5 tips for levelling up your short customer communications

When firms ask us about how to improve customer communications, the focus is often on longer and more complex documents such as Ts&Cs. However, these are only one facet of the customer experience. On a day to day basis, firms are more likely to engage with their customers through shorter communications such as short letters, text messages, emails, and in-app messages. 

The FCA’s Consumer Duty put the onus on firms to make sure customers understand how their products and services work, and support customers through product lifecycle. However, across the sector, we see customer communications that continue to use avoidable jargon, overly formal language, and design elements that impede accessibility. 

It’s especially important to have a solid plan of action if most of your communications are based in-app or sent through email and SMS.

Here, we highlight some of the key elements of strong communications and what firms can do to balance clarity and brevity alongside more transparent, accessible communication.

1. Set clear objectives

Before you can draft effective communications, it’s important to have a clear sense of who your audience is and what you want to achieve.

Shorter communications should be centred around a clear call to action - this means asking yourself why you’re reaching out to customers and what you want them to take away from your comms. These are important questions to ask about your communications, not just in terms of setting goals for good customer outcomes, but also as guiding principles for the structure, language, and channel used for reaching out to customers.

An example of this could be firms needing to move back-book savings account customers to accounts with more favourable interest rates. While letters can be a good way of getting in touch with customers initially, you may need to follow these up with impactful digital communications to make sure customers don’t miss important information.

2. Establish a clear structure

While emails and text messages are unlikely to be relaying as much information as longer documents, structure and hierarchy still make a major difference. Customers are inundated with information on a daily basis – you need to make sure your message stands out. 

This means headings should be intuitive and framed around customer questions – ask yourself what information you’d look for in a document as a customer. This helps establish a clear information hierarchy, making your communications easier to navigate for ‘information foragers’.

For example, in an in-app message about a customer who has gone into an unarranged overdraft, the main heading could be “Your account is overdrawn - please pay this as soon as you can”. This could be followed by headings such as “What to do next” to explain how customers can pay this back and “Need help managing your money?” to signpost debt relief support at the firm and beyond.

3. Use clear and simple language

After you’ve established a clear sense of what each communication is meant to achieve and how these should be laid out, the next step is to write in clear and simple language. Documents in the financial services sector are often written in an overly formal tone, using long sentences, and unnecessary jargon.

At Fairer Finance, we’ve established a comprehensive framework for assessing this: the Clear & Simple Mark. Communications must meet each point in our set criteria to be eligible for this endorsement, and we assess communications based on language, structure, and design. 

4. Prioritise accessibility

One aspect of designing good communications that can often be sidelined is accessibility. This can cover a range of issues on the design side of things: adequate colour contrast, larger text, and designing communications that are compatible with widely-used accessibility tools.

For example, it’s important to consider how digital communications would be interpreted by customers who use screen reader tools. Emoticons, non-standard Unicode fonts, and images that don’t have alt-text, may not be picked up by these. 

5. Follow up with your customers

Establish a clear programme of communications for getting in touch with customers who may be unresponsive - this involves following up on a regular basis and through multiple channels of communication. This is especially important when it comes to vulnerable customers, who can be unresponsive for reasons such as major life events or health issues. 

How information about a product or service is highlighted is known as ‘layering’, and this is an important focus for the FCA. This can include key features of a product, fees and charges, and any relevant call to action for customers and what happens if they don’t take action.

One area where this can be important for firms is where they’re dealing with customers who are in arrears. Customers may be reluctant to get in touch or may be unable to do so because of life events or health issues. In this context, firms must make sure they exhaust their options in terms of customer communications and that their communications consistently signpost support, both at the firm and outside of it. 

Putting customers at the centre

Clarity of communications is likely to remain an important area of focus for the FCA. Firms are being asked to put the customer at the centre of their decision-making at each step of the process while designing shorter communications. 

Through focussing on clarity, transparency, and accessibility across communications, firms can stay ahead of the curve. Utilising some of the practices in this article can be challenging, but doing so can set you apart from the competition and deliver better outcomes for your customers.