When businesses think about brand identity, they often focus on visual elements – logos, colour palettes, typography, and photography.
While these aspects are crucial, one of the most defining factors of customer experience is the tone of voice a business uses. Whether through help-desk interactions, marketing messages, or automated responses, voice moulds perception and can ultimately determine customer loyalty.
What Is a Company’s Voice?
Just as colours and shapes make an organisation recognisable, voice does the same – but through tone. A company’s tone of voice is more than just the words it chooses; it encompasses communication style, brand values, consistency and emotional resonance. A reassuring, warm tone can put customers at ease, while a confident, knowledgeable voice builds trust.
This is especially crucial in the energy sector, where fluctuating fuel tariffs can sometimes cause stress in the context of people’s fundamental need for a warm home. Clear, sensitive and authentic communication can help engender customer confidence and satisfaction, even in difficult conversations.
Insite Energy, a leading provider of metering, billing, and maintenance services for communal heating systems known as heat networks, understands the importance of voice in customer interactions. With an “Excellent” rating on Trustpilot, the customer experience we provide is one of our key USPs.
Our brand’s voice is something we’ve put a lot of thought into, working with colleagues throughout the organisation. We’ve identified 20 different channels within our business where voice matters. These fall within the following categories:
- Resident calls
- Client meetings
- Emails with customers or suppliers
- Public speaking at conferences
- Newsletters (internal and external)
- Flyers and brochures
- Website and social media
- Office posters that influence company culture
- Engineering visits to residents’ properties
In all our communications, we prioritise clarity, empathy and professionalism. Our voice consists of seven key tones encompassing qualities such as ‘friendly’, ‘understanding’, ‘enthusiastic’, and ‘informative’. These should characterise every written or spoken interaction, with different tones coming to the fore in different situations.
Crafting a Distinctive Voice
An organisation’s voice not only differentiates it from its competitors but can also help it to foster stronger emotional connections with its customers. To be memorable for the right reasons, it must be unique, recognisable, and aligned with the company’s mission and values.
Personalisation is key, too. Human psychology dictates that we tend to remember experiences that are tailored specifically to us. Similarly, voice guidelines should not be so rigid that they prevent customer service professionals from expressing their own personalities or adapting to the situation at hand. The aim is for a unified voice that is expressed in different ways by different people. We want our customers to feel like they’re speaking to a human, not a robot, and getting a solution tailored to their particular requirements.
In order to ensure you establish the right tone of voice for your organisation, consider where you want to go. Focus less on what your competitors are doing and more on where you’re aiming to be. It’s helpful to include the following steps in your process:
- Identify Your Core Attributes: Pinpoint key characteristics that reflect your company’s personality. A financial services company may opt for a calm, professional tone, while a tech start-up might lean into a more dynamic and innovative voice.
- Solicit Your Team’s views: Canvas opinions from across and beyond your organisation. You need a broad and complete understanding of how you’re perceived.
- Develop A Voice Guide: Much like a brand style guide, a voice guide defines the brand’s personality, messaging and preferred tone.
- Maintain Consistency: Customers expect uniformity across all communication channels, from phone calls to emails to live chats. Inconsistencies confuse people and damage trust. A strong brand voice remains coherent while allowing for flexibility in different contexts.
The Brainstorming Process: What Works and What Doesn’t?
It’s important to involve people from all parts of the organisation in tone of voice brainstorming workshops, making it clear the sessions are a safe space to share ideas and work collaboratively across teams and hierarchies. In business, it’s easy to get fully absorbed in day-to-day work within departments, making it hard to see things from a broader perspective. Having the opportunity to talk with colleagues from every section of the company and freely share all kinds of viewpoints and impressions is rare and usually very enlightening.
During Insite Energy’s tone of voice brainstorming sessions, the team looked at over 100 words to describe a brand in order to identify words that we identified with as an organisation and ones we didn’t. It was essentially a democratic voting process, informed by questions such as:
- What do you think of our company?
- What would you like us to be?
- What are we currently?
Although Insite is a recognised innovator within a technology sector that itself is new in the UK, it didn’t feel helpful to foreground this trailblazing aspect of the company’s identity in the tone of our communications. Some words, like “trendy” and “hip,” didn’t resonate because they felt unnatural. Others, like “bleeding edge,” were debated but ultimately rejected as too high-pressure and unappealing. This process highlights how carefully selecting a voice that aligns with company values is crucial.
The Value of a Voice Guide
Putting all your information about tone of voice in one place ensures everyone in the business can refer to it whenever they need to. It’s an essential foundation upon which individuals can build their own personal approach.
Your voice guide should provide clear rules for tone, vocabulary and phrasing, with examples of specific language usage and practical writing style guidelines. Share it with all departments to ensure a unified approach in communications and review it at intervals.
There’s no fixed timeline for refreshing a company’s voice, but the process should continue until it’s fully ingrained in the organisation. Just as we associate Coke with red or Barbie with pink, a company’s voice should be second nature.
Training for Consistency
Customer experience teams are the frontline representatives of a brand’s voice. Without proper training, even the best-crafted voice guidelines can fall flat.
Role-play can be used to practice realistic customer service scenarios, refining tone and style to align with your brand’s identity. For example, at Insite, our customers want the engineers who visit their homes to be friendly and polite, with many Trustpilot reviews focusing on this. So, these were the qualities we focused on in role plays with our installation and maintenance teams. Our client services colleagues, on the other hand, respond to up to 100 emails a day, so we worked with them on maintaining a consistent tone while dealing with large volumes of enquiries.
Training must be continuously reinforced, too. Regular refresher courses, integration into onboarding processes, coaching sessions, and feedback loops help maintain consistency over time. Let team members know they can ask for help if they’re struggling with tone of voice. Give them the supports they find most helpful, whether that be more training, visual references, verbal reminders, etc.
Three Tips for Implementing a Strong Tone of Voice
- Stay Consistent: Ensure that all departments follow the same voice guidelines.
- Remain Professional in All Situations: No matter the conversation, maintain professionalism while staying true to your chosen tone.
- Respond to Negative Feedback Thoughtfully: Even in difficult communications, use your brand’s tone guide to maintain composure and professionalism.
In an era where digital interactions often replace face-to-face communication, a company’s voice is one of its most valuable assets. While businesses invest heavily in visual branding, voice should be given equal consideration, especially in customer service. By crafting a distinctive voice, embedding it into all communications, and training teams to use it effectively, businesses can create meaningful and memorable customer experiences that set them apart from the competition.
About the Author
Sharleen Zeonk, Customer Communications Specialist at Insite Energy.
