The Devil is in the Detail
Organisational image is incredibly important for the success of a business and is often considered the responsibility of sales and marketing.
Yet every single communication you send to your customers influences how they view your organisation. And even small design decisions can have a powerful impact.
All too easily, readers can fail to understand documents or feel disregarded by the organisation sending them, causing them to lose trust in the company.
This article explores what you need to consider when writing customer communications to ensure this doesn’t happen.
What People Notice
The Simplification Centre at the University of Reading performed a study to find out what people notice about information they receive from businesses. For a month, a group of volunteers were asked to keep a diary of their thoughts on every document they received unsolicited through the mail.
Over a quarter of these documents were sent or produced by financial institutions, and a significant proportion were utility companies and government departments.
From this study, some key recommendations emerged for businesses to consider in the production and distribution of their customer communications.
What You Should Do
When producing and distributing customer communications, make sure you:
- Know your audience well, and only send them relevant, preferably personalised, information.
- Make your document easy to read by:
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- Keeping the document concise and precise.
- Providing a structure to aid navigation.
- Making key information stand out and easy to understand/use.
- Ensuring the language used is simple and plain. Avoid jargon and technical language.
- Using a legible font size, considering the font and background colours, and using effective layout and spacing.
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Read on to explore this advice in more detail.
Ensure Audience Fit
Know your audience well and make sure your documents are appropriate for them.
Participants felt that a considerate company would only send them relevant, and preferably personalised, information.
They felt it was particularly irritating when organisations had enough information about the customer to assess their level of interest.
“I have a mortgage with (this company) and they continually send me letters about loans/insurance etc even though I’ve told them I’m not interested… I’ve lost respect for the company.” (Loan offer letter).
Reduce Reader Effort
Limit the effort required to read your document.
“Guidance notes quite hard work and key actions in using the form could have been highlighted. Language not user friendly. No encouragement to use form!”
Diary participants noted the following factors that influence read effort:
Prominence of Key Information
Establish the key information people will need to know. Then make it stand out visually, so people don’t have to look hard for it.
Successful approaches included using bold type, boxes, coloured panels, capital letters and bullet points.
“Easy to find essential information in lined out area.” (NS&I savings certificate).
Readers found it frustrating when information they wanted was not highlighted. They assumed that the organisation didn’t care enough about them to make things easier or were deliberately attempting to be deceptive and hide things.
“It took me a bit of time to find out what to do if I didn’t want to reinvest, because they want you to reinvest, everything about reinvesting is ‘what to do next’, how to reinvest etc. all clear. And then in very small, well ordinary print here, “if we don’t receive your reinvestment form by the x date, or you would rather not invest, we will automatically pay it out”. Thank-you, that’s all I need to know. I read different sections and couldn’t find how not to invest. It could have been numbered options or something. I suppose they’re trying to make a sale.” (Investment account letter).
Amount of Information
The diary participants responded positively to concise, precise documents. From everyone’s perspective, the shorter the better.
“Short, concise, all facts on one page. No selling of other products, easy to store.” (Bank ISA bond certificate).
Too much information provoked by far the largest number of negative comments, causing participants to feel irritated and overwhelmed.
“There’s so much of it. And this is just the summary. If I get the whole policy I don’t intend to go near it!” (Insurance Policy Summary).
Structure
An essential element of document design is to encourage strategic reading. This enables the reader to (correctly) pick and choose which parts of the document are important for them.
This means you need to provide a structure and different levels of information so people who are interested in the detail can read and those who are not interested can skip sections easily.
“Good summary of information with effective use of summaries on top of page.” (Credit card statement).
“You don’t have to read it unless it applies to you’, ‘you know how big the section is when you start’.” (Bank information booklet).
Good use of headings and white space reduces the appearance of complexity. Colour and size were useful to show hierarchy of headings.
“The different colours of heading make it easier to skim through the issues that are relevant.” (Notice of variation to terms and conditions letter).
Step by step instructions and diagrams showing extra detail and precision of information were noted as helpful and clear.
“Tells me exactly what to do and why so I don’t have to think or feel stressed.” (Campaign flyer).
A particular irritation reported was too much cross referencing and having to flick between pages.
“Miles of lists, too much cross referencing. The numbers are on the righthand side of the table! (instead of expected left).” (Insurance Keyfacts quote).
Legibility
Ensure the content of your customer communications is easy to read.
It is recommended you keep your font to 2mm x-height as a minimum (11 or 12 point for most typefaces). The most common complaint was that the font was too small to read easily. This was found particularly irritating when there was space in the document to make it bigger, or if the document was sent to older users.
“Print far too small, unnecessarily so on Page 2 where there’s plenty of room for a larger font.” (Shares form of acceptance and report).
Document producers should also think carefully about background and font colour. Items in bold were often found to be clearer to read unless most of the document was bold in which case it just became confusing.
“Really didn’t like the grey writing on the back, found it very hard to read.” (Loan offer).
“Black print on red background is hard to read.” (Sale advertisement and vouchers).
“The white text on green table is difficult to read – it flickers somehow.” (Council tax leaflet).
Page layout and spacing also influences legibility.
“Dense, close type – needs a lot of concentration to extract information.” (Insurance Keyfacts quote).
Technical Language
Businesses need to demonstrate that they have made an effort to be clear, even if the topic of their document is complex. Use simple English that is direct and plain. Avoid technical language.
“It’s clear, absolutely simple, straightforward English, easy to understand. I hope all their communications are as easy to follow.”
If the reader doesn’t understand many of the words involved, they are likely to give up or may misunderstand the message.
“There’s a bit of jargon here and there. eg ‘we will always represent the request for payment twice’. Represent what do they mean? take notice of? Remind you to pay twice, is that what they mean? Why don’t they say so?” (Insurance Keyfacts quotation).
Consideration Build Customer Trust
Ultimately, communications that show consideration towards your customers will help to build their trust and respect.
You can read the full study here.
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