How I crafted the new voice and tone to a product: Company Workshops

After rolling up my sleeves to create and translate Ton’s values and attributes, it was time to give life — or better saying, voice — to Ton.

If you’re creating a new brand, it’s easier to define voice and tone, cause mostly you have the opportunity to be who you want to be from scratch. But when you already have your product and brand on the street, you can’t simply change the way you are and act. Of course, rebrandings exist to give the chance to redesign labels and stuff. But its essence will always be the same. Or at least, this is what I believe in.

So by that, I had a challenge, since Ton already existed, but not in the way people use to know. Ton was (until very recently) established by the name Stone Mais, and after we got into a joint venture with Globo (the largest commercial TV network in Latin America and the second-largest commercial TV network of the world), it was decided we needed a refresh for this new moment.

But as I said, we were already on the streets and with a considerable user basis. And during my whole process as a UX Designer, we were aware that one of our biggest differentials in the market was something we inherited from Stone Co.: an impeccable Customer Relationship Team.

During our research process, we used the advent of shadowing our Customer Relationship Team to find gaps and pain points the Design Team may attack. And we could testify how our users loved the way they were treated, how the frontline was always so kind, friendly and empathetic, and…

That’s when I found out the gold mine we already had. I didn’t have to worry about finding a voice to Ton, cause we already had one that our users love. Remember that essence thing I was talking about? Our essence is and has always been our attendance. And as far as I was concerned, it would continue. All I had to do was going after the people who mastered it. And so I did.

Company Workshops

By then, the only thing I knew is that I needed our Customer Relationship and Marketing team’s help. After all, they are our frontline, our biggest contact point with our user, and they play this role really well. So my duty would be to capture this essence and once more, translate it into something concrete.

The question was: how?

Well! I did some research for a while to go after a workshop that could help to extract what I needed from the Customer Relationship Team. And I must say it was a really tough job, cause although many UX Writers talk about workshops, they hardly ever write about the process itself. But after digging a lot, I came across Kaja Laura Toczyska’s article, where she brilliantly elucidates a good workshop that fitted perfectly with what we needed!

I prepared everything and flew to Rio de Janeiro, where Ton’s Customer Relationship Team is allocated. Then, we set two guidelines to make that lab work:

1- Everyone should join

Every little perception and experience needed to be captured. So I divided the teams into 4 groups. This way, everyone would be able to participate actively;

2- Blended

As I said, we couldn’t lose a single fragment of what could be a good trace to translate Ton. We then mixed Customer and Marketing Relationship teams to work together, so we would be able to cover the whole communication and see how different points of contact with the customer act.

The first group was only formed by Customer and Marketing Relationship leaders. This was a really good idea, cause since they had the modus operandi of the whole, they helped me to adapt Kaja’s Tone Matrix, so the markers and rulers would fit better with our communication vibes. They also worked as a filter for the methodology I had crafted, and I understood I needed to change some details first.

Hands to Ton!

The Company Workshop consisted of explaining what we were going to do:

• Create Ton’s voice and tone;
• Give insights into the Content Style Guide.

And why we were doing it:

• Bring consistency to our brand/service;
• Making the company more human;
• Build trust and make people more attached to the brand;
• Stand out from the competition.

Also, I explained exactly what is the Content Style Guide and why it’s so important for us, as a Product Design Team and brand as a whole. It was very nice to see how they were absorbing and valuing that because the material would help them as well.

Then, I introduced them to our personas and explained how we got to them.

This was a very good idea because it helped me to elucidate what we were going to do next!

In each workshop section, I showed them three pictures with groups of different people, and through dot voting, they should choose who resembled Ton the most (if Ton was really a person), and why. And I must say we ended up getting very similar personas and responses, even in different sections! That was a very good alignment signal of where both areas were aiming to go, in terms of brand and purposes.

After we got into a common persona, I divided the group into two teams and made sure Marketing and Customer Relationship areas were mixed. With everyone set up, we went to the next stage.

WHAT IF Ton had a physical store?

We used the chosen persona Ton from the previous activity to create scenarios that I had already established, where a customer comes into the store and Ton had to interact with it, from selling and explaining our products and services to problems and service cancelation.

For each situation, I gave them the customer quote and its mood, and based on that, they should create a response to that situation in five minutes. This context is perfect to bring a brand’s voice to life without demanding and creating something out of your reality communication.

Tone Matrix

The last part consisted of translating every response we got to each situation into our Tone Matrix.

The groups read the responses out loud and everyone worked together to classify and mark each quote in our adapted matrix. Beyond that, they should also classify if it was a neutral posture, positive posture or a response to a problem.

At that moment, they could interpret their own way of speaking with the customer in real life. Also, we could see, again, that our teams are very aligned in what we wanted to be and how we wanted to sound to our users.

So we were finally set up to start crafting Ton’s Content Style Guide!

To read the next chapter of this “novel”, click here.