How do you go global with your tone of voice?

Zurich Insurance came to us after making sweeping changes – with a new brand strategy, purpose, values and visual identity, all focused on being more customer-centric.

But their communication was still corporate and legalistic – especially in one-to-one comms like emails, letters and policy documents.

The Zurich global brand team had an ambitious plan: to develop a new tone of voice, and roll it out to every country they’re in, rewriting all their customer comms along the way.

Once we’d picked our jaws up off the ground, we got to work.

Our mission was to define a tone of voice that:

• expressed Zurich’s new brand purpose
• brought their new CX standards to life
• would work across the world, from Switzerland to Japan to Brazil – in dozens of different languages
• improved tNPS scores.

After workshopping ideas and a language audit, we decided to tie the tone of voice to Zurich’s brand purpose: Create a brighter future together. That way, by using the tone of voice, Zurich people would automatically be living the brand. And it was one less thing to remember.

The global brand team’s goal is to rewrite all customer communications in the new tone of voice, so they work closely with each country to help them do it – and we’re there to help. We’re still running regular tone of voice training for teams in the USA, Europe, Middle East and APAC, and rewriting huge swathes of documents – from policy schedules to complaint responses to welcome emails. We also partnered with our friends at Wortwelt: an Austrian tone of voice consultancy who covered Zurich’s German-speaking countries.

There’s been a significant improvement in tNPS* for the majority of countries where the tone of voice has been implemented – an increase that countries not using the tone haven’t seen. The Swiss team has reported a drop in customer complaints, and we even got some marketing industry recognition with an award at the Transform Awards Europe 2025.

Thanks to the clear business case, Zurich’s many business units have jumped on board, with nearly 4,000 documents rewritten – and more than half of the company’s key customer comms (as of Q1 2025).

Now it’s all about going bigger and bigger. The plan is to keep embedding the tone through training and writing, and to spread it to every Zurich business around the world.

Zurich have even developed their very own AI tool with all the tone of voice rules plugged in, and countries have been using it to dramatically speed up the rewriting process (with humans for quality control, of course).

It’s the most ambitious tone of voice programme we’ve ever seen, and a perfect model to follow for any brands looking to make the leap from customer-second to customer-first.

If that’s you, give us a ring?

• “It’s surprisingly clear and gives a good impression of Zurich”
• “You can tell that they’ve really tried to make this easy to read”
• “The pages are broken up nicely”
• “It’s not hiding behind technical terminology”
• “It’s quite engaging for this sort of thing”