FCA READS FINANCIAL FIRMS’ COMMUNICATIONS AND GOES: “EH?”

FCA READS FINANCIAL FIRMS’ COMMUNICATIONS AND GOES: “EH?”

TERMS AND CONFUSION APPLY

Earlier this summer, the FCA sat down and (tried) to read 132 financial documents.

Now, these are intelligent guys and girls. I imagine quite a few of them are lawyers. And yet they must have scratched their heads and gone: “By Jove. I have absolutely no idea what these things are going on about.”

OK. I wasn’t there. But the report found only 6% were written in plain English. Which becomes even more remarkable when you discover who they were written for. Yup. The customer.

We’ve been taught a peculiar habit in organisational communication.

When something is important, we give customers lots of information.

The more important it is, the more we give them.

And when it’s really important, we give them absolutely bloody loads of it.

It sounds perfectly sensible.

Until you remember someone has to read it.

Until you meet John and Mary.

Sadly this is a true story. Mary was receiving long-term treatment for incurable cancer when she and John received a letter from their health insurer. It said they owed money and warned their policy could be cancelled if they didn’t pay. Naturally, they worried.

Then they discovered what they needed to do.

Nothing.

They already direct debit in place. When I read the story, my first thought wasn’t: “Could they have written a clearer letter?” It was: Why write to them at all?

I don’t know this couple but having dealt with the death of my parents last year they have my sincere sympathy.

I’ve seen a less serious version of this. We worked with an insurer that couldn’t reach claimants by phone in around 35% of cases. So it sent a three-page letter. Nobody called.

We replaced three pages with: “Please call us on this number.”

They called.

Psychologists call part of this processing fluency — how easily our brains process information. Try remembering 07700 900 123. Now try 07 7009 001 23. Same digits. Same information. Different effort.

And that, I think, is the bigger lesson. Customer communication has one job: move the issue forward. If the customer reads it and goes “Eh?”, you have a problem.

I have a fairly unscientific way of testing this. The Aunt Test. Imagine you’re writing to my 83-year-old aunt. Will she immediately understand why you’ve contacted her and what she needs to do next?

If not, have another go.

And if she doesn’t actually need to do anything? Perhaps don’t write to her at all.

Sometimes the lowest-effort communication is the one you never send.

PS if you like my weird insights on psychology and work design you’ll get even more from my newsletters.

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