Humanising your brand is the strategy of establishing an emotional connection with your customers.
With the rise of social media (and having to go digital thanks to the pandemic), it’s more important than ever to create those connections with customers by humanising your brand, even when they can’t see or meet you in person.
To do this, you should display and maintain a consistent voice for your brand that makes you relatable.
Why Humanise Your Brand?
Humanizing your brand can create a sense of trust between you and your customers and make room for engaging conversation. One of the most important aspects of this is that it can help maintain a positive relationship between your company and consumer.
It can increase engagement, and present your brand as an approachable entity, which will increase your reach as well as nurture your relationships and promote customer loyalty. It can also be a good first impression for leads that are contacting you for the first time.
Humanising Through Voice
There are many tools out there that can assist you in humanising your brand – one of which is often overlooked – your phone answering ‘machine’.
Humans like two-way communication and your voicemail greeting can begin the conversation before first words are exchanged.
Phone Greeting
A greeting is the first thing that your callers hear, and allows you to inform callers that their call has been acknowledged and that they will be put through to a member of your team shortly. This is a great opportunity to announce any news or promotions relevant to your company.
Try to convey your business personality and voice in your message, by using words and phrases that express your business brand. Think: Adjectives.
For example, our phone greeting here at Ballyhoo ends “your call will be answered shortly by one of our wonderful team.” which is much better than “We will answer your call shortly”.
Additionally, you want to grip your customers. Spice your messages up by letting your brand personality shine through. Whether that’s using humour, kindness, or getting your Brummiest team member to record the phone messages – it will all help represent your brand and make you stand out from competitors.
Humanising Your Brand Through Google Voice
We use Google Voice for our phone lines, and the auto attendant feature allows us to add a message that users hear when calling, before being passed through to our team to answer the call.
How to update Auto Attendant on Google Voice
- Go to your Google Voice Admin Console
- Go to Apps → Google Workspace → Settings for Google Voice
- Click ‘Auto Attendant’
- Click ‘Default Auto Attendant’
- Add a Welcome Message – this is what users will hear at the start of a call
- You can press the small play icon to hear what this sounds like, and click the voice icon below it to choose which voice type you’d like, language and speaking speed
What’s more, greeting messages allow you to add seasonal greetings, as well as add any important information that customers may need going forward. For example, throughout the month of December, we set our auto attendant message to include the closing dates for Christmas – to ensure that anyone who called knew in good time when we would be shut for the holidayschristmas.
On Hold Message
You can also think about updating your On Hold message – which will minimise callers perception of wait time and serve as an opportunity to share information on your products or services.
Voicemail Message
Lastly, it’s important that you regularly update your voicemail message – this is the one that callers hear when they try to contact you outside of your opening hours. In this message you can also include information on how callers can reach you by email or social media.
Brand Tips
You should regularly update messages – this is because regular callers will get bored of listening to the same greetings, and you want to be able to hold their attention. As your business evolves and grows, your phone messages should too.
Need help humanising your brand through your website? Contact us now to see how we can build a website that allows your brand personality shine through.