It Doesn't Sound Like You

You can tell.

The three tidy bullet points. The opener that thanks you for reaching out. The word “ensure”. The closing line a shade too warm for two people who've never met.

Everyone can tell now, your customers included, and most of them stopped mentioning it about a year ago — which is worse than complaining, because you can't fix what nobody says.

This isn't a taste problem

It's easy to file under aesthetics. Sounds a bit off, who cares, the information's correct.

But for a small business the voice is most of the product. People don't choose you off a spec sheet. They choose you because something in how you replied suggested you'd turn up, do it properly, and not be strange about it if something went wrong. That judgement gets made in about nine words.

So the moment your messages start sounding like a company, you've quietly changed what you're selling. Companies are interchangeable — that's rather the point of sounding like one. The thing that made you the obvious choice was that you sounded like a person who could be held to it.

That's a strange asset to hand over in exchange for saving four minutes on an email.

What actually gives it away

Worth knowing the tells, because once you've seen them you can't unsee them — and you'll start catching them in your own outbox.

It's too tidy. Real people don't write in three balanced points of equal length. Real people put the important bit first, then remember something else at the end.

It's too warm. It thanks you for things nobody thanks anyone for. It hopes things about your week.

It won't just say the thing. Asked whether you can do Thursday, it produces a paragraph about how it appreciates the enquiry and would be delighted to explore availability. A person says “no — Thursday's gone, Friday first thing?”

It has no specifics. No names, no prices, no “the one round the back”, no Tuesday. Specifics are the fingerprint, and a machine that hasn't been told them will write around the gap rather than admit to it. That vagueness is the smell.

The fix isn't better prompts

Everyone reaches for prompting first — telling it to be more casual, sound Scouse, write like a tradesman. What comes back is a performance of a person, which is worse than the corporate version, because now it sounds like somebody doing an impression of you.

The real fix is source material. It doesn't sound like you because it has never read a word you wrote. It's guessing at a voice from the average of the internet — and the average of the internet is exactly what it sounds like.

Give it the last twenty replies you actually sent. Your real prices. The way you genuinely answer the customer who wants it cheaper. Your standard bad-news message. Now it isn't inventing a voice. It's using yours.

Which is the Neural Vault idea from Issue #4 wearing a different hat. Getting what's in your head into something outside it isn't only insurance against being unavailable — it's the only thing that makes any of this sound like it came from your business rather than from nobody in particular.

And some things it shouldn't touch

Even done well, there's a short list to keep for yourself.

The apology when you've genuinely let someone down. The bad news — the delay, the price gone up, the job you can't take. The thank-you to the customer who's used you for nine years. The message to someone who's had a bereavement.

Not because a machine would word them badly. Because those messages are doing something other than conveying information, and the person on the other end can tell the difference between someone sat down and wrote this and this arrived. That difference is the entire content of the message.

This week's homework: the Read-Aloud Test

Ten seconds, and it catches nearly everything.

Before anything goes out in your name — written by you, by a machine, or by somebody in the office — read it aloud.

If you wouldn't say those words to that person's face, in that order, it isn't your voice. Cut until you would. What survives is almost always shorter, blunter and better, and it sounds like the business people chose in the first place.

Try it on the last five things you sent, including the ones you wrote yourself. That second part tends to be the humbling bit.

If you want the version where this is handled properly — your prices, your policies and your actual phrasing held in one place, so everything sounds like you — that's what a Neural Vault is. The principle works without us, mind: get it out of your head and somewhere it can be used.

And hit reply — we read every one. What's the phrase you'd never say that keeps ending up in your inbox? We're collecting them, and some are very funny.

Built by operators, for operators.

— Kane & George