How to make your customer and business communications clearer

You might think your customer and business communications are easy to read. But would your customers and clients agree?

I’ve been working a lot in the financial services sector lately. It’s been an education. The FCA’s Consumer Duty regulation is forcing providers to make everything they write and say to customers easier to understand. So the insurers I worked for have been testing their comms templates on focus groups and revising them to make them simpler and clearer.

Did you know that the NHS claims “The majority of adults in the UK have a reading ability at or below Level 1, which is what is expected of the average 11-14 year old”?

So it’s important to make your communications as simple and easy to understand as possible.

But unless you’re a trained copywriter, it can be difficult achieve this – especially when you have a lot of messages or information to get across.

I’ve noticed this on recent projects, where my job was to edit or rewrite communications other people had written: hundreds of customer letter, email and text templates for two insurers, plus presentations, and replies to RFIs and RFPs. for a B2B client.

The main problem with the copy I was given: it was hard to understand. The wording was complicated, and information that should have been together (such as instructions) was scattered about or in the wrong place. Your audience should never have to work to understand what you’re saying.

If you’d like to make sure your communications are clear, simple and easy for your audience to digest, here are some tips.

Check your copy’s readability

Before your audience reads your copy or hears what you have to say, it’s a good idea to check to see if there’s anything they might stumble over. Here are three ways you can do this.

• Read your words out loud to yourself. You’ll notice if something doesn’t sound right.
• Check the readability of your copy in Microsoft Word – just click on the Editor tool, scroll down to Insights’ and click on Documents Stats. The higher your Flesch score (above 60%) and the lower the Flesch-Kincaid grade level (below 8), the better.
• Use the Hemingway App.

The above apps will suggest ways you can improve your copy’s readability, such as:

• Writing in plain English instead of using jargon
• Shortening sentences 
• Using the active voice
• Replacing long, fancy words with shorter ones

Check your copy’s structure

Making your copy easier to read is good, but it might not be enough to make your communication easy to understand. Good copy needs a simple, coherent structure or organisation of ideas, arguments, messages and information. It might read beautifully but still leave your audience puzzled and wondering, What am I meant to think? Or What exactly am I supposed to do?

You can make your copy clearer and easier to digest simply by restructuring or reorganising it by following these steps:

1. Separate all the things you want to say into groups of related points. For example, if there are things the reader needs to do, keep those things all together.
2. Arrange these groups so that they either:
   (a) descend in order of importance, with the most important first
   or
   (b) tell a simple, straightforward story that leads to a conclusion.
3. Find the most important thing your audience needs to know, whether that’s a selling benefit, an announcement, or an instruction to do something. Make this your headline.
4. Insert sub-heads to flag each new section (the sections you created by grouping points).
5. Try reading only your headline and sub- heads, and imagine you are your audience skim reading your copy. Does the letter flow smoothly? Would you take in the essential messages and notice if there are important details to check – for example, the name of a person you need to call, and their mobile number?

By making sure your communications are clear and easy to understand, you can give your audience a better experience.