Customer Support is one of the key differentiators that every company out there strives to get right. A happy customer is not just a buyer, but a prospect and an advocate for a brand with the power to rope in more of his clan.
So, for brands to be in the eyes of many, the customer service agent’s tone of voice needs to be appropriate when answering queries when reached out to, for a problem.
The particulars below will help you chart out some of the key areas where your agents’ tone of voice impacts customers. And what to do about it.
1. The Role of Tone of Voice in Our Brains
Did you know that our brains process the words we hear and the tone in which it’s heard, separately?
Apparently, it does and this is backed by scientific studies too.
According to the reports on the groovehq blog, Sophie Scott, a neurobiologist’s study at University College London suggests that the brain takes speech and separates it into words and “melody” reaching different parts in our head.
So, in this context, when a customer support executive responds to a query or a problem, the customer’s brain perceives the meaning of what is said by both your words and “melody.” This is not just for the words we hear, our brains also do the same for the texts we read.
With this in mind, tweaking the customer support emails and training the staff to offer tailored speech tones by considering the impact on different and most received customer scenarios would be ideal.
2. Facts on Tone of Voice in Customer Service
Fact 1: Paldesk’s blog mentions that the Voice Coach Maria Pellicano says, ‘28% of call center agents’ tones of voice sound “strained and tired.”
This is indeed one of the most alarming facts in the customer support industry that leads to unhappy customers, thereby pointing at the mental fatigue of employees.
Fact 2: For successful communication, UCLA professor Albert Mehrabian came up with a 7-38-55 formula that divides into three important elements:
7% spoken words
38% tone of voice
55% body language
Normally, a customer service executive speaks over the phone or writes an email to the customer which makes only spoken words and tone of voice metric relevant here. So, maintaining a polite and gentle tone with the customers is imperative.
3. The tone of voice that makes a difference
As it’s a known fact that there is no “magic tone” for effective communication, the rule is the same for customer support executives too.
A positive, empathetic, and optimistic tone or a response based on the situation is the one required for companies to maintain a good customer relationship.
Currently, getting your brand noticed on social media channels with humor and customizing messaging tones based on trends would increase reach and attract leads.
Leveraging humor as a Tone of Voice for B2B companies is a trend that every brand is building on to make an approachable impression on people.
Best Practices for Tone Of Voices
As reported by Gladly, let’s take a look at a few communication guidelines for effective customer support practices to improve the tone of voice-
- General tone
The most important thing when conversing with a client or a customer is to be confident, positive and energetic.
A conversation without these three will sound unnatural, unrelatable, and will fail to hold the attention.
- Customer Service Tone Over the Phone
Though most of the customer support is pursued on email and chatbots now, a report from BrightLocal on Smallbiztrends states that 60% of customers prefer to call small businesses on the phone.
To tap this vast market share, maintaining a perfect volume of words to be spoken and assisting customer requests or queries till it gets resolved will get you the best ratings online.
With that, training your support staff to understand, pause and listen to the customer’s problem is also the need of the hour.
- Customer Service Chat and Email Tone Tips
As many of the companies leverage online capabilities, service chat and emails are a part of the process to solve customer problems that need to be perfect and clear.
Usage of punctuations, emojis, and abbreviations at the right time based on customer interactions will make a big difference.
- Casual vs. Formal Tone
A survey by the consulting firm, Software Advice, says that about 65% of customers would like a casual tone for customer support.
Similarly, about 78% of customers reported that an excessively casual tone has a negative impact on their experience when the agent is denying a request.
The best practice is to maintain a friendly tone that helps the customer feel comfortable enough to talk and let them know you want to help them. Also, you can incorporate a customer support tool like Kapture that can assist agents to respond to queries through chatbots and emails without any stress.
- Positive vs. Negative Tone
As many would already know, a positive tone is the most preferred one across any customer support call. Staying calm, patient, and supportive with the customer’s request will make a subsequent impact that can turn into a positive comment on social media channels or word-of-mouth marketing.
- Context-Specific Tone
Sensing the status of the complaint with the tone and mood of each customer and ideally responding to the queries would be perfect.
A survey on email customer support states that nearly 67% of the customers found elements like formal greetings, courtesy titles, and not using any contractions too formal.
Furthermore, about 35% of customers found emoticons too informal for email customer support.
So, responding based on past interactions and preferred language will make a significant impact on customer retention rates.
A New-age Customer Success Tool
A customer service software that can automate tasks and procedures eases multiple processes and improve the Tone of Voice for businesses would be Kapture.
It is a SaaS-based Customer Support Automation platform with features such as auto serve/self-serve management, and an automated agent assistant that makes a customer support agent’s job easier.
These features of the platform enable an agent to respond to more queries in a day than usual without any stress.
Kapture is the right tool that can set a perfect tone of voice in customer service on chatbots and emails with auto-generating responses for different queries. This in turn leads to happy customers with their queries resolved sooner leaving the agent with a good rating or review.
About the Author | |
 | Sunith Ramachandra |
| Sunith Ramachandra says, “Content writing is all about using the right words for the right audience”. At kapture he does exactly the same writing content to create conversations and conversions online. | |
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