It’s your duty to stop being a dinosaur

First, a little thought experiment. Think about the people you like most in the world. Are they warm, friendly, funny, kind? Or are they officious, verbose, formal, old-fashioned?

I’m guessing, for the most part, they fall into the first bucket. Most of us would rather spend our time in the company of people who are pleasant to be around.

So why do so many businesses, particularly in the finance industry, do their best to avoid all those good features in their writing?

It’s all ‘regret to inform’ and ‘detected unusual activity’ and ‘incurring fees’. It’s like they’ve had a human write something, and then gone through it word by word to make it as inhuman as possible.

The whole thing is baffling and unhelpful for everyone, which is why the FCA felt the need to lay down the law with a Consumer Duty that calls on financial institutions to communicate in a way customers actually understand.

Firms that don’t, can be fined, or worse. And so the industry has found itself with a strange new imperative: better writing.

Making better writing the norm

We’ve worked with finance firms a fair bit, from Monzo and Starling to HSBC and Zurich, redrafting complicated product comms, terms and conditions, user journeys and more. And we’ve noticed a pattern: some companies are trying to scrape through, rewriting just the key documents to keep the FCA at bay, while others are focusing on the root cause of the complexity: their culture.

Maybe they’re too risk averse. Maybe they make every decision based on what’s right for them, not their customers. Maybe they’re just set in their ways.

Whatever the communication problem, a good tone of voice programme can fix it by encouraging sweeping changes across the organisation.

A tone of voice can help you stand out from the competition, win over customers, make and save money and, critically for the finance industry, just be clear.

Monzo, Starling, First Direct, Hiscox and more have built their brands on clarity, and it’s worked like a charm. Not only does it mean their customers warm to them more, but it also paints them as anti-establishment, as being on your side rather than their own.

These companies were following the Consumer Duty way before it was even a thing.

So if your organisation isn’t, what do you do? How do you make customer-friendly comms the default?

Like this:

1. Define your tone of voice properly
2. Treat it like a behaviour change programme

Defining your tone properly

Having tone of voice guidelines doesn’t mean you have a tone of voice. The ultimate test of whether or not you have one is this: are people outside the brand and marketing teams using it?

If so, great. You’re one of a small number of brands getting this exactly right. If not, read on because here comes the science.

The first step is to make the guidelines useful.

Four adjectives on a slide? Not useful.

100 pages of rules mixing tone and style, going into detail about when to ‘flex’ the tone, and waffling on about vague brand stuff? Also not useful.

What’s useful are super-tangible rules that everyone from professional copywriters to HR people to salespeople, and beyond, can understand and use.

Less ‘Be bold’, more ‘Don’t use hedges like “might” and “could”.’

Less ‘Be human’, more ‘Use words you’d actually say in real life, so “buy” not ”purchase”, ”use” not “utilise”’ and so on.

Less ‘Be empathetic’, more ‘Make sure there’s a “you” before a “we’”.’

Oh, and once you’ve got that sorted, you need lots of before and after examples. That way you’re covering the theory and the practice.

Making the horse drink

Getting to guidelines is step 1. Now it’s time for the hard work of getting people to actually use them.

We base our tone of voice roll-out plans on a tried and tested behaviour change model called COM-B.

In a nutshell: if you want to change people’s behaviour, you need to give them the capability, opportunity and motivation to change.

How? Here are our top 7 things that’ll help you make that change.

1. Train your people, in smallish groups, to use the tone. You’ll want plenty of exercises because people learn by doing, and a trainer who’s both charismatic and an oracle of good writing (we’ve got lots of those, by the way).And as a side note: training people to change the way they write is hard. If you want it to work, you have to do it properly. E-learns are no substitute. And unless you have on your payroll a bunch of people who are as brilliant at writing as they are at capturing and holding the attention of a room full of tone of voice naysayers for hours on end, nor will a train-the-trainer programme. (Capability)
2. Coach key communicators one to one, so they can get help with specific writing challenges. (Capability)
3. Rewrite your most used templates, documents and customer comms in the tone of voice. Hey presto: thousands of messages on tone for the price of a few dozen. (Opportunity)
4. Create tone of voice AI prompts so your people can quickly generate writing that sounds bang on. I can’t emphasise enough how much of a game-changer this is: with the right prompts you can go from bad writing to good writing across your entire organisation pretty much overnight. (Opportunity) 
5. Use tone checking software like Toney. That way your people get tone tips as they write, and nobody has to read the guidelines. (Opportunity and capability)
6. Get support from the top. An endorsement from the CEO is gold dust. (Motivation)
7. Link it to a popular movement. If your company talks about ‘putting people first’, call your tone of voice ‘people-first writing’. Leaching onto a campaign with currency is like getting a Mario mushroom boost. (Motivation)

There are, of course, dozens more things you can do to breathe life into your tone of voice. To hear all about them, plus plenty more thoughts and ideas on the long legacy of the Consumer Duty, come along to our free Duty Calls webinar from 1-2pm on September 18^th 2024.

Written by Nick Padmore, Head of Language at Definition.