Interview

Ines Abaroa built a bank's voice out of complaint letters

The tone-of-voice project that started in the customer service queue and ended in the annual report.

14 min · Paris

Abaroa's team read eleven thousand complaints before writing a single guideline, on the theory that a bank's real voice is whatever it sounds like when a customer is angry.

What they found was not rudeness but evasion — sentences engineered so that no person appeared to have done anything. The rewrite was mostly a matter of restoring subjects to verbs.

Complaint volume fell thirty-eight per cent in a year. Abaroa is careful: some of that is process. 'But people stop writing twice when the first reply sounds like someone read it.'

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