{"id":18172,"date":"2020-09-15T10:00:50","date_gmt":"2020-09-15T09:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/?p=18172"},"modified":"2024-07-16T13:19:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-16T12:19:10","slug":"preach-framework-for-customer-support-tone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intercom.com\/blog\/preach-framework-for-customer-support-tone\/","title":{"rendered":"PREACH: A tone of voice framework for customer support"},"content":{"rendered":"

Often in life, it\u2019s not what you say but how you say it that makes all the difference. This is even more true in a customer support<\/a> conversation, so getting your company\u2019s tone of voice just right is incredibly important.<\/p>\n

Once you\u2019ve figured out how you speak to your customers<\/a>, the next challenge is getting your team aligned so you can ensure a consistent customer experience.<\/p>\n

At Intercom, we strive to maintain excellent customer relationships using conversational support<\/a>. Conversational support is the modern way to resolve customer questions through a digital-first, messaging-based interaction. This means that customers and agents can be connected in real time or asynchronously, and customers can stop and restart the conversation when it\u2019s convenient \u2013 without ever losing context.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s called conversational<\/a> because it, well, feels more like an ongoing conversation: natural, easy, and convenient. So it follows that we want to make sure that every time we talk to a customer, we strike that perfect balance of friendly, efficient, and helpful.<\/p>\n

How do we do that? With a simple six-step framework that helps us to create consistency, stay on brand, and still deliver personalized, conversational support at scale.<\/p>\n

Measuring our customer experience<\/h2>\n

As a support team, we use a number of metrics<\/a> to ensure that we\u2019re always exceeding our (and our customers\u2019) high standards. When it comes to measuring conversations, we\u2019ve implemented a peer review system, where every member of our customer support team consistently reviews their teammates\u2019 conversations. During a review, conversations are rated on two main aspects: quality and tone of voice.<\/p>\n

“One of the biggest challenges for any growing customer-facing team is finding a method you can rely on to teach every new team member exactly how you talk to your customers”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In simple terms, quality covers the correctness and accuracy of the answers provided. While we hold a high bar for customer satisfaction, and encourage our team to go beyond simply providing correct answers<\/a>, it\u2019s a simple metric to break down and can be rated objectively with relative ease.<\/p>\n

Tone of voice, on the other hand, presents certain challenges. As soon as you look at the approach your teammates have taken to provide those answers, objectivity is inevitably replaced by subjectivity.<\/p>\n

We conducted a calibration where the entire team rated the same 30 conversations for quality and tone on a three point scale. The resulting pie chart may have strongly resembled the marque of a certain German luxury vehicle, but it certainly didn’t confirm that conversations were rated consistently across teammates.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This shouldn\u2019t have come as a surprise. Our existing guide for speaking with customers was five years old, and 15 points long \u2013 it was written to be comprehensive rather than memorable. Furthermore, it captured what the Support team at the time already knew about how they spoke to customers. No one was referring to it, because they had already internalized its most essential principles.<\/p>\n

But as a rapidly scaling company, our Support team needed to be able to scale with us<\/a>. One of the biggest challenges<\/a> for any growing customer-facing team is finding a method you can rely on to teach every new team member exactly how you talk to your customers \u2013 this consistency is key to ensuring high customer satisfaction.<\/p>\n

Why tone is so important (and such a challenge) in customer support<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Customer support guidelines often focus on the specific steps reps should take to help customers, but tone of voice may be the single most important factor in support performance. The tone you take with a customer will go a long way towards determining the quality of their support experience. No matter how helpful you are, if you communicate with impatience, condescension, or disinterest, then their experience will be negative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“The proper framework will give your support reps a clear idea of the tone of voice they should take, and will communicate this in an intuitive, insightful, and unique manner”<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, this presents a challenge: besides simple truisms like \u201cbe friendly\u201d or \u201cbe nice,\u201d it\u2019s hard to standardize tone across a support team. This is where a customer support tone of voice framework comes in: the proper framework will give your support reps a clear idea of the tone of voice they should take, and will communicate this in an intuitive, insightful, and unique manner. <\/span><\/p>\n

Teaching tone of voice<\/h2>\n

We realized the biggest issue with our previous guidelines for tone of voice was their inaccessibility. Even if the guide\u2019s content was perfect, it was a little too long to recall every point, meaning that it wasn’t something that could be easily referred to when speaking to customers or reviewing a teammate\u2019s conversation.<\/p>\n

In coming up with a way to make these guidelines more easily understood, remembered, and shared, we considered alliterative phrases, mnemonics and even rhymes. We eventually settled on an acronym: PREACH.<\/p>\n

PREACH means that to maintain a customer-centric approach, we aim to be Proud, Responsible, Empathetic, Articulate, Concise and Human.<\/p>\n