The tone document

Priscilla Brooke You hear from customers, you hear them use words that you put in your tone document, and that is so reassuring. When someone says, "Man, it just feels like Buzzsprout is on my team, thank you so much for the help" — you're like, boom, 100%. And then when someone does that and they say, "Man, you make this so simple," you screenshot that and you post it for your entire team to see. You make noise about it when that happens, because that is the coolest thing. When you've defined your goal and then someone speaks it right back at you, it's the best.

Jen Weaver You know that feeling when you order your favorite meal but it doesn't taste quite right? It's disappointing. Support teams face the same challenge: consistency.

When customers reach out to your team, they expect the same great experience every time. But as teams grow, tone and messaging can drift, leaving customers frustrated. A unified tone isn't just about sounding good — it builds trust, streamlines communication, and motivates your team, with a specific rubric for how to write a winning reply to a customer.

So how do you scale without losing the human, helpful, on-brand voice that makes your team exceptional? Today's guest has the answer.

I am thrilled to be joined by Priscilla Brooke, head of podcaster success at Buzzsprout, where she leads one of the most customer-loved support teams in podcasting. Priscilla has played a crucial role in scaling their support operations while keeping quality and tone consistent. She's also the host of Happy to Help, a podcast dedicated to raising the bar in customer support — it's a fantastic listen, I highly recommend it.

Priscilla is here to share Buzzsprout's exact tone framework, the playbook that keeps their team aligned, engaging, and trusted by thousands of podcasters. Plus she's just so passionate about support and has obviously built an amazing team. If your team has ever struggled with tone drift or robotic-sounding replies, then this episode is for you.

And remember, this podcast is sponsored by Supportman, which connects Intercom to Slack with AI to give agents feedback and surface problems in real time. All right, let's get into it.

Priscilla A couple of years ago — well, I guess now it's like five or six years ago — we were a team of just two people on the Buzzsprout support team, and we were starting to grow into a larger team.

When you're smaller it's a lot easier to work in a unified tone. For my team, me and this one other person, we worked together a lot, we were in the office sitting side by side a lot of the day. So it was really easy for us to collaborate and be aligned when it came to how we worked with podcasters via email. And I should say most of our support is email-based, written word.

As our team started to grow, I realized that we really needed to have a better way to be aligned on the tone that we use in our support team. So what I wanted to talk about today was just how to develop a tone for your support team, how to develop a tone for your written support — which I think is really important, especially as you're building a team that's growing beyond just a couple of people.

Jen So for fast-growing teams, nailing that tone and still sounding like a small team, like a cohesive unit, is really crucial.

Priscilla Absolutely.

Jen Tell us more about that. Let's say I am just getting started, I'm growing my team, and — oh no, we're starting to sound not unified. What launches me into it?

Priscilla It's funny, I think about: what do customers want when you're writing into a support team? You want accuracy, you want it to be fast, but you also want it to be consistent. You want to know that when you write into that support team, you're going to get the same great quality this email that you're going to get the next email, and the next email, so that you have confidence in that team.

That is kind of where this came from. You can have a cohesive team when you're really small, but as you scale it's a lot harder to keep that cohesion, and then it's a lot harder to be confident that your team is going to handle each email with the same consistent quality.

Another aspect of this is the fact that written communication leaves a lot up to interpretation. You have the words on the page — but you and I are having a conversation digitally, virtually right now, and I can see your face, I can see how you're reacting, and so that helps me to interpret the things you're saying. Whereas when we're writing, I don't see you, I don't see your body language.

There are studies that have been done that show — I think it's like 7% of communication is verbal and everything else is nonverbal. So if you think about that, then you've got 7% of your ability to communicate well when you're writing, because you have nothing nonverbal. And so it leaves so much up to — I don't want to say chance, but it just leaves a lot of room.

Jen Imagination.

Priscilla Exactly, a lot of room. So writing a tone document and having a tone document very clear for your team helps them to work with an intention, so that you at least have the best possible chance at making sure you're communicating what you want the other person to receive. If that makes sense.

Jen It does. Most support teams know that tone is important, but maybe can't quite define it. Can you tell us — what is tone?

Priscilla What is tone? I mean, it's a hard thing to define, that's real.

I think it's so much about the feeling of how you leave an email. That's how we approached it anyway. Okay, what do we want our podcasters — in our case, but our customers — what do we want them to feel when they leave this email?

Tone can come down to super nuanced phrases and things like that, but when I think about a broader definition, what I'm thinking about is: how is this making you feel? What is the tone I'm setting for this conversation, in a way that I want you to leave it with a certain feeling?

So when I started to step back and go, okay, I need to develop this document, I need to figure out what this tone is for our team — and how am I going to decide what the most important things are for our tone document, but then also how am I going to communicate it to my team in a way that we can stay consistent with it over time?

Most companies are going to have a set of values. I think we all know, some companies they're more forefront and some companies they're not. For Buzzsprout, our values are in front of your face every day, we talk about them all the time. So it's really a great place for me to start when I'm thinking, okay, what do we want customers to feel when they write in to support and they leave an interaction with us? How do I want them to feel? Well, that's going to depend on how our values are structured.

So that's where I started — going through our values, and what are the things that we find important in how we treat people, beyond the reality of the product that we're supporting. It's bigger than that.

And then you want to look at your customer needs. What is it that your customer is expecting? When you're setting your tone you might think, okay, I want it to be a super fun, casual, exciting tone. Well, if you work in insurance that might not be the tone you want, because you might want a tone that's a little bit more professional, because you're working with some really serious situations. But if you're working in podcasting you might want a little bit more fun and casual.

The second thing that I did, that I think is really important — and it goes back to what I was saying about customers leaving with a certain kind of feeling — that was really the question I honed in on. What is the ideal situation when a customer writes in, and then they're done, they've closed the email, they've now worked with us, everything's resolved? How do I want them to feel? What impact do I want to have had on them, as the customer support professional they're working with?

That really guided me to create some communication goals for my team. So before we even get to tone, these were communication goals. How do I want them to feel? What do I want them to think about our product when they're done interacting with us?

I'll just tell you what we came up with for ours, because hopefully that'll help inspire some people to think about what it would be for them.

For us, we want people to feel like Buzzsprout is simple. When you're done with an email conversation with Buzzsprout, I want you to be like, man, that was easy. I don't want you to feel like, gosh, that was difficult — they helped me, that's great, but it was super difficult. I want you to think Buzzsprout is simple.

I want you to think that Buzzsprout is on your team. I want you to feel like you just talked to someone on your team. You didn't just talk to a random support team person who you'll never speak to again — you just talked to Cara, who is on your podcasting team. That's what I want you to feel.

I want you to know that Buzzsprout is always improving. When you close out that conversation, I want you to feel like, gosh, they really care about getting better, they really care about making updates, clear in the way they were just talking to me, that they care about improving the product that I'm paying for.

And then for podcasting, this is maybe kind of unique, but I want them to feel that Buzzsprout cares about their voice and cares about their story. So it's more than just "hey, I'm here for you if you need me" — but I care about you. There's actually some care there.

Sometimes I think about the way people approach customer support, and it's like, I want you to feel like I care about you. But I actually want to care about you, and I want everyone on my team to actually care about the people who are writing in. I think the only way that you walk away with that real feeling of "oh, I feel cared for, I feel like they care about what I have to say" is if the people on the other side actually care. It's hard to fake that, if you know what I mean — to say, how do I convince this person I care about them when I don't actually care about them? So we try to look at it in a way of, okay, we actually do care about the people.

So those are like four pillars, and they drive the tone that we use to write emails and communicate with our podcasters. They're not necessarily these nitty-gritty individual ideas or strategies, these are more broad driving factors. So it might not be that every single email hits every single one of these goals, but I want these four things to be consistent when I look at our emails and the way people respond to our emails.

If someone comes back and they're like, "this is so complicated," I'm like, man, we really didn't hit that goal of making them feel like it was simple. We want to accurately communicate that it's simple, because that is a value that Buzzsprout has as a company, as a product.

Jen Are these the tone pillars that you came up with originally, or did those shift over time?

Priscilla They really have stayed pretty consistent.

Jen You grounded them in your customers' perspective, and so that's pretty basic.

Priscilla In the customer perspective along with our values. Because a lot of times when you're evaluating whether your customer support is good or if it's not, the question is where do you go to find that? And I think there's a balance between some of it is what the customers want and some of it is what we believe and feel as a company.

It is very important for us to make sure that Buzzsprout is simple and easy to use. That is one of the main things about Buzzsprout, and one of the reasons why a lot of people love to use it, is because it is simple and easy to use. If there's a super complicated issue that we're trying to figure out with a customer, then the question might be, hey, actually maybe we need to figure out how to simplify this, because it doesn't align with our product value. It might not be that the customer is actually frustrated about it, but I don't want that to be the norm when we're communicating with them.

In the beginning, when I was setting these, they definitely went through iterations of what do we want these four big ideas to be. But once they were set, it really has felt pretty consistent over the last several years that these are the driving pillars.

Jen That makes sense to me as a Buzzsprout customer, because it's one of the primary things I tell people about podcasting with Buzzsprout — you just click a button and it goes to Spotify. It walks you right through it.

That's a brand consistency that I think support teams need to be thinking about. When you bring it back to your company values, you're bringing it back to your whole unified experience for the customer, from UI to a support ticket.

Priscilla Absolutely. Because if you as a support team are trying to communicate that Buzzsprout is simple, and then they go into Buzzsprout and the UI is so confusing and you can't find the billing page and it just doesn't make any sense, that's not going to feel cohesive between support and development. So it is really important, to make that remarkable experience overall, to have that cohesion in the entire brand.

Jen I know there are support managers out there listening and watching who maybe don't have as cohesive a company that they're working for — maybe their company doesn't have a values-first perspective. What would you say to help those managers, those leaders, to develop a tone without setting unattainable goals?

Priscilla I think it can be hard, because you might want to sit down and go, okay, I'm just going to define these in a silo — what my opinion is on this product and our customers — and I'm going to define it and then I'm just going to tell everyone to follow it.

But I think it's really important to go to management, leaders, whoever is setting that for the whole company, and make that a really important piece of it. Say, I need to sit down with someone who is setting the culture here, who is setting the intention behind our product and why we do things, and I want to make sure that I am aligned with you before I start building out what these look like in support.

You might not have set values as a company, or they might be so broad that you can't narrow it down. But you can go and talk with your head of product, or you can talk with your head of customer, or whatever it is — wherever the people making those big decisions are — and have that conversation. It might be hard to get in front of them, but I think that's an important first step when you're trying to build that cohesion into support and the rest of the product.

Jen It might be like step one A. Use your company values, but in the absence of those, or if they're just too generic, then find an ally who is also thinking about these things, who you can start to un-silo yourself with in that project.

Priscilla That makes perfect sense. And if you don't have that ally — because I have worked at places where it's not there, it's just not possible — then you might have to build them in the silo. You might have to think, well, as the person who is running this support team, how do I want our customers to feel? And you might actually have to lead it.

And then once you're doing it and you're seeing customers react well in support, then you reach out to the marketing team and you go, hey guys, I did this, this is how we communicate, you might want to look at this and consider it for your team or adjust it for your team. You might have to lead that, if you're at a company that's not valuing that or putting intention behind it.

I haven't had any hard pushback, which I think is unique to me and my position here. I don't think I'm doing anything necessary to get that — I work at a company that really values that.

For me it was really whittling it down and finding, okay, what are the things that we're going to focus on? Because you cannot focus on everything. If you set up 12 communication goals for your team, you're not going to achieve any of them, because there's too many to achieve. So we sat with four, and we said okay, these four encapsulate what we want people to feel when they leave an interaction with us. Any more than that — and even four might be too many — but any more than that is just not attainable. People aren't going to be able to do that, because it's too many things to try to communicate through an email while being accurate, while being quick.

Jen So you're folding those into a rubric that doesn't just include those pillars of tone, there are also other things. So you have to think about keeping it minimal.

Priscilla Yeah, tone is one part of how we communicate.

Jen You mentioned earlier these four pillars that you created. They're the core, they're where you start, but they're not necessarily actionable. So where do you go from there?

Priscilla From there I went to characteristics. I said, okay, if these are the things we want to communicate, how are we going to do that? How are we going to communicate to someone that we're on their team? That's one of our goals. So what characteristics are we looking for that will communicate that?

I'll go through these that we have here, because basically I took all this and put it into a document — very simple, into a document inside of our project management tool — clarified this and gave a lot of details about what this characteristic looks like, and some examples of how this might sound in an email. So that when people are reading this they go, okay, that's what that means, that's what she's saying, and that's why we do it that way. So that when you're reading it or training people on it, there's the buy-in.

The first thing I say at the top of this document is that all of our communication is intentional.

When I was in college I took a course on writing, and there were a lot of projects that we had to do that were very intentional sentence structure projects. It wasn't "write a four-page research document" on whatever — it was like, write one paragraph, but you have to include a sentence that's shaped this way, a sentence that communicates this, a sentence that communicates this, and one that communicates this. And that's it. And it was so hard, because you had to be so intentional with every word that you use. But it really taught me that the best writing is super intentional writing.

So that's our overarching thing when we talk about this tone: we are intentional with what we write. We are not throwing in sentences without a purpose. It's really unusual to hear someone on the support team at Buzzsprout go, "You know, I really don't know why I said that," because we have a reason behind everything we're saying. Whether it's communicating information and fact, or whether it's communicating tone, everything is there for a reason.

The next characteristic that we use is friendly. So the Buzzsprout support team is friendly. It's pretty self-explanatory. We like people, we are people helping people. We are not getting caught up in the fact that we are experts in podcasting, because there are some facets of podcasting we're not experts in, and so we want to be human about that. We are friendly people, we're kind, we're not going to be rude to you. You should enjoy writing into us, because we're friendly. Okay, there's number one, pretty easy.

We're casual. We do not get super professional when we speak, for the most part. We type and write how we would talk, and so we keep things casual. Again, this is specific to Buzzsprout — for your company you might not want casual to be your second characteristic. But for us it is really important that we keep things casual, because it keeps us approachable and it means people feel comfortable coming to us, because they know that they're not going to have to jump through a bunch of big fancy words to figure out what we're saying.

We're empathetic. Everyone in customer support talks about empathy, right? Or at least they should — if they're not, they should be talking about it. It's really important to be empathetic. We know as support professionals that the time and effort that people are putting into their podcast, that is real and it is personal. So if someone writes into us and says, "Oh my goodness, I deleted my episode," we're going to be super empathetic about that, because we know that it means a lot to them. Even if it doesn't necessarily mean a lot to us, because we aren't connected to their episode — we are connected to them, because we are humans and we have lost things before. So we're going to be empathetic in that. That's just such a big part of having beautiful support.

We're thorough. That's another characteristic of the Buzzsprout team. We're going to take the time to be detail-specific. We're not going to make you fill in the gaps of information, we're going to lay it out for you. That means that we're going to send you resources alongside explaining the answer to the question that you have, or the super technical issue you're running into. We're going to use clarifying words, we're going to anticipate questions. We're not just going to send you the fastest response and move on to the next email. We're going to be thorough and we're going to give you the time that you need.

We're excited. This is my favorite one. We really are. We all think about, you know, "happy to help" — oh, I'm happy to help. And it's like, are you happy to help though? You're on the other side of this email, it's the middle of your work day, are you really happy to help me right now?

And the answer for our team is yes. Everyone on our team is happy and excited to be doing the work they're doing. Now, there are definitely days that we are off and it's like, man, I don't want to be doing this, and so it's a challenge sometimes to actually be happy about the email that you're in. In some cases we'll say, hey, if you're really struggling with that, take an hour and get out of the inbox — because people can see if you're not excited.

So for us, one of them is being excited. It's a joy to do this job. We enjoy working with podcasters. That is a big driver of how we hire people: you love people, you love helping people? Well then this is the job for you, because we need you to be excited and joyful about it when you're doing it, because that really does come through to the customer even if you don't intentionally put it in there.

One time we had a customer leave a review — I think this was somewhere on a social post — and they said, "Every time I write into the support team I feel like they're actually excited to talk to me, and I don't think I've ever felt that way about a support team." And it made me just so happy to hear, because I was like, that is what I want you to feel. Everyone on the support team is so happy to help you, and I mean that with the full meaning of the word happy.

Jen Which is great. Can you speak to — this is a whole other episode topic, we can't get too much into it — but can you speak to ways that you support the team? Like you said, you can take an hour off if you're just not excited to answer these emails. In terms of proportion of queue time to how much time they are there, or other staffing issues that just support them and being happy to help.

Priscilla If you think about what people want from an email: they want it to be fast, they want it to be accurate, but they also want it to be enjoyable. That's part of it, that's what separates good support from fantastic, remarkable support.

You can be accurate and really unhappy and in a queue for eight hours straight. The way that we structure it is you're not in a queue for more than two hours. If you're in the support queue for Buzzsprout, you're in for two hours and then you're out for an hour, and that hour typically is working on projects outside of support.

But if you're like, "man, I'm not in a great headspace after that two-hour shift, I need to go on a walk, I need to get outside, I need to touch grass," as the Gen Z kids would say — that idea of, I need to just reset — that's encouraged. It's like, hey, go outside, do that other work later when you need to. But right now it's most important that you get yourself to a place where you feel good and excited about this work again.

And then we also have a lot of the ability to pass emails back and forth between the team. So if you're working with Sally and you go, "man, we hit a wall, I really cannot give Sally any more patience, I am done with this email," you have the freedom and are encouraged to pass it along to someone else who has a fresh reserve of patience or empathy for Sally, and they can come in and give that.

I think those kinds of things that are just known — and it's known that at any point if you need a break, you can get up and take a break. I've heard horror stories from other support teams where you cannot leave your seat, or you have to start a timer when you walk away and you only get 30 seconds to be away from your computer. That is not going to put your team in a headspace where they are excited and happy to help people. It's just not.

So we try to be really intentional about saying, hey, you know your own mental space better than I do, so you make those calls and do what you need to do. And if that means taking some time and going outside for a few minutes so that you can come back and do better work, then I'm okay with that.

Jen It sounds like making tone a really important part of the whole conversation really reinforces that, in addition to the staffing choices that you've made. Just as a support specialist, knowing that I'm essentially going to be measured on these elements of tone makes a big difference to knowing what the leadership prioritizes.

Can you connect the dots for me real quick? You mentioned the tone pillars and the characteristics. Do those characteristics map to the pillars? Are they under them?

Priscilla Yeah. If you look at those pillars that I said in the beginning, and then you look at these characteristics, they're going to fall into it.

So "we're excited" and "we're empathetic" and "we're friendly," all of that maps back to the characteristics of Buzzsprout. The casual is back to Buzzsprout being simple. Friendly — we're on your team. The encouragement — we're on your team. We're always improving, that's the thorough side of things: we're always going to be really thorough with how we're explaining something because we care about the technical stuff too, we're always trying to get better. We care about your voice, so we're going to be empathetic when you run into an issue that you can't resolve.

So all of those characteristics map back to one or more of those pillars, in a way that reinforces that as a feeling when someone leaves an interaction.

Jen Is there another layer too? So you've got your goals and then your characteristics — do you have examples you provide the team, or specificity?

Priscilla Within each characteristic I'll talk about why we are communicating that way, and how that maps back to one of those goals, but then also some examples of what that might look like.

So for example with empathy. When you're trying to be empathetic with someone, a lot of times people think that that means apologizing. But that's not what it means. Empathy does not equal apologizing. Sometimes you can apologize and there's empathy in that, but they are not the same thing.

So in our tone document we explain, hey, this doesn't mean we apologize for things that aren't our fault, but it does mean that we can relate with someone and be there for them and care about them — and here are some ways you can do that, here are some sentences or some phrases that will help communicate that in a written way.

And then we'll include strategies underneath that too. So for example, speaking on empathy: if you are writing an email and you want it to be empathetic, don't put your empathy aspect at the very end. Because by the time someone gets to the end of your email, they've already decided the tone. So if you have this empathy part at the end, they're not going to believe you — at least in my experience they don't believe you.

So lead with empathy. Start strong. That is what I want you to get out of this: that I care about you and that I care that this thing happened. So I'm going to lead with empathy before I get into starting to solve the problem. That sets the tone for the rest of the email.

We'll put those kinds of strategies under each characteristic, so that when you're training on this document you really have a good idea. Okay, if I'm being thorough, that means I can use sentences that start with "let me clarify." Or "I hope that makes sense" is a good one — at the end of a sentence to say, does this make sense? I'm giving you the ability to say it doesn't, because I want to make sure that we're on the same page here.

Does that answer your question?

Jen It does, and it really gives me a picture. I think we'll create a resource that's maybe an example document or a template that follows that — let me think — goal, characteristic, example, strategy kind of framework.

I love it, that's brilliant. And you mentioned training your team on it. You're training your team now as they come on, but when you first developed this document there was a time when you had to introduce it, right?

Priscilla Right. So we sat down — I think some of us were remote at the time, so we didn't do necessarily all of it in person, but we did it all synchronously, so we were together and we walked through every piece of this document together as a team.

Actually, now that I think about it, we were all together, we were at one of our company meetups, and so we were all in the same room. We went through it piece by piece and we discussed even more than what was written on the page. I went and pulled examples of emails that showed this tone, that really lined up with these goals and showed these characteristics. So it helped to see it in real examples.

Because training new people that come on the team, that's really important of course. But when you're building this and you have people on the team already, it's going to be harder to get them to move into that tone, because they've already been writing in whatever way they've been writing up until now. So it was really important to take the time that was needed to go through all the examples and everything, and to really have a discussion about why we're doing it, so you get buy-in from everyone on the team.

Jen It's really a change management initiative. And something you said earlier is impactful — that when they have an understanding of why we're doing it, you get buy-in from them.

Did you feel any resistance? Or — let me say that a different way — was there any resistance to that change?

Priscilla Outwardly, no. When you're sitting there and talking with everyone, we were all in agreement and it was great. In practice you could see some. There would definitely be times where the intentionality behind our emails wasn't showing up. This was years ago, when we were first trying to get this habit. There were definitely times where I was like, "Hey, did you take the time to think through the tone of this email before you sent it?" And they'd be like, "Oh no, I was moving too quickly," or something like that.

So it definitely took some time in some cases for the tone to become a habit that was not necessarily having to be worked on every single email. But for the most part the buy-in was there, it just took some time to get it.

Jen Were you using a QA system or some kind of conversation review at the time?

Priscilla This was several years ago — we had a very relaxed email review process. We've since really shaped that up a lot more.

But back when we first were defining that tone, our email review was a lot more relaxed. It was just me selecting emails, getting together with the support specialist and reviewing it with them. There wasn't a rubric necessarily, we were kind of relating it back to that tone document, but it wasn't anything super structured at that time.

Now it's a lot more defined. Our measurement is, there is a rubric that we're measuring emails against, and the way we select emails is different.

The way we review those emails now is we select five random emails a week. So we're constantly reviewing emails — it's a weekly thing, which I think there's something really beneficial about doing it weekly. This week I'm reviewing five emails that I wrote last week, so it is fresh in my mind, it's not from two months ago.

And we have a rubric where we measure them against: are they educational — so the thorough falls under educational, it encapsulates some of those characteristics and some of those goals. Are they accurate — accuracy is a really big deal, it needs to be correct. Are they clear. And are they human. Those are the four scales that we measure our emails against, and then we rate them.

Jen It sounds like that QA rubric grew after your tone document, and your tone document informed it. Which — now I'm realizing — is kind of an unexpected benefit of developing this tone document, because then it really informs your QA as you build that.

Priscilla It definitely did. We sat down as a team and we said, okay, these are the characteristics that we have all decided are important, and we want to have a better way of measuring if we're meeting those goals.

Because we've all seen that the customer's opinion of the work is one way to measure, but it is not the only way and should not be the only way. We all know that we can write a really great email that's super in tone and it still doesn't get interpreted the way that we want it to. Or a customer might hate it just because they don't like the answer, that it's not a yes or it's a no, or whatever that is. So you just can't always go based on what the customer's saying.

We wanted to make sure that we were measuring the quality of our work on our end. That's why we sat down and built it. We said, okay, these are the things that we care about, and we wrote down every single characteristic and then a bunch of sub-ones underneath. And then we figured out how to come up with — we were looking for four scales that would encapsulate all of those things. So we came up with educational, accurate, clear, and human.

And as a team we developed that rubric, because again it's all about buy-in. We're a small team, there's six of us, so it's pretty easy for us to sit down and do those things together. I would imagine it's much harder when you have teams of hundreds, obviously. But you might be able to get your leads together and get them bought in, and then they can with their smaller teams. It was a really great way for us, and it has been a really cool process to do consistently as a team.

Jen I'm going to ask a question around speed bumps and cooperation from the team. So you developed this tone document and you pretty much knew what you wanted in it, but you also wanted to get buy-in and collaboration from your team. How did you balance those — in terms of, someone gave an example that you then folded into the document as it evolved over time?

Priscilla With a lot of respect and authenticity and honesty.

You sit down with your team and you want feedback — and not even just feedback, you want input. Because a lot of times — I don't know if it's clear from this recording, but I am a talker, I like to talk. So it's hard for me sometimes to be quiet and let other people speak first.

I think I was very intentional when we were having these meetings. I knew what I wanted and I knew what my opinions were, but what I want is for the people on my team to have their thoughts be heard. Not feel heard necessarily, always — but be actually heard. I want them to know that they are heard.

So I would sit back and be silent and let them have their input and share their thoughts. And then in some cases you might have to tactfully say, okay, this is important, and what you just said is important, but it's not one of our pillars, it doesn't align in this way. So while it is important that that is a way we talk to someone, it's not something that's going to be measured in this rubric.

Finding tactful ways to express that, with a shared trust between the team, I think is hard sometimes but is important — without making people feel like, man, I don't want to ever speak again. So you have to be really careful in that way. For me a lot of it was able to be done because we have such a small team that has a lot of shared trust.

Jen Have you gone back over time and adjusted that document? It's been several years since you created it. What does that revision process look like for you?

Priscilla It probably should be more consistent. But it really, for me, is just every time there's someone new that comes on the team in any part of the company, they'll read through the document, and so I always want to make sure I look through it. I make sure it's refined in any way, if there's things that have changed I update it then.

There's not so much of a consistent "go back every two months and look through it." But typically it's a couple of times a year that new people are coming onto the team, and so at that point I'll go back and I'll revise it and make sure that everything is still accurate. Or if something has changed, or we've decided that this is no longer important, then we'll adjust it. But yeah, I don't have a consistent process for that. Maybe I should.

Jen It sounds like the trigger is really people coming on the team, or you notice a change that needs to be made. And that's just as valid a trigger for doing it as an arbitrary amount of time.

Priscilla And the reality of the situation is this hasn't changed a ton since we built it. The things that we care about as a company, the way that we want you to feel as a customer, that hasn't changed. Those core values are still our core values, and so the strategies we use to get there are not changing a ton. That means the document doesn't have to change that much.

Jen You mentioned training. Do you have advice for us on how to work tone into your training process? And you're welcome to mention tools, or if you use an LMS or whatever.

Priscilla For training I usually will have someone on the team — it usually isn't me — so I'll usually have one of our senior specialists meet and walk through the document with the new hire, and make it really personal, the same way that we did it when I was training them. And say, this is why we do it, here's a strategy for how to make sure that you're able to be empathetic, here's this, if you ever have any questions about this come to me — until you can get to a point where you're doing this without having to think about it so intentionally.

So it's a one-on-one synchronous process in that training. We like to do a lot of our training as a balance of async and sync, and so that's one of the things that we think is really important: that first time you're seeing it, you're walking through it with someone. And then everyone on the team is expected to study that and revisit it often, so that it is part of their makeup as a Buzzsprout support specialist.

Jen So let's say they do that and they're trained and they're reviewing it, but a support specialist is consistently not quite getting tone right in their QA. What's your go-to for communicating that, correcting that, without making them feel like they're in trouble or losing an amount of dignity?

Priscilla It'll usually come up during the QA. It'll usually be that we go, hey, you're consistently getting not great scores on this human side of things, and so I need you to go out of your way to do that.

Or what I'll do is I'll pair them up with someone who's really good in that area. I'll say, I want you to study Brian's emails, because he is so personable and he never misses a chance to celebrate someone. And I see that sometimes that's not one of your strong points — other things you're really great at, the tech you have down, but the celebrating people, it doesn't come as naturally to you, but it comes really naturally to Brian. So I'll pair them up with someone who's really strong in the area that they're weak, and help that crossover training work a little bit.

Most of the time when I run into those situations where someone is lacking in one area, they are excelling in other areas. So you can really balance it. You can say, hey listen, you are really good in A, B, C, but in this last one, this is not where we need it to be, and we all hold ourselves to a high standard, so we've got to figure out how can we work together to bring this up.

If someone is really struggling in every area of our rubric, that's going to be a lot harder of a conversation. But most of the time that's not the case.

Jen We talked about how you measure this with your QA system, but how do you measure the success of your tone document and of this process?

Priscilla There is a higher level of consistency when it comes to our emails, and that is because of the tone document. It's because we've all gotten on the same page with what we expect and what we want our podcasters, the customers, to feel when they reach out to us.

Also, you hear from customers, you hear them use words that you put in your tone document, and that is so reassuring. When someone says, "Man, it just feels like Buzzsprout is on my team, thank you so much for the help" — you're like, boom, 100%. And then when someone does that and they say, "Man, you make this so simple," you screenshot that and you post it for your entire team to see. And you say, Cara made Sally feel like this was simple and accurately communicated that — shout out to Cara who was successful in doing that, everyone else should read this email and see how she did it.

You make noise about it when that happens, because that is the coolest thing. When you've defined your goal and then someone speaks it right back at you, it's the best.

And then people outside of support have reached out and said, "Hey, can I see your tone document? Because I'm working with our Facebook moderators and they are struggling to find that tone, and so I would love to have some of those strategies for my team." Or, "Hey, our marketing tone is different, but I want to make sure it aligns with what you've done in support, or how you've built this."

So now it's a tone that the support team has set and that we are following, but the rest of the team is starting to use that as a guide for themselves. That's really what we've seen over the last several years, and it's been really rewarding to see how just writing down the things that you're already doing — when it comes to tone and when it comes to how you talk to people — can have such a big impact on everyone in the circle.

Jen I love it. That brings it full circle, from creating that document to just releasing it into the whole team.

That's a wrap on today's episode. Huge thanks to Priscilla Brooke for sharing Buzzsprout's process for keeping tone consistent.

As a quick recap, to refine your team's tone: step one, analyze company values — that's where your support pillars will come from. Step two, get all of that into a tone document. And then communicate that with your team.

Do you have a favorite takeaway from this episode? I would love to hear it — drop me a message on LinkedIn or share your thoughts in the comments. And if this episode was helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or send it to someone in support who needs it.

Finally, if you like this podcast's focus on tactical processes and you use Intercom, check out Supportman for instant AI quality review in Slack. That's all for now — see you next time on Live Chat with Jen Weaver.