voice guide

Also called a voice brief or a persona doc, a voice guide answers one question: how does she sound? That is a different question from what to do next, which belongs to a message sequence (the order of steps, when to offer, when to stay quiet). Two chatters can follow the same sequence and sound like two different people. The voice guide exists to close that gap, and nothing else.

What goes in a voice guide?

Seven sections, on two pages at most: identity, vocabulary, form, rhythm, what she shares, off-limits topics, and real examples. Past that, nobody opens it mid-shift, and a guide nobody opens holds no voice.

• Base identity: the name used, the age shown, city, relationship status. What is true, what is played, and where the line sits.
• Vocabulary: ten words she uses, ten she never uses. Fastest section to write, and the one that does the most work.
• Form: usual message length, punctuation, capitals, abbreviations, typos left in or cleaned up.
• Rhythm: fast, late, in bursts? A creator who answers within sixty seconds at 3am stops sounding like a person.
• What she tells fans about herself: three or four reusable stories with their fixed details. A dog that changes breed between shifts gets noticed.
• Off-limits topics: what she does not go into, what she never promises.
• Real examples: five messages she wrote herself. Worth more than all the description above them.

How do you write one without spending a week on it?

Build it from her actual messages, not from a questionnaire. Pull a couple of hundred of her own replies, underline what repeats, write down what you see. Ask a creator to describe her style and you get the style she thinks she has; her outbox gives you the one she has.

After that it grows by small corrections. Every quality control pass that finds a tone drift adds one line, never a paragraph.

Where does the voice stop and the selling start?

At the sales message, which obeys rules rather than style. This is what most guides miss. A voice written up as soft and hesitant, trailing off at the end of sentences, inevitably produces sales messages that end in an ellipsis, the worst-performing closer in our data. A voice written up as considerate produces a closed question at the moment of closing, which costs several points of conversion.

So add one section, last, in plain words: the message that sells ends on a statement, the price appears once in clear figures, the voice resumes immediately after. Three lines settle the conflict before it comes up.

Is a voice guide enough to hold a voice across a team?

No, and it is worth saying so. A guide gives vocabulary and prohibitions. It does not give the memory of what was said to this particular fan, which is what a handover carries, and it does not give consistency at 4am at the end of a shift. The finer the shift rotation is cut, the wider the drift runs despite the document.