The Right Tone for Remarkable Support

In this episode of "Happy to Help," we delve into setting the right tone for your support communications. 

Drawing from real-world experiences and insights, we take a deep dive into the importance of defining tone for your support team, especially in written communication where every word matters. Get an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at Buzzsprout Support's tone strategies and discover practical tips for harmonizing your team's approach to tone.

Whether you're a seasoned support professional or just starting this episode offers valuable guidance on fine-tuning your support tone and knowing when adjustments are necessary to enhance customer experiences. 

We want to hear from you! Share your support stories and questions with us at happytohelp@buzzsprout.com!

Follow us on Instagram @happytohelppod

To learn more about Buzzsprout visit Buzzsprout.com

Transcript

Priscilla: 0:00

Welcome to Happy to Help. A podcast about customer support from the people of Buzzsprout. I'm your host, priscilla Brooke. Today we're talking about setting voice and tone in your support team. We'll discuss the tone we have set for Buzzsprout support and what you should think about when setting the tone for your team. Thanks for joining us. Let's get into it. As always, we're joined today by our producer, jordan. Hi, jordan, how's it going? Hey, it's going great. It's Friday. I know it's Friday. Yeah, we were talking before we started recording about how we need to get our energy up, because it's the end of the day on a Friday, I know, and that is not the best time for recording.

Jordan: 0:40

I think, yeah, I think it's one of those things, like there's a sweet spot Monday. You're just like a little tired. You're kind of dragging, like on the weekends.

Priscilla: 1:00

And then there's something about Tuesday through Thursday where you're like all right, I'm in the groove of things, I'm energized about this week, things are going well, and then on Friday it's like and I'm ready for a nap. Yeah Well, it's funny because we recorded like a little Snapcast last week and that was also recorded on a Friday. That's true, it was, wasn't it? Yeah, it was, it's funny.

Priscilla: 1:10

So Jordan has another podcast. She has a couple other podcasts, but another one that she does for the Buzzsprout team is called Buzzcast and it's all about podcast industry news and it goes off the rails sometimes. It's a lot of fun. It goes off the rails a lot of times, but they release episodes every other week, every other Friday, and so on the alternating Friday they record and release a little snap cast which is just a little glimpse into the next episode, which is really fun. And so last week Jordan and I got together and recorded the snap cast and did a little, you know, shout out to Happy to Help and kind of talked about, you know, my experience of starting this podcast. Yeah, but it was so much fun to record it, it was like a five minute episode. The funny thing about it is that Kevin, who is both of our boss. He reached out to us and said oh great episode. It sounds like you guys are best friends and we both were like well, I mean, we kind of are, and so it's funny.

Jordan: 2:05

Yeah, I mean it's so funny because you and I both went to Podfest in Orlando, which is like a podcasting conference in Orlando, and we I don't know what happened Like the stars aligned and we had a hotel room across from each other. And we like, yeah, and so we got together and, like, after everyone went to bed, you came over and we watched TV together.

Priscilla: 2:27

Yeah, we watched Traitors. If you're a Traitors fan, Jordan and I are both also big fans of Traitors, and so it was. It was fun. We just hung out a lot and you know, you and I just get along. We have a lot of things in common and now that we've been doing this podcast, we hang out like weekly, which is really fun. It's been great for me because we're on different sides of the country. Like it's fun to hang out.

Priscilla: 2:46

So yeah, Kevin, we're friends and hopefully that comes through in this podcast too. I hope so. So this episode is kind of going to be a continuation of last episode. So our last episode we talked about the importance of setting communication goals for your support team, and this week what I really want to talk about is setting your tone for your written support. So it's a little different from communication goals and it's more kind of how you're writing and what you're trying to convey through your writing, and so that's what we're going to talk about. So if you haven't listened to the episode from two weeks ago, then I would recommend going back and listening to that one about support goals, because that'll kind of give you a little bit more foundation for this conversation, which is more about voice and tone.

Jordan: 3:30

Yeah, I'm really excited that we're discussing this, because it kind of feels like when you are creating a work of art, the communication goals are like the end goal of what you want the art piece to look like, and the tone is going to be like the medium that you use, like the types of paints or the colors or things like that. Right, it feels like it's what you use to create this overarching vision of what you want your brand to be represented, as I think that's a good way to think about it is the goals are these like overarching feelings and these like big driving ideas?

Priscilla: 4:05

But then the tone is kind of like the actual route you take to get there and the things that you let kind of define how you're going to write an email or how you're going to communicate with someone, and just like setting communication goals, it's really important to set that tone for how you're going to write in your support communication, to set that tone for how you're going to write in your support communication, especially if you have primarily written support, because there is so much room for miscommunication in written support depending on how you write something. Okay, this is the example I always think of Jordan and you've probably seen this. I don't know if it's a meme or just a funny saying, but it says let's eat grandma, and there's like a version with the comma after let's eat, but it says let's eat grandma. And there's like a version with the comma after let's eat, and so it says let's eat grandma, and then the other one says let's eat grandma, and then at the bottom it says you know, the correct grammar saves lives.

Priscilla: 4:56

And I think it's really funny, yeah, but I think it's a good illustration of why it is so important to be careful about how you write something and how you're communicating with someone, especially when you're doing something like customer support, where you're trying to be very intentional about how you're communicating. You know, if I'm communicating with you and we're just chatting about something and we already have a relationship, it's not that important that my tone is perfect because you already know me and so there's some context there and that kind of you know conversation is easy and you have grace for me. But if I don't know you at all and our only communication is written communication, then it becomes so much more important that you're using a tone that's going to be accurately received by the person you're talking to. At Buzzsprout, you know, if a typo sneaks through in an email, we're really not that worried about it, because a typo kind of shows that we're human and so that's OK. But the tone we use to communicate with our customers, that's way more important than like misspelling something.

Priscilla: 5:57

Albert Morabian is a professor in Los Angeles and he's done a lot of research on body language and communication. A lot of his research has to do with face-to-face communication, but what he found is that 55% of communication is nonverbal, 38% of it is vocal and 7% of it is words only. Okay, so think about that. In face-to-face communication, only 7% is about the words you're using. Everything else is nonverbal. So like body movements or it's like vocal how you're saying things, inflection, oh, wow, yeah. So think about now you're in written communication and you lose the ability to have inflection and you lose the ability for someone to like see you lean in or the way you're using your hands, all of those nonverbal cues that we use when we're talking to each other. It just shows you that there is so much room for error when you're working primarily in written communication.

Jordan: 6:52

Yeah, and the person on the receiving end of you know your email is probably going to put their own inflection, own tone on how they would say whatever it is that you're saying, which, if you're saying something and maybe they are like a naturally sarcastic person, they might interpret your sentence as like sarcastic too. And you know that? Yeah, I didn't even think about that, that is tough.

Priscilla: 7:17

It does make it. It just is another layer of difficulty when it comes to having written support be your primary way of communicating with people. We've all seen it on social media, where there is a comment section and there's all this arguing in the comments, and some of that is just people being trolls and trying to get people frustrated, but some of it is people who are trying to communicate and they're just unable to communicate because they don't have the added benefit of inflection and understanding each other's point of view in that way, don't have the added benefit of inflection and understanding each other's point of view in that way. And so I really think, like you were saying, when you're writing an email or when you're writing communication to anyone, you really only have control over how you write it. You don't have control over how the person reads it, and so it makes it so important that you are very meticulous about how you're writing something, because you want to have the best shot as possible to communicate what you want to communicate, knowing that the person who's going to read it is going to put their own history, their own inflection on it, and so you need to make sure that you've written everything as well as you possibly can to communicate as well as possible so that when they read it we have the best shot of them being on the same page with us.

Priscilla: 8:23

And all of that comes down to tone. All of that comes down to the voice and tone that you have set for your support team and giving your team a guideline to work by so that you have the best shot of having a positive reaction. You know you were saying that if someone's sarcastic, they might read an email in a more sarcastic tone. Think about if someone's frustrated and they send you an email and they're angry and you respond with like positive, helpful information, they might read that as you being patronizing when you're not being patronizing. And so it can be really easy for those lines to get crossed and for people to misunderstand each other's intention on both sides. Honestly, as a support specialist, reading an email you can also misunderstand and on the other side, the person getting the email back can misunderstand. And so all of that to say setting your voice and tone in your support is really, really important and really important to set it early on so that everyone on your team is able to work within that tone.

Jordan: 9:22

Setting this tone early can also shift the public perspective of your company or of your brand. You know you think about like these major corporations and they have tones for their companies. You know you think of Dutch Bros, which is like a coffee shop, and they're kind of famous for like. When they are talking to customers they're just super friendly, like their arms are like in your vehicle and they're getting your order and they're just going to like chat up about things, but their tone is very like youthful and chill.

Jordan: 9:53

And then you have Apple and Apple is very like minimalistic, to the point sleek. So you're just it's no nonsense. And so if you write in, you know that you're just going to get this like minimalistic, sleek response and you're just going to get this like minimalistic, sleek response and they're just going to direct you exactly to something. And then you could also have Wendy's, who is irreverent and witty and like a little funny. And so if you write into Wendy's or comment on their social media, you might get a little bit of like a sassy response or something. But people love that and I think that you know when you set these tones, it kind of like sets the expectation as well for the people writing into the customer support.

Priscilla: 10:31

Yeah, Well, and for better, for worse, right? I mean, I'm sure everyone can think of a company that they've worked with and they were like, yeah, their tone is short and not very helpful, and do it yourself. Like you could definitely think of companies that have tones that are a negative reflection of their brand and, like you were saying, kind of, in that case, dictate what their brand image looks like based on what your experience with their support has been. And then you've got the added layer of a social media tone which you know, like for Wendy's, I wouldn't say when I go to a Wendy's the person standing there working with me customer service is witty and fun, but you're right, their social media tone is really witty and fun and sarcastic. And so I think there's definitely layers of tone and it really can help shape the brand and what your brand looks like to the public people who are your customers or prospective customers.

Priscilla: 11:24

So with Buzzsprout, we have a defined support voice and tone document that all of our new hires study. So when you come into our support team, one of the first things you do is you'd meet with me and we talk through our tone and then you have time to study it and get an idea for what our tone is, and so everyone on the support team really is very familiar with our tone Everyone in the Buzzsprout team as a whole, everyone on the Buzzsprout team as a whole. They also are very familiar with what our tone is maybe not as familiar with it as the support team, but we have this document that we've put together that really is going to direct how we write and how we communicate with podcasters. So our voice and tone document starts out by laying out our communication goals, which we talked about in the last episode, but then it gets into this tone section where we break down how the people at Buzzsprout Support interact with customers and the characteristics that our writing should have. It's kind of how we look at it.

Priscilla: 12:22

Jordan, I know that you're familiar with our tone document because a couple of years ago I developed a modified version of the document for our Facebook moderators. I don't know if people know this, but Jordan also kind of heads up our Facebook community for Buzzsprout, so she works with our moderators, and so we had a project that we both worked on where we met with the moderators and kind of gave them an introduction into what our tone is so that they would have a little bit of that context, and so this tone really is a guide for communicating with our customers.

Jordan: 12:53

Yeah, I know that it helped the Facebook moderators immensely because you know, as we said, the social media channels, people can be real nasty on there and so it can be really difficult to deal with those people and still maintain the correct tone for your company. There was just like this moment after we went through the communication and tone document with the moderators. Afterwards they told me they were like man, that was great and honestly, it made moderating the Facebook group so much better. It was easier for them because they just had these like guideposts.

Priscilla: 13:27

Well, and now you can go back to it. And if you're trying to craft a response to someone and you're having a hard time, you can go to this document and say does it hit these benchmarks that I've set for myself or that have been set for me? And if it doesn't, meet that you can kind of make adjustments as necessary.

Priscilla: 13:42

Yeah kind of make adjustments as necessary, and so I thought it'd be cool for this episode if we talked through that tone document a little bit, or at least that section of the document which talks about our tone and voice and support. The first thing which is kind of like the top of this list is that our communication is intentional. So when we're talking about tone, we're talking about how we're writing something. In the support team we try to view this that every sentence has a purpose. We're not kind of adding fluff just for the sake of it and we're trying to make sure that we're crafting every sentence, which can mean we work a little slower, but it's so helpful when it comes to how things are perceived.

Priscilla: 14:18

I took a class in high school that really affected my writing style and how I write. That really affected my writing style and how I write, and it really is like one of the classes in high school where I can see like a transformation in my own, like writing before this class and after this class, and one of the things that they would do in this class is, instead of getting projects where it was, like you know, write a four paragraph book report about X, y and Z. It was things like write a paragraph and in that paragraph you need to have a sentence that starts with an L-Y word, and then you need to have a sentence that uses a simile and then you need to have a sentence that uses a metaphor. And we're not really worried about the content of your writing, but we want to see you put together these like very intentional sentences, almost more like a puzzle, and so it really changed the way I write and I think it's something that you know as really changed the way I write, and I think it's something that you know as I was putting together this document several years ago that I included in here because I like the way thinking about each email to a user as this puzzle that you want to make sure is right, because you want to give yourself the best shot at being received accurately. So that's kind of where we start. You know we want every sentence to be intentional and we want every sentence to be accurate. That's kind of where we start. You know we want every sentence to be intentional and we want every sentence to be accurate. That's the other thing that's not really broken down in this. It's kind of like a known. You know accuracy is important, but that doesn't really fall within our like tone guidelines.

Priscilla: 15:35

Ok, so let's get into the nitty gritty of how we write. So I'm going to list off a bunch of different characteristics of our support team. Is kind of how this is going to sound, and not every email is going to hit every single one of these characteristics, but the idea is that you're hitting a couple of these. You're hitting these when they're necessary, when they work with the email, but you might not hit every single one every time, and that's OK. The first one we have on here is we are friendly. So the Buzzsprout support team is friendly. We are people helping other people. We have information that our users need, and so we're here to help them navigate the confusion. Everyone's going to run into confusion at some point. So we're here and we don't want to get caught up in being the expert. We are more focused on being a friendly, helpful support specialist who you can feel comfortable coming and talking to. That is number one. We are friendly.

Jordan: 16:24

And I think that that is such like a hard thing for people to step away from is like oh no, I have to be the expert because that's why they're coming to me, but in all honesty, it's kind of like more important people, that they just have a nice person on the other end who's willing to like hold out their hand and help them. You know, yeah, exactly.

Priscilla: 16:42

If you're friendly with someone, then they're going to be more willing to give you a little grace if you need it and they're more willing to write in again if they need something, instead of just getting frustrated and leaving. And so I think being friendly and kind of breaking down those walls with your customers can be a really great way to add that personal touch into every email. So recently I saw this described as not being anonymous, which I really liked the way that they said that they were saying that this idea of not being anonymous. You know, sometimes when you're working in support, it can be tempting to say I don't want to put my name on this because I don't want to be held responsible if something goes wrong.

Priscilla: 17:18

But with remarkable support, putting your name on it can be so beneficial. Because if you don't put your name on it, then they don't know who they're talking to and it could just be a robot, it doesn't matter, and then there's no personal connection. And so they were talking about don't be anonymous. You know, show your name. If for some reason, something's wrong, then you can own up to it and that's fine and they know who you are. But if something goes wrong and you're anonymous, then there's more room for frustration there.

Jordan: 17:45

You know, I think it goes even further than just putting your name on something, because you know, I actually had to write into Spotify today to fix an issue and they wrote me back. But I know it was like a canned response. There was no personality behind it. I'm pretty sure it was AI and they signed like thanks, brian. And I was like sure, brian, I had this moment of like this is for sure a bot. This is not a guy named Brian. And I think that the not being anonymous goes even further into like don't temper down your personality, your friendliness and things like that. So, yeah, I think that it goes even further than just putting your name on it.

Priscilla: 18:26

Yeah, well, and there's a good example of this is something you're familiar with, jordan, when you spent some time working with the support team recently and one thing we do in support is we will give everyone a job title, but it's not like a job title, like you know, head of customer support. It's a job title like loves the Denver Nuggets or some kind of personality thing. So Lindsay, who's on our team, her job title is that she's the 2023 Women's Pickleball Champion, because she won a pickleball championship that we had last year, and so that is her job title. Yeah, what was yours, jordan?

Jordan: 19:00

My personal favorite is Kara's. Hers says a literal ray of sunshine yeah, and there's so many people that make comments about that Mine. I think it says something like cat enthusiast and daydream believer. Yes.

Priscilla: 19:14

But like it's such a fun way to personalize the emails, I think Tom's has something to do. Tom is one of our developers. His has something to do with Star Wars.

Priscilla: 19:24

And so if you're also a Star Wars person who writes in and you get an answer from Tom and in his email there's this line about him loving Star Wars, it gives you that connection. It's amazing how many people will write to Brian, who has to do with the Denver Nuggets, and they'll say, oh my gosh, did you see the game last night? It was so good because it's just a great connection. Oh my gosh, did you?

Priscilla: 19:43

see the game last night. It was so good because it's just a great connection, and so I mean that is the opposite of being anonymous, right, but that leans so well into our friendly aspect of our tone. We always want to be friendly. That is like top of the list. So that kind of goes well into our next attribute, which is that we're casual.

Priscilla: 19:58

So being casual makes us approachable and we talked about we don't want you to feel like it's not a good thing to write out to support. We don't want you to feel like I'm going to have to talk to them again. So we want to be approachable. We want people to feel comfortable reaching out, and so the casual tone helps with that. So, instead of trying to be professional, we kind of lean into easy conversations and we talk to our podcasters like we're talking to a friend, or maybe we're talking to our mom who struggles with technology and we're trying to talk to her in a way that will help her understand how to use this thing, and so in that tone that means that we're using things like emojis, or maybe we're using GIFs and we're not afraid of exclamation points, and all of that helps to kind of keep that tone casual. That tone casual.

Priscilla: 20:45

It's funny because this part of our tone is actually something that people historically have struggled with coming on the Buzzsprout support team, because we've had a lot of people think yeah, I know it's surprising, but people have come from, let's say, they've come from the corporate world or they've come from a nonprofit, where you're trying to come across very professional, and then they come into a support team where we're like, hey, let's be casual, let's be easy with our conversation, and it's hard to break that professional tone out of your writing when you've been doing it so hard. But once you get through that and once you can lean into that casual conversation, it can really help make that personal connection with your customers. Okay, the next one is not a surprise to anyone, but we're empathetic. We've had a full episode about empathy. I know I will talk about empathy probably every episode for the rest of this podcast. It is just so important in good, remarkable customer support that you have empathy sewn into your tone.

Priscilla: 21:39

We need to be able to empathize with customers. It's a superpower really to be able to empathize with customers, and so being able to figure out how to write in an empathetic way takes serious skill, and I would recommend, if you're trying to figure out how to write in an empathetic way, to go back to that empathy episode and listen to it, because we talk about some practical tips there about how to communicate in an empathetic way. But it is such a big part of our tone for Buzzsprout support and it really is such a big part of remarkable support is being able to be empathetic. Okay, the next aspect is that we're thorough.

Priscilla: 22:14

We're not rushing through responses. We're not letting a full inbox decide the quality of our emails. So even if the inbox is busy, we're still going to be fully focused on this one email. The inbox is busy, we're still going to be fully focused on this one email we're working on and we're going to be thorough and we're going to find as much information as we can on our end before writing back. So it might delay our responses a little bit, but the goal is to have a really thorough response Because, I mean the worst thing is to reach out to a support team and then have an email that comes back where they're asking you a question that either they can find out on their own, or that you've already said in the first email, or they send you a link to an article that you could have read yourself and you think, did you really spend time on this email or were you just trying to move me out of the inbox?

Priscilla: 22:58

And so we try really hard to be thorough and to be efficient with our time. So we're not spending hours and hours on one email, but we want to spend the amount of time that an email needs to craft a really good response, and so we put a lot of emphasis on being thorough in our communication.

Jordan: 23:14

And in the long run, I mean, I could actually like, even though you're taking a little bit of extra time, to maybe like look into something you know, look at their account or you, or find the best YouTube video to send to them that will help them with their problem. Even though you're taking that time, being able to just make sure that you're really intentional with your response to them and giving them all the information that they need can actually save you in the long run. Because you're not doing this back and forth and back and forth with them, because you're not paying attention to what they're actually saying, exactly Right forth and back and forth with them because you're not paying attention to what they're actually saying.

Priscilla: 23:44

Exactly Right, and a little more time up front, like you said, really can cut down on the back and forth and can offer a solution to your user much faster than if you have that back and forth, and so it can be a much cleaner and easier experience. So the next thing is that we are excited, so the Buzzsprout team is excited. I really love this because I think one thing that sets our team apart from some other support experiences is that it feels like the Buzzsprout support team is actually excited to help you. And it's because we are excited to help you because we have people on the team who love helping people and that is what brings them joy and that's what lights up their world when they can help someone.

Priscilla: 24:22

And so you don't always feel that when you're talking to a support team, I know sometimes you feel like, oh gosh, this person would rather be doing anything else than talking to me on the phone. Well, surprise, surprise, I would rather be doing anything else than talking to them. But when you talk to a support team that's excited to help you learn, help you understand something, that is like such a refreshing experience that I don't think a lot of support teams are able to really accurately convey in an email, and probably because a lot of people don't feel that way, and so I'm actually very proud of the fact that our support team does come across that we are really excited to help you. I mean, we were talking about Kara earlier, whose job title is literal ray of sunshine. If you know Kara, she is a literal ray of sunshine and it comes through in her writing.

Priscilla: 25:05

She's so happy to help people, like she loves people and loves helping them, and that makes the interaction so much better because she is enjoying it, and so that's the next thing you know we're, we're excited.

Jordan: 25:18

And it makes the company look good too, because, okay, so we were talking about how we went to pod fest this year and I remember someone came up to someone in the support team and said gosh, it really seems like everyone at buzzsprout loves their job and they're like yeah, it's because we kind of do, and that's the thing is, like we're excited to do our job, we're excited to help people.

Priscilla: 25:39

Yeah, and so much of that comes from a culture that we have here that is really positive and really good, and that comes from the leadership down. You know, they do a really good job of making sure that the culture we have here at Buzzsprout is really good, and that goes into every department.

Priscilla: 25:54

So much of that is culture based and really we should have a full episode of that in the future about setting that culture for your team to be able to enjoy the work they're doing, and that will come through to your users, to your customers. So the next characteristic is that we are patient. This is a hard one for a lot of people, as it should be. Patience is not easy and the people who have it more naturally, I think they're just very good at faking patience and making it happen because patience is it's so important. But you know what I mean. Like sometimes you're like, wow, that person is it's so important. But you know what I mean. Like sometimes you're like, wow, that person is really patient. And you say it to them and they're like actually I'm not patient, I'm just good at masking my impatience and being patient and having control of that. It's more like self-control, really. They're just better at self-control than someone who loses their cool faster anyway.

Priscilla: 26:40

So patience is really hard and when you're working with someone who's getting frustrated, it can be really difficult. So we've made that part of our tone. You know we want to be patient. We want the podcaster, or our users, to know that we are going to be patient with them. We're going to answer all the questions that they have, we're going to take our time and make sure that they fully understand what's going on and how something works. And if we find that we're losing that patience with a user that we're working with, everyone on our team knows you can pass that person on to a new specialist who has, like, a better reserve of patience at that time, because you definitely go up and down on how much patience you have at any given moment. So patience is a really important one. And then we're encouraging.

Priscilla: 27:25

So this is kind of specific for podcasting, but you know, with podcasting it can be a solo sport. There's a lot of podcasts that are solo podcasts or it's just you with one other person, and so if you have a question about it and you reach out to your podcast host, we want you to feel like you have a team of people that are on your podcasting team, and so we want to be really encouraging. I mean, why not? When someone writes in and they have something that we can celebrate, why would we not celebrate that? And why would we not encourage them to continue on what they're doing or celebrate a little win that they told us about? And so our goal is to make your day better. And so you know, our goal is to make your day better, and so being encouraging and celebrating our users is a great way to make someone's day better.

Jordan: 28:10

Absolutely Talking about. You know being encouraging, like encouragement, like being someone's cheerleader is definitely being on their team, which is one of the communication goals that we discussed last episode. So that is a perfect example of how setting these tones can help you reach your communication goals.

Priscilla: 28:28

Exactly. You know you set these communication goals and then you figure out how your tone is going to move you there, and so this is a really good one. You know, if you're encouraging, that's going to help someone understand that you're on their team, so I think that's a great tie in there. So that's our tone, that's our. The voice and tone that we've set are those characteristics. I will say that sometimes you have to be able to kind of adjust your tone a little bit.

Priscilla: 28:51

In the moment I was thinking about this as I was kind of putting together my thoughts for this episode, you know we have this tone document that is set.

Priscilla: 28:59

This is how we want to communicate with our podcasters, our users, but there have been times where this tone doesn't resonate with the person we're writing with, and I think there is some importance in being able to adjust a little bit based on who you're talking to. There are going to be, like outliers of people who don't like that you're using exclamation points and they might misread that because that's how they're putting their own you know inflection on it, like we were talking about earlier, and so a good example of this is there was someone several years ago who was frustrated with me because I started an email with hey, let's say his name was Robert, I don't remember what his name was. I said, hey, robert, let me help you with this. And he was like how dare you start an email with hay? And I thought, oh, okay, like we use hay because, well, and we don't strictly use hay, but that's, you know, casual, right, it's friendly conversation.

Jordan: 29:50

It's easy.

Priscilla: 29:51

We're not too formal, but he wanted us to be more formal, and so in that moment, because I wanted to give, let's say, robert the best experience, I modified some of my tone. I had to kind of correct what he was originally thinking, which that we were taking things not serious enough. Oh wow, but I was able to kind of get into a tone that resonated more with him, and so sometimes you'll need to do that. It's not common, because if you set a tone, you want to stick to that tone, but occasionally you might find that some people want a different type of tone, and if you run into that a lot, then maybe your question should be is our tone actually the right tone that we want to be using with our customers, or are they craving a different type of conversation than we're giving them?

Jordan: 30:37

And it can go the other way, Like we were talking about the tone of corporations. So, like Apple, they're very sterile and to the point and you know customers might want a friendlier voice. So it really can go either way where, you know, maybe you're like too friendly and people are like you're not taking my credit card charges serious enough. You know you have the other way, where people like chill, it's just a phone, you know.

Priscilla: 31:03

Well, and I might even argue that having that personal touch is what makes remarkable support, and sure there will be some people who don't want that.

Jordan: 31:11

Yeah.

Priscilla: 31:12

But if you think about you know you were saying Apple has kind of like formulaic responses sometimes. I wouldn't think about Apple support as being remarkably good that's true or excellent support.

Priscilla: 31:23

Yeah, Now it might, or excellent support. Now, it might be adequate support, and I'm sure there are people that have had excellent experiences with Apple, but when I think about consistent, remarkable, excellent support, Apple doesn't seem to fall in that category for me. So I might argue that having that personal, more casual tone is what helps you to have a more remarkable support, because that's a situation where you're connecting on a personal level and that is what makes remarkable support. Is having that personal connection in and of itself.

Priscilla: 31:52

That's a great point, yeah, so, unlike the communication goals that we talked about in the last episode, which I mentioned, you know you want to make sure those are unique to your company and to your brand. I think the tone attributes that we've been talking through can actually apply a lot better across multiple support teams, because the goal is remarkable experiences, the goal is remarkable support, and I feel really strongly that our list of attributes help us or enable us to give remarkable support. So I don't think I'd tell you, hey, maybe your characteristic is going to be the support team is curt Like. I would not tell you to make that a characteristic for your team. Even if you feel like maybe that's something that would work with your brand, I wouldn't say that that's going to give someone a good feeling from your support team. And so, yeah, I think that there's to an extent. When you're looking at the tone and voice, it's not all going to match up with the ones I just read off, but it might be that several of those that we just talked about will apply to your support team and you might go. There are a couple other things that we value at the top of that list that we're going to include, that are brand specific, but I would argue that a lot of the things we just talked about. So, as you're going through and defining it for your team and personalizing it, there are a couple of things that I would recommend you think about as you're kind of defining what those characteristics are that you want to make sure your team knows about. So the first one is we've been kind of talked about it a bunch, but aligning your voice and tone with your brand.

Priscilla: 33:27

Looking at the brand that you are providing support for, or the product and going what is it that our marketing tone is? What is it that our social media tone is. We want to be in line with that a little bit. If your social media tone is snarky, like Wendy's, then maybe you can put a little bit of that into your support tone. Maybe you can like bring that in a little bit. Maybe not a ton, because you don't want to be misinterpreted Rude, right, so you need to be careful, but maybe you bring a little bit of that kind of sass into your emails. Or, you know, maybe you have a bank and you really want to make sure that one of your characteristics is that your team is trustworthy. Well, that is a really important thing and you want to make sure that that's at the top of your list. So maybe that's above being friendly, maybe that's above being casual. You still want those things in there because you still want to be approachable, but you also want to make sure that your users know that you're trustworthy.

Priscilla: 34:15

Another thing is I would talk about how you want to be perceived. This is another thing, just like we were talking about aligning with your brand. But what do you want your users to feel? How do you want them to think of you? If they're talking to their friend about support or support interaction, what do you want them to say? You want to say, oh, I reached out to Apple support and it kind of felt like I was talking to a robot. No, probably don't want them to say that, but maybe you want them to say I reached out to Apple support the other day and it really felt like I was talking to a friend of mine. Or I reached out to Apple support the other day and they were so thorough in their response. It was great.

Priscilla: 34:49

Like, what are those things that you want someone to say about you? How do you want to be described? That's one way to think about it when you're putting together the tone of your emails. This is actually a really good example. This morning I was doing some work in the inbox and we got an email from someone and in her response she said that Buzzsprout already feels like a trusted friend. Oh, which was like such a sweet thing to get first thing in the morning on a Friday morning. But it was so nice to hear it because it shows that this tone that we're trying to set was successfully set. She felt like we were a friend, we were a trusted friend. So in our conversation we succeeded on nailing that friendly tone.

Priscilla: 35:30

And so you know you might want to, as you're setting this, really sit down and think about how it is that you want to be received by your customers. And then the last thing is you know what's important to your customers. We were talking about being trustworthy might be something. If you're a bank, look at who your customers are and what it is that they're going to expect from a brand in your industry. So we work in podcasting, which gives us the ability to be a little bit more casual and to use GIFs and emojis, but if you work in an industry, that's a little bit more professional. On that professional side, you may want to look at setting a tone that kind of aligns with that a little bit more. So, if you work for a bank, you might not want to send a GIF. That might be something that doesn't resonate with your customers. Or health care? Yeah, exactly Health care, but you can still have a really personal connection via email.

Jordan: 36:21

Yeah, like friendly, friendly, casual.

Priscilla: 36:23

Yeah, hope you get better soon yeah exactly and show people that you care about them while still being professional and also setting yourself up as an expert. I mean, at the end of the day, the tone in your customer support is so important. If you don't get it right, then you really do risk your customers not truly understanding your product, because so much of that communication is in your support team and so much of a customer's view of a product is through support, and so if you don't take the time to set the tone that you want with your team, then you really do risk having your users misunderstand what you're trying to say and then they might miss out on a really great product because it wasn't communicated in a way that accurately depicted what it is that you want to communicate. So, hopefully, as you sit down and work on your own tone, I hope this conversation at least is helpful as you kind of figure out where the importance of each characteristic is to you and what else you can do to make sure that your communication, especially in written form, is done as intentionally as possible so that you have the best outcome for your customers.

Priscilla: 37:33

It's time for our support in real life segment, which is where we discuss real support experiences, the good and the bad and talk about them and what we would recommend. So, jordan, do you have a support in real life story for us? I hope you do, because I'm expecting you to have one.

Jordan: 37:48

I do, I promise. I actually found a post on Reddit from Jgrum that I thought was probably a story that a lot of customer support or customer service people would be very familiar with, or, you know, in the back of their mind, be like yep, I've dealt with that before, so I think that this will be a good one for you to talk about. All right, so J Grum says I work at a place with a rewards program. The only way to redeem the points is through our app. This older guy comes in all the time and gets upset that he can't redeem his points Every time. Multiple people have explained to him that the app is the only way, and today he got upset and said why don't I just have the app? And he said I feel bad for him, but I also don't deserve to be spoken to that way.

Priscilla: 38:33

Yeah, so it sounds like he works maybe at like a restaurant, a fast casual restaurant, where there's like the rewards program and you can only access it through an app, and this older person just doesn't use the app and doesn't understand that, and I think what he said. The last line was I think he said like I feel bad for him, but I don't deserve to be spoken to that way. I think he said like I feel bad for him but I don't deserve to be spoken to that way. I think that's like a very important part of this. The reality is that any person working in support, you're going to have people that ask the same question over and over and over again and it comes back to that characteristic of patience.

Priscilla: 39:06

Right, we have had people with Buzzsprout support who ask the same kind of billing questions over and over again, and in some cases it's because you need to update something in your product to make it easier, because if everyone's asking the same questions, let's fix it before they get to us. But in some cases it's because the person just doesn't understand and they haven't had that education aspect of it. They just don't understand what's going on and they can get frustrated and they can take it out on you, and I think it's important to remember that, yes, you don't deserve to be spoken that way. But it's also an opportunity for us as a support team to show patience in a very real way. And you know I think Brian said it in the empathy episode to think about that person as a family member. And how would you talk to your mom if she was frustrated and didn't understand how the membership program worked? You would be patient with her, you would try to understand, or you would try to help her understand what it is that she's missing.

Jordan: 40:02

Or download the app to her phone and put it on the home screen, so she knew exactly how to get to it.

Priscilla: 40:08

Yeah, exactly Right. And sometimes you won't have the ability to do it for them, and so it really does just come back to going OK, I'm going to be patient, I don't deserve to be spoken to this way. So in some cases you might say, hey, remember, I'm a real person, the added body language and inflection that we talked about earlier to help you communicate that. But if you're in a written form it can be a little bit harder to communicate that. But it is okay to say I'm not going to just let you speak to me like that. But at the same time, I'm going to be patient and I'm going to work with you, because I understand that the reason you're frustrated is because you don't understand something and it's on me, it's my job to make sure that you're learning it, or it's my job to help you with this. And so, yes, while I don't want to be spoken to in that way, I also am recognizing that it is my job and, yes, I need to figure out how I'm going to communicate this to you and I'm going to be patient in that response. So I feel bad for this guy who is getting so frustrated with this person who always comes in and is repeatedly asking the same question, doesn't understand it, but then at some point you got to look at, like, the root of why he doesn't understand it and try to figure that out and have patience for him in the moment, even when you're absolutely right that you don't deserve to be spoken to like that. But sometimes that is what happens with this kind of a role you have to figure out how to get through that Exactly. Well, that's it for today. Thanks, jordan, for having this conversation with me.

Priscilla: 41:42

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