It is not at all difficult to create a voice and tone guide, and your entire team can participate in this process. Here’s how you do it.
The voice
The “voice” part is a reflection of your company’s culture. Do you have a comfortable or orderly place? Does your team communicate with clients about important issues, such as bank accounts or insurance?
The voice, on the other hand, is the second part of the voice. Your company’s voice should always be consistent, no matter what the situation. But the tone of each email may be different based on what it is talking about while maintaining important aspects of the overall voice of the company.
Here is a good example: Suppose you owned a software company. The company voice as a whole is friendly and straightforward and always aims to educate your customers about using your product. You can use features of that voice to compose very different types of emails, such as:
Know Your Audience
The next step in creating a voice and tone guide is to look at your company’s customers and get a sense of who gets all those emails your team sends. If your company has any customer service people, those are great resources. You may also want to spend a little time looking at a particular email history to gain insight. In either case, he tries to answer the following questions:
- Who, in particular, do we email? Who is our main customer?
- What are the needs of our company?
- What would they like to hear about our company?
So, with that in mind, you may deal with email communications with these clients in a different way, such as:
Keep emails short and clear, so you do not need a lot of time or focus to read them.
Limits the number of questions you ask a customer in any one email, so they don’t spend too much time on their response.
Remember the names of your customers’ children, so they can add comments to emails, such as, “I hope you and Logan have a great summer vacation!”
The more you understand your customers’ needs, the more your voice and voice guide will come together and be useful.
Set your customer service rates
This part of the process can be a fun team activity. Now that you have thought about the customers who receive emails from your team, it is time to examine what your team believes their prices are in the customer service team.
Assemble your team in an area with open wall space. Give everyone a Post-It notepad and tag. For existing remote groups, you can do the same process with Zoom phone with Google open doc. Now, ask the team to think about their experience as customers.
Ask everyone to start writing down their answers to these questions, trying to keep one word in each answer as much as possible. Attach Post-Is to the walls (or add to your open document) so everyone can see you.
Conclusion
Thanks to the customer for a great review of your product shared on its social media channels.
Explaining to the customer why the refund you have requested is outside the scope of your refund policy.
The language you choose may be simpler in the first email and more sensitive in the second, but both emails can still be friendly, straightforward, and informative. You are in tune with the voice of the company, as your tone changes slightly in different situations.
