We’ve just hosted a panel chat where we asked three wise finance minds one big question: how do you build a culture of clear, customer-friendly writing?
Watch the full webinar hereFive bits of advice
1. You’ve got to change the culture if you want to change the writing
If your company doesn’t care about customer-friendly communication, they’re not going to hire people who care about it either. It’s a negative spiral.
So you can’t just create a tone of voice guide and assume people will use it. You’ve got to fundamentally change your culture.
You might use a little mystery shopping to see what’s happening in the corners of your business. Training is critical. And you need to give people the tools and support to keep going and use what they’ve learned:
“…every single person at Monzo gets writing training when they join as part of their onboarding. It’s up there with their mandatory anti-money laundering training. […] And it doesn’t talk about tone of voice. It doesn’t talk really about the brand. It talks about fundamental skills in writing that anyone in any role can apply. And then once you’ve got people, and you’ve brought them in, it’s a much easier sell to talk about the brand and the mission.” – Harry Ashbridge, Monzo’s Head of Writing and Customer Experience.
2. Clarity and readability are really important
Most adults in the UK have a reading age of 9-11.
So you need to write clearly and simply if you want everyone to understand.
There are readability tests that check if your writing is clear. Flesch-Kincaid, for example, scores you on sentence length and average word length – and it’s built into Microsoft Word.
These tests give you a quick and dirty sense of whether your writing is easy for most people to read. But they don’t check the context or meaning of what you’ve written. And they don’t have your personality. So don’t rely on them completely.
3. In fact… complex language is never a good idea
Mention legal language and… you’re falling asleep?
It’s no surprise.
Lawyers get a lot of leeway to be formal. But they shouldn’t. You don’t need complicated language to be precise. In fact, simpler language does that job far better:
“I read a brilliant study from MIT […] lawyers themselves rate simplified contracts easier to read, easier to remember and critically more enforceable.” – Lane Greene, language columnist at The Economist and author.
4. AI needs good prompts (and great humans)
It’s all about the prompting. You need a clever human to write killer prompts and check the output (no one wants AI hallucinations, buzzwords, blandness or, even worse, something really inappropriate).
Machines can’t tell if your argument makes sense or if your writing is any good, and some situations just demand that extra bit of human empathy:
“It’s really difficult to tell a customer for whatever reason that their policy doesn’t cover something when they’re in pain or they need treatment. You have to do it in a very empathetic, very sympathetic way and not sound like an insurance policy guide, because that’s how you lose your customer.” – Anne Marie Cooklin, Head of Customer and Healthcare Communications at Bupa.
“You have to have a certain amount of knowledge to use these [AI] tools responsibly and well and wisely.” – Lane Greene, language columnist at The Economist and author.
5. Still not convinced you need to worry?
Well, there’s a simple test.
Listen to your customers. If they’re confused, you’ve got work to do.
Want to chat more about making customer comms friendly throughout your organisation?
Drop us a line