Helsinki Power
A documented brand voice for a Helsinki public utility, written to be operable across customer service, regulatory communications, and resident newsletters.
The context.
Helsinki Power serves around one-hundred-and-eighty-thousand residents. They had been operating without a documented brand voice for thirty years; the result was a customer-service register that varied between formal Finnish bureaucratic, friendly newsletter-Finnish, and the regulatory language demanded by the Finnish Energy Authority. They needed a single voice that could be operated by three different teams without any of the teams losing what they did well.
The approach.
A Voice engagement extended by two weeks to accommodate the three internal stakeholder groups. The tone-of-voice guide is built around twenty side-by-side rewrites — formal Finnish on the left, the new voice on the right — and is operable by a customer-service agent in their second week on the job.
The outcome.
The voice has been in operation for two years. Complaint rate on customer correspondence is down twenty-eight percent. We were the first external writers ever commissioned by the utility; we have been retained for an annual voice refresh.
"The Voice — verbal identity for a public utility — 2023, Utility, Finland." Casework · Helsinki Power
Working on something comparable?
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