Choosing the voice of your company

Historically, branding has been associated with your company’s distinctive design. This means you have a unique logo, color scheme, and imagery that represent your organization.

But in today’s conversational world you’ve got to ask yourself: what’s your company’s voice?

Chat and voice applications have officially hit exponential growth rates. According to Gartner and others, businesses have deployed more bots than anticipated and the adjusted number of bots will be higher than expected! In fact, next year 85% of all customer service experiences will be facilitated in some way, by a bot–be it voice or chat. In the very near future, your customers will be using a variety of devices to talk to your company, before they ever meet with the sales person.

It’s time for you to start thinking about what the sound of your brand. Another way to look at it is: if you were to have a conversation with your brand what would it say? How would it say things?

The first question to ask is: how do I create a memorable experience? Generally, companies forget that voice and chat are not only ways to help gain a new customer or solve an existing customer’s issue–they can also create brand awareness and help make your brand more personable. Remember, each build (be it voice or chat) should be tailored “to the tenth degree” for a customer to have a good experience.

The second question to ask is: what’s my brands persona? Do you want a male or female voice branding your company? Let’s unpack these questions in order. Personas include everything from dialects to accents to tones. Even choosing to not have a persona is a persona in itself! Generally, the brain without even knowing what a voice/chatbot sounds like, can make some assumptions as to how the persona looks. Next, gender can be a tricky thing to navigate–often voice and chatbots are female. However, we’ve recently seen the introduction of genderless voice bots like Q and Sephora’s Color Match bot–which offer the companies the ability to be a little more anomalous–without being too eccentric. It also helps companies avoid pigeonholing the branding efforts to just one voice (think about Progressive and Flo).

The final question to ask is: what’s my bot going to say? Do you want to be hard-hitter, with a strong call to action? Maybe you need a very sober and factual bot–generally something that banking companies do very well. Or maybe you want to be a little more playful and fun–something that fast food purveyors like Dominos have accomplished with their Twitter bot. Always consider how existing voice and chatbots respond– If you say, ‘I love you’ or ‘I hate you’ to Siri or Google assistant, how do they respond? Moreover, how many different types of responses do you get from each, for the same question? Additionally, it is important for your messages to be sensible and empathetic–being able to provide virtual markers like ‘we’re almost done!’ or ‘just a few more steps’–help give users a sense of direction and finality.

Just remember, that building a bot without considering the above will result in a disjointed bot and confused customers. When we talk to CIOs about latest the technologies–chat and voice bots have become a reoccurring conversation. What’s more, At Macrosoft we see it as the place where a CIO and CMO meet to join cutting edge technology with strong branding and marketing initiatives. Plan accordingly and bot carefully!

ByJohn Kullmann | Published on April 10th, 2019 | Last updated on May 30th, 2019 | Enterprise Services