer’s perception of tone → “but, unfortunately…” can easily become “sadly, we cannot…” One of these comes across as explicitly negative.
Ultimately, adopting the right tone for your customer service “voice” drives the communication from start to finish. Negative language can turn a happy customer into an unhappy one just as easily as the inverse.
Connects with Customers and Makes Them Feel Heard
The right voice and tone can humanize your brand, help you better connect with customers, demonstrate empathy/compassion, and build brand loyalty. Customers like to feel valued and prioritized. Implementing the correct tone requires first identifying the needs of your customers.
Let’s say a customer experiences a rough time trying to use your product, and hasn’t been able to get help. An apologetic response with plenty of effort and compassion goes a long way towards improving the situation and resolving the complaint.
3 Tips for Developing and Maintaining Your Customer Service Voice
Given the advantages on offer, it’s vital to plan your customer service voice proactively. Even the most dedicated support agents will struggle to help customers and maintain the right tone without clear guidance.
In other words, a consistent customer service voice doesn’t just happen. It’s thoughtfully constructed and deliberately applied. Here are a few lessons we’ve gathered from decades in the customer support business.
1. Craft a Consistent But Flexible Brand Voice
First, you’ll need to consider your business’ overall branding. A good place to start is by summing up its identity or personality from the customer’s point of view:
“We’re professional and helpful, but not academic or stuffy.”
That identity should reflect your niche, values, and key selling proposition.
It should also reflect your target audience. Consider what knowledge customers have of your product or service. Are you speaking with beginners, or do you make software for educated veterans? What kinds of language do your customers use? Do they understand jargon related to your niche?
All of this should inform the tone you adopt in support interactions.
However, your tone should also be flexible to an extent. None of us speak exactly the same way in all situations and to all people. Leave room to adjust to the circumstances. For example:
- Your brand presents as extroverted, bubbly, and easy-going. You retain a conversational tone across social media channels and in live chat. But you’ll need to tone it down a bit for serious conversations, and present in a more formal manner during troubleshooting. Otherwise, you risk customers thinking you’re not taking them seriously.
- Your business provides software for accounting departments, and you use a formal, professional tone. But you’ll want to ease up a little in support chats, since people don’t want to feel as though they’re dealing with a robot.
When in doubt, a good rule of thumb is that many customers prefer a more casual tone. It makes your business feel approachable, and helps them feel heard and safe when communicating concerns or feedback.
With that being said, there isn’t a one-size fits all approach to tonality in customer service. Choose your voice thoughtfully and with both your business and your customers in mind – yet don’t let it become rigid. Even the most casual, laid-back tone starts to sound artificial if it never adjusts to the situation or individual.
2. Adapt Your Communication Style Based on Channel and Inquiry Type
Customer inquiries come in many forms. You might receive emails, phone calls, social media DMs, and more. It’s important to consider how you’ll maintain consistency while also adapting to the channel being used and the type of request being made
It helps to start by breaking down support interactions into two broad categories.
Social responses are more conversational and casual. Examples that call for social responses include product suggestions, general inquiries, compliments, and positive reviews. Common channels in this category are review sites and social media platforms.
When you respond to these, it’s usually best to speak casually and transparently. If responding to a compliment or positive review, be sure to express gratitude.
Action responses are more direct and formal. Examples that call for action responses include email complaints, negative reviews, concerns, technical issues or bugs, and troubleshooting. Common channels are email, phone calls placed to a service line, and live chat.
In these situations, it pays to be straightforward and clear, with no room for confusion. The focus should be on resolving the problem to the customer’s satisfaction. Sincere apologies are essential, as is careful questioning to get at the root of each issue.
Beyond that, consider how your customer service voice should adapt to each specific channel. The best way to do that is to create customer profiles informed by research and surveys.
How do customers who reach out via Instagram speak, and what do they care about? How do those answers differ when considering customers who take the time to email directly?
And of course, you’ll need to take the particulars of the channel or platform into account. Email allows for longer responses, while social media calls for concise replies (and often an invitation to continue the conversation elsewhere). Be mindful of platform conventions and limitations, and pay attention to what prompts customers to respond well or poorly.
3. Create a Customer Service Voice Style Guide
It’s not too hard to maintain a consistent tone when only one person works in support. If you have even two team members communicating directly with clients, however, you’ll need to create that consistency deliberately.
A style guide keeps everyone on the same page. It also ensures that everyone understands what voice they’re aiming for, and how to achieve it.
Your style guide can be simple, and it doesn’t need to be long. We’d suggest including:
- Summaries of key aspects that affect your customer service voice, such as your brand mission and target audience characteristics
- ‘Emotion words’ that describe the overall tone for support interactions (friendly, positive, confident, reassuring, etc.)
- Details on specific terminology/types of language that should or should not be used
- Any notes on grammatical consistency (for example, do you want to use first person singular or plural?)
- Advice on how to apply the above to a few common support scenarios, and examples of ‘good’ vs. ‘poor’ use of the brand tone
- Advice on adapting the brand voice for specific situations and channels, as discussed in the previous two sections
A few final tips for optimizing and using your style guide:
- Consider developing a larger brand style guide. This is essential to keep team members in all departments on the same page about communication, and can be expanded to cover topics like fonts, imagery, and colors.
- Make your brand information easy to access by creating an internal knowledge base. Our customer support helpdesk, Groove, makes this simple. You can build a repository that your entire team has access to, and fill it with stylistic guidelines, examples, step-by-step processes for solving common problems, etc.
- Make life easier for your support agents by creating template replies. Groove also lets you create canned responses, which can be accessed and personalized as needed. Not only does this save time and effort, but these pre-written responses can model your preferred tone. Don’t forget to list them in your style guide, along with clarifications on how/when they should be used.
- Take the time to train your support team. Don’t just hand them a few resources; invest in their development. A little time spent developing communication skills and learning empathy gives your team the knowledge and confidence to embody your brand.
Develop Your Customer Service Voice and Deliver Better Support
Every small business lives or dies based on the customer experience it provides. It’s much easier to ensure that you’re providing a strong CX if it’s unified across all interactions, from marketing to customer support.
Customer service voice plays a key role, since it shapes how your business presents to buyers (and often at the times when they’re most frustrated or confused). The tools you use also have a huge impact. They can make it simpler or harder to maintain a clear and consistent voice.
With Groove, you can respond to customer inquiries across channels in the same place. This helps your support agents maintain a consistent voice in all interactions. Groove’s AI tone detection helps them tweak responses to mirror the customer automatically, and canned responses can be crafted ahead of time with just the right tone and word choice.
Sign up for a free 7-day trial of Groove today, and build a foundation for a truly unified customer support experience!
