Setting the tone your agent writes in

The agent writes on your behalf, in public, to your customers. Tone is worth ten minutes of setup.

Tone

Pick the register that matches how you actually talk to customers:

• Friendly — warm and conversational. Suits hospitality, retail, personal services. The most common choice and a safe default.
• Formal — measured and professional. Suits legal, medical, financial, B2B.

The mismatch to avoid is a formal business sounding chatty in a complaint, or a relaxed café sounding like a bank. Customers notice, and it reads as insincere at exactly the moment sincerity matters.

Response length

• Short — a few sentences. Best for apologies and thank-yous. A short, specific apology reads as confident; a long one reads as defensive.
• Longer — where you need to explain something, or in an AI conversation genuinely trying to understand a problem.

When in doubt, choose short. Nobody has ever complained that a business replied too concisely.

Business context

The tone settings sit on top of the business context you gave at setup — what you do, who your customers are, what matters to you. That context is what stops replies being generic.

If replies feel off-brand, the context is usually the problem rather than the tone setting. Go back and make it more specific. “Restaurant” produces bland copy; “family-run Italian restaurant, mostly regulars, known for the pasta and for knowing people’s names” produces copy that sounds like a person.

Reviewing before you trust it

For the first week or two, set resolutions to require approval. Read what the agent drafts. You’ll spot tone problems immediately, and you’ll learn what it’s good at.

Once you’ve approved a couple of dozen replies without changing them, widen the latitude.

Things to check

• Does it use words your business wouldn’t use?
• Does it apologise too much, or not enough?
• Does it promise things you can’t deliver — refunds, upgrades, callbacks?
• Does it sound the same in every reply?

That last one matters. If every response opens identically, customers reading your review page will notice the pattern. Vary the context you provide and the phrasing follows.

When to escalate instead

Some categories shouldn’t be handled by tone settings at all — they should never be automated. Configure safety, legal, and medical cases to escalate.

→ Taking over a conversation