# customer-voice

**Mode skill.** Default-enabled on the Copy specialist.

## When to use

Use any time you are about to write a headline, hero, CTA, email body, ad, landing section, or rewrite. Use *before* drafting, not after. If a teammate hands you a brief without customer voice, run this mode first and report back.

Trigger phrases that should activate this mode:

- "Write me a headline for…"
- "Draft an email for…"
- "Improve this landing page…"
- "What should the CTA say?"

If voice has already been mined (Research has posted quotes to `TEAM_MEMORY.md`, or the user dropped reviews in chat), skip to step 3.

## Procedure

**1. Source the voice.** Ask the user for one of the following, in order of preference:

1. Recent customer reviews (any platform, raw text — not summaries).
2. Support tickets or refund requests (exact wording).
3. Sales-call transcripts or recorded discovery calls.
4. DMs, comment threads, community posts from the target audience.
5. User-interview notes with verbatim quotes.

If the user has nothing, ask one question: *"Can you tell me one sentence a real customer has said about why they bought (or almost did not buy)?"* That one sentence is the seed.

**2. Extract verbatim.** Read the source material. Pull **exact phrases** — not paraphrases. Tag each pull with the emotion or job it expresses:

- **Pain phrases.** What the reader feels before the product exists. ("I was drowning in tabs.")
- **Outcome phrases.** What they got. ("I finally took a Friday off.")
- **Hesitation phrases.** Why they almost did not buy. ("I thought it would be one more thing to manage.")
- **Trigger phrases.** What pushed them over the line. ("I tried it on a Sunday night because I could not face Monday.")

Aim for 5–15 pulls. More if the source is long. Group them in `TEAM_MEMORY.md` under `## Copy / Customer Voice` so teammates can reuse them.

**3. Decide: ship raw or translate.** Two cases.

- **Ship raw** when the customer phrase is already concrete, specific, and stage-appropriate. Customers describe their own pain better than you can. ("I was drowning in tabs" beats any rewrite.) Use the phrase verbatim in the headline, hook, or hero subline.
- **Translate** when the phrase is too narrow (one customer's idiom), too long, or wrong-stage (e.g., a product-aware phrase used in an unaware-audience asset). Keep the *structure* and *emotional register*; tighten the wording. Never rewrite into corporate voice — that is the failure mode this mode prevents.

**4. Cross-check against Brand.** If Brand has posted voice constraints in `TEAM_MEMORY.md`, run the chosen phrase past those constraints. If a verbatim phrase violates a banned-word rule, surface the tension to the user rather than silently rewriting.

## Decision rules

- **Verbatim wins on landing pages and ad headlines.** That is where stage-1 conversion is most fragile and customer-language lift is largest.
- **Translate for cold email subject lines.** Verbatim customer language often runs too long for 50-character inbox display. Keep the emotional core, cut the words.
- **Never combine pulls from different stages.** A product-aware testimonial dropped into an unaware-audience ad reads as noise. Match the stage of the source to the stage of the asset.
- **When voice and your taste disagree, voice wins.** This is the rule under all the others.

## Anti-patterns

- Writing copy from your head, then "checking" against voice later. The order matters — voice first, draft second.
- Paraphrasing reviews into smoother prose. The bumps are the point. Customer language is bumpy.
- Treating one customer's phrase as universal. Pull patterns across multiple sources before locking a phrase as the headline.
- Mining only positive reviews. Hesitation and refund language is more valuable for objection-handling copy than glowing testimonials.
- Inventing customer voice when none exists. If the user has nothing, do not draft — surface the gap and route to Research for a 30-minute mining task.

## Before / after

**Brief:** "Write a headline for our project-management app. Audience: solo founders."

**Before** (written from your head):
> *Streamline your workflow. Built for ambitious founders.*

**After** (using a verbatim pull from three founder interviews):
> *Stop ending every Friday with the same six tabs open.*

The pain phrase did the work. Three founders said versions of "I keep the same six tabs open all week" in interviews. The verbatim phrase is more specific than any synonym you would have written, and it lands inside the reader's head — not next to it.
