Client story - Citroën UK
Developing tone of voice and improving customer communications to create a consistent
written and verbal style for Citroën UK
Aims
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To develop a workable tone of voice for Citroën UK’s written and verbal
communications.
To bring the quality and tone of Citroën UK’s contact centre communications in line
with the brand’s wider ideals.
To help contact centre staff deliver consistently high-quality customer service.
Project
To achieve these aims we:
• spent time with key stakeholders at Citroën UK to get to the heart of their brand
ideals
• analysed a broad sample of their writing – both internal and external – as well as
telephone conversations with customers, and came up with a detailed set of
recommendations for improvement
• refreshed their library of standard letters and paragraphs and created writing
guidelines aimed at achieving consistency of tone across Citroën UK
• provided face-to-face training to customer-facing staff to develop their
communications skills and embed the new Citroën UK tone of voice
• trained team leaders to make their quality assessment more effective, objective and
consistent.
Results
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The number of positive feedback letters Citroën UK received from customers rose
by 200%.
Citroën UK went from 74% to 82% in customer satisfaction in the first eight months
of 2010.
In the BPA report on call-handling Citroën UK moved from an average ranking of
6th out of 13 car manufacturers in the first half of 2010 to an average ranking of 2nd
in the second half of the year.
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Improved morale in the contact centre. Advisors feel motivated about the less stuffy
and formal style.
Nice words
“Working with the lorries has made a dramatic difference to the way we communicate with
our customers.
Our training has sharpened up our writing skills and brought our language up to date. We
discovered that our ‘tone of voice’ on the phone was pretty much up to date, but our
written language was stuck in the deep past.
Now we think long and hard about the language we use in the Contact Centre so that we
come across as human and as helpful as possible at all times. It’s been really liberating to
cut out all the formal and stuffy language we used to use. The customers are also friendlier
in return! They can tell that we’re focusing more on them than on company processes.”
Alka Sidar, Contact Centre manager, Citroën UK