This past December, amidst the blizzard of urgent pre-holiday tickets, a beautiful snowflake floated down into our support inbox. One of our long-term customers wrote in to tell us that they love Front’s tone of voice and writing style, and asked for tips on how we do it. ❄️
It’s always flattering to get an email like this, but this one resonated with me personally. Before joining the team, I experienced Front’s exceptional support as a customer myself. Those interactions left such a lasting impression that when I began my job search, Front rose to the top of my list. Now, four years into my role here, I can say with certainty that our approach to effective communication is anything but accidental.
After reading the message with a big smile, I consulted with our Support director, Kenji, to see if we could share our internal tone guidelines with the customer. Now, fresh from a restful winter break, we’re ready to reveal our secret sauce.
Here’s why tone matters, how we nail it at Front, and a link to our exclusive tone guide packed with actionable tips to elevate your team’s communication.
Why a consistent support tone matters
Think about the last time something broke at work. Maybe your team’s messages stopped sending, or that important workflow you set up just ... stopped. When you reach out for help, you’re not just looking for someone to fix it — you want to know your business is in good hands.
That’s what tone is really about. When we help track down a missing email, walk through a tricky setup, or just check in to see how a new feature is working out, our tone is what sets the stage for customer trust.
The financial implications are equally compelling. A Harvard Business Review study found that customers who had the best emotional experiences with a brand were likely to spend twice as much as those who had merely satisfactory experiences. Salesforce research indicates that 78% of customers will forgive a company’s mistake after receiving empathetic, high-quality service – demonstrating how tone can transform even challenging interactions into relationship-building moments.
So we don’t just wing it. We have a game plan for hitting that sweet spot between being real and being reliable — every single time.
Our tone framework
To ensure our tone is always intentional and never left to chance, we’ve created a framework that guides every customer interaction. Here’s how we approach it:
1. Define your team’s tone pillars
Tone pillars will be unique to each company, and will differ based on your product type, customer base, and company goals. We recommend sitting down as a support team to develop your tone pillars – if you have a marketing team, partnering with them is a great way to accomplish this.
After 10 years of soul-searching, and thousands of customer interactions, here are our pillars at Front 🧘
Keep it quick but human. Every customer reaching out wants a fast solution, but speed shouldn’t come at the cost of warmth. We start with a friendly greeting, acknowledge their situation, and then move efficiently to the solution.
Build partnership. Solving issues requires teamwork between Front support and the customer. When customers invest time in troubleshooting or gathering information, we thank them for their collaboration. We bring customers into our process by explaining the "why" behind our answers, and maintain transparency about what we can (and cannot) do. This honest approach builds trust and helps customers make informed decisions about their workflows.
Match and adapt. Responses are not one-size-fits all, and each interaction will call for a different approach. Sometimes that means adding a playful emoji or holiday greeting, other times it means maintaining a more serious tone when helping with a critical issue. We assess each customer’s situation and respond in kind, while maintaining professionalism and clarity.
These pillars give our team a north star to follow, ensuring our tone feels cohesive no matter who’s responding.
2. Set guidelines to follow
A good tone guideline will feel less like a restrictive template and more like a trusted mentor’s advice.
Rather than starting from scratch, we recommend looking at your team’s existing communication strengths. For our team, strong guidelines emerged by answering fundamental questions about the work we were already doing:
Which interactions received high CSAT scores and enthusiastic customer testimonials?
When do customers take a moment to specifically praise not just the solution, but the way it was communicated?
How do your highest-performing team members adapt their communication style?
Which support conversations become reference points in your team – the ones that get shared in Slack with "This is how it’s done!"?
These organic moments often capture your team’s voice at its most authentic and effective.
This approach helped us create guidelines that stay true to our pillars. Whether you’re building your own or borrowing from ours 😉, the goal is to create a foundation that empowers confidence between your team and your customers.
3. Make tone a part of QA
Tone wasn’t built in a day! We’re constantly refining, and we’ve implemented our guidelines into every step of our process.
It starts with the interview process. Candidates tackle a support homework assignment that grades on both technical know-how and communication style, helping us identify people who can solve complex problems while navigating the emotional dimensions of exceptional customer support.
Once onboarded and trained on our guidelines, teammates will share and edit drafts together in Front, creating natural learning opportunities where newer agents can learn from experienced ones. This peer-to-peer feedback loop helps maintain consistent quality while allowing individual voices to shine through.
In our weekly QA reviews, tone represents one of four key metrics we use to evaluate customer conversations, ensuring it stays top of mind alongside other important factors, such as completeness, correctness, and brevity:
This collaborative process helps everyone stay on the same page and keeps our tone evolving as we grow.
4. Empower teammates to use their individual voice
Each team member brings their own style to the queue, whether it’s a knack for humor, a talent for analogies, or an ability to explain complex ideas in simple terms. We encourage our team to embrace their preferences and strengths while staying aligned with our tone pillars.
One example? Emojis. Some of our teammates love using them to add a touch of warmth, while others prefer a more minimal approach. Both are great, as long as they’re used thoughtfully and in line with our pillars.
Seeing the results
That snowflake that drifted into our inbox last month – a customer pausing to appreciate not just what we do, but how we do it – represents a fundamental truth about modern customer support: how we make customers feel is our most sustainable competitive advantage.
The impact of tone reverberates through every metric that matters. At Front, we’ve seen how thoughtful communication directly influences customer satisfaction scores. When our team embraces our tone pillars – keeping it quick but human, building partnership, and adapting to each situation – our CSAT scores consistently outperform industry benchmarks.
Because in the end, it’s not just about solving problems — it’s about creating moments that stick, one emoji, one sign-off, and one thoughtful reply at a time.
Want to take a look at our internal framework? We’ve made it available for download here.
guide: Front support’s tone guidelines
Get the inside scoop on how Front’s support team creates trust and builds customer relationships with every interaction.
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Written by Phoebe Killick
Originally Published: 28 January 2025