How to protect your tone of voice when implementing AI in customer service

Bas Ploeg, Founder at Neople
Bas Ploeg
October 8, 2024
7
min read

How to maintain consistency and your same familiar tone of voice when implementing AI in customer service? Here's how to protect your tone of voice, while improving your response times with AI support.

Thanks to efficiency and speed, AI-driven integrations are becoming the norm in customer service. But one of the big questions is, how to maintain consistency and your same familiar tone of voice when implementing AI in customer service? Stop struggling, this article gives you a full overview of how you can protect your tone of voice, while improving your response times with AI. 

Top 3 ways to protect your tone of voice while working with AI in customer service

Don’t want all the details? We understand you might be busy. Here’s a short summary of how you can best protect your brand’s tone of voice while working with AI. 

  1. Create a clear and complete tone of voice guide: Make sure to have clear guidelines on how people in your business should communicate with customers to ensure consistency, brand alignment, and a positive customer experience. This guide mostly includes brand values and personality, tone types for different scenarios, language and style guides, empathy and personalization and sample phrases and scripts. 
  2. Customize AI with tone-specific training: AI can be trained based on real customer interactions and data to better understand your communication style. Ongoing training and machine learning is crucial to maintain the right tone of voice.
  3. Enable collaboration between human agents and AI: There are different ways to work with AI. Do you want to fully automate with AI? It’s possible to have human agents complement AI by handling more complex conversations or let AI give answer suggestions instead of sending complete answers automatically. 

Curious to learn more about protecting your tone of voice in customer service and how to deal with it when implementing AI? We’ve narrowed down all the key information in the rest of the article below. 

Why the tone of voice matters for customer service teams

The tone of voice helps to establish and maintain positive relationships. Not the least important factor for many e-commerce companies, as competition keeps growing. Your brand voice can help your business give a personality. Your customers will recognize themselves in it. A tone of voice could even be the reason they chose your business in the first place. 

What is the tone of voice in customer service exactly? 

But before we dig into the reasons why you shouldn’t ignore the tone of voice when working with AI. Let’s first clarify what it is. The tone of voice refers to the way you communicate with your customers. It even has an emotional impact on the interaction with your customers. It involves many elements such as:

  • Style
  • Attitude
  • Personality

The tone of voice should be a reflection of your brand values and identity, which helps to define the overall customer experience. As in any relationship, your customers expect you to behave consistently, to show up the same in every conversation. 

4 reasons why the tone of voice is too important to ignore 

People are more likely to remember a brand that has a distinct way of communicating. AI that can follow this unique brand voice consistently will help your business retain this level of brand recall.

1. When dealing with customers, consistency is key

AI support automation can be a powerful asset for your brand as it helps to scale, become more efficient and increase customer satisfaction. But the tone of voice is crucial to use the full potential of AI integration in support.

You can only achieve long-term success if you communicate consistently and customers know what to expect from your brand. 

2. A consistent AI-brand voice creates familiarity

A consistent and friendly AI assistant or AI chatbot tone of voice humanizes communication. It helps customers understand they are not dealing with a faceless business. It increases familiarity which makes your business more memorable. 

3. It increases reliability and predictability in customer interactions

By communicating in an authentic way that aligns to your brand values, you can increase trust with your customer. Especially when automating customer service interactions, you want your customers to be able to trust you and don’t be afraid to use your self-serve options. 

4. It adds efficiency to your AI support tools 

One of the major advantages of implementing AI is its ability to complete tasks more efficiently.  Being able to respond to customer queries with a standardized and consistent tone makes customer interaction more effective while still being authentic.

It also helps to maintain a uniform brand personality across touchpoints and in different languages.

How Neople’s AI co-workers can speak your brand’s voice 

In case you haven’t heard about Neople yet, we think it’s about time. Because we’re creating AI co-workers that are designed to work like any human colleague would. Neople’s virtual agents work alongside human support teams, and are integrated into all the same tools your team uses daily. 

As they are active in your contact center, the AI learning curve of a Neople gives it the unique ability to maintain and evolve with your brand’s tone of voice. Here’s why hiring Neople to scale customer support helps you to maintain your brand authentically.

A Neople is trained on your company information

Before onboarding your Neople, they get fully trained by combining AI technology, your product information, FAQs, brand guidelines, internal policies and even past conversations. So when a Neople starts, they already know your business like a long-term employee does. 

The tone of voice can be tailored to match your brand’s specific needs

When a Neople gets trained on your business and brand, they also learn about your tone of voice. From the first day your Neople get to work, they can communicate with your customers in the same way your human team would. 

A Neople learns and operates in your team’s work environments

A Neople works wherever your team works. When a Neople gets onboarded, they will be integrated into all the platforms you and your teams are using. You can think of Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and contact centers like Trengo, Zendesk, Freshdesk and more.

There’s no need for API keys. As a Neople is integrated in all the systems, they’ll learn and match how you talk to your customers.

A Neople collaborates with your customer support teams

Collaboration is what makes a team stronger. Neople are designed to fit right in with your customer support teams. A Neople collaborates with your team to help resolve customer inquiries quickly, while improving efficiencies within your team.

A Neople offers answer suggestions, translations, tone of voice improvements and looks up information to save a lot of time for your team. 

A Neople helps to scale customer support without sacrificing the customer experience

When working with a Neople, you’ll answer support tickets with speed and efficiency. Advanced AI employees can analyze data in real-time to offer personalized solutions to a customer’s problem, lightning-fast.

You maintain control, as you can provide feedback to your Neople and train a Neople by telling whether the answer they provided was good or needs improvement. And as your brand’s unique voice will be maintained, you never have to worry about bad replies. 

How to offer an authentic AI voice that mirrors your brand’s values and tone? 

How you communicate with your customers is crucial to the success of your brand. Your customers choose your brands based on the overall experience of interacting with your business. That’s why the tone of voice is a powerful tool in your brand inventory. 

Especially as the role of AI is growing in customer support, an authentic AI voice is crucial to build a connection with your customers. If you are considering an investment in AI automation for your customer support teams, remember the power of personal experience for building trust, engagement, and brand loyalty. 

Tools that respect and mirror your unique brand voice will help your brand stand out, just like Neople does, ensuring the human touch is never lost in this era of AI assistance.

Want to know how a Neople can help your brand to optimize support while maintaining your unique tone of voice? Book a free demo and we’ll show you how your personal Neople can help out. And the best part? You don’t need to figure it out all on your own. Our managed services help you from start to finish to make sure you succeed in scaling support with AI collaboration.

Upgrade your e-commerce support by hiring a Neople

Increase customer satisfaction and make your support team’s jobs more fun. Meet Bob, Emily, or Max and find out how they can help you scale support.