The language experts from maslansky + partners take on the smartest, savviest, and sometimes stupidest messages in the market today. CEO Michael Maslansky and President Lee Carter bring their experience with words, communication, and behavioral science to the table — along with a colleague or client — and offer up a “lay of the language.” Their insight helps make sense of business, life, and culture, and proves over and over again that It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear™.

Every customer communication, no matter how small, is a moment of trust. Transactional communications—like order confirmations, account updates, or payment notices—can have an outsized effect on your brand and reputation. After all, the brand customers know is the one they experience every day. What makes good customer communications? And how can the language you choose help you make the most of every touchpoint? In this episode of HearSay, Senior Vice President Maria Boos shares her insights on the impact of customer communications, why so many companies struggle to get them right, and how to make them work for you, not against you.

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE SHOW

Lee Carter’s book, Persuasion

Michael Maslansky’s book, The Language of Trust

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TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Michael Maslansky:

They said, what? Welcome to hear say a podcast from the language strategists at Maslansky and partners, where we give our take on the strategy behind the smartest, savviest, and stupidest messages in the market today and what you can learn from them. Our philosophy is it’s not what you say. It’s what they hear. And that’s why we call this hearsay. I’m Michael Maslansky, CEO of Maslansky + Partners and author of The Language of Trust.

Lee Carter:

And I’m Lee Carter, president and partner at Maslansky + Partners and author of a book called Persuasion. And I have a healthy Kathleen Turner voice going on thanks to another cold that I’ve caught from my 3-year-old or 4-year-old now. So joining us today, we have our colleagues Maria and Will. And Maria, thank you. You have so much amazing experience in the space that we’re about to talk to. You have really helped lead a lot of our work in customer communications. And it is a very different kind of work, but very important from a language strategy perspective, nevertheless. So I just want to talk for a second because we’re talking about the topic of this episode. We know what we mean by customer communications, but not everybody might know what we mean. So why don’t you tell me a little bit about what you mean by customer communications? What do you think it is and what your working definition of it is?

Maria Boos:

Sure, thanks, Lee. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. So I am fond of saying, when I think customer communications, I think all the communications that are really used to transact business and support relationships with your customer, not the communications that are used to try to get them to engage more or sign up or become aware of everything you do. I mean, as much as all of those things are hugely important, and at Maslansky + Partners, we work on all of those. To me, those transactional, regulatory, service-oriented communications are a world unto themselves, and they’re so important in defining the overall customer experience. So that’s what we mean. The stuff that’s below the line, nitty gritty, people refer to them as business as usual or necessary evils, that’s what I love to work.

Michael Maslansky:

So I remember, Maria, the first time, or one of the first times that we worked on something in this space was when a health insurer that we were working with couldn’t understand why the letters that they were sending out saying that your claim is denied were not getting the positive reaction that maybe they were hoping for. But to me, that example along with the customer service context, on the phone, your call is important to us, are two examples of where customer communications really can make a huge difference in the way that we perceive things, right? I know that we internally, as nerdy as we may be in this space, when we get an email that is clearly doing a poor job of communicating on behalf of a company, that’s one that gets sent around as an example of what not to do. But I think customer comms in general is often underappreciated for its impact on the brand. So we often talk about the importance of having a really strong brand, going out there, and building your reputation, what gets talked about a lot less is how important it is in supporting that brand and supporting that reputation to have effective customer communications. So what do you think is the impact of getting it right or not getting it right when talking to your customer after you’ve already earned the relationship?

Maria Boos:

You’ve already earned the relationship, the brand your customers know is the one they experience every day. So the devil is really in the details of how you’re communicating with them through all those emails, texts. I mean everything is omnichannel now. When I started doing this we were talking about letters. Now letters are you know a relic in most cases. So the fact that it’s all omnichannel increases the likelihood that things are going to seem fractured and inconsistent to the client. Or to the end customer because companies are very siloed organizations. So I think, you know, to your question, what is the impact? The impact is these communications have an outsized effect on the overall customer experience. Language is a huge part of defining that experience. They’re the things they interact with every day. They’re the things that really represent the products and services that they’re getting from you. And they define the relationship.

Michael Maslansky:

I mean, this is just writing letters to customers to kind of tell them what’s going on. It can’t be that hard.

Will Howard:

Well, I think of it as sort of two layers for why it matters. The first is part of the reason I love this job and part of the reason I was gravitated to a career in words is that language is a tool. Like it does jobs, it has effects, it works or it doesn’t work. And there is on the first layer, just a functional element. When we talk about customer comms, you’re trying to make a thing happen or not happen if you denied a claim, right? You were trying to facilitate a process. And the language either advances that process or slows it down. So you can evaluate it purely functionally on the basis of whether or not it did its job. You know, just like you can look at KPIs for a marketing campaign to see if you drove interest. You can look at public sentiment to see if a crisis communications strategy is working. There are very material functional ways to evaluate whether or not your language at Customer Comms is working. So there’s the functional layer. There’s also a formal layer. And this is really one of my favorite things about language is that every single time I communicate with you, I’m telling you the information, I’m telling you two things. I’m telling you the information that I’m trying to communicate. I’m also telling you something about myself by the way that I do it, right? The words that I choose, the tone, how I sound, who I sound like in that moment is giving you information about who I am as a person and whether or not I successfully communicated to you that your claim is denied. The way I told you that it was denied tells you something about how I feel about you or who I am as a person. And what’s really interesting is there’s no way to avoid that. There’s no opting out of that. There’s no way to simply neutrally give you the information. Something about it, whether I choose to use the default legal language, that’s not me choosing not to brand it or tell something about myself. It’s me choosing to tell you that I’m lazy and legal and defaulted to the default language.

Lee Carter:

Lazy and legal. Those are the words —

Will Howard:

Words often used to describe me.

Lee Carter:

I am. But you know, it’s interesting. So I’m going to take you guys back. A long time ago, Maria and I worked together at an insurance company. You guys might not all be aware of this, but there was a division of the company that was called Voice of the Customer. And we both tangentially worked on that. Maria was amazing with creating experiences on forms and some other communication that went to customers. And I was working on some of it as well. And one of our jobs was to map out every customer touch point to try and identify where the opportunities were to build relationships. One of the things that we saw over and over again is that customer relationships are often formed in negative experiences, right? And there is no reason why we shouldn’t put the same amount of effort on every touch point, even those that might be a negative one where we have a regulatory obligation to tell you something, where we’re denying a claim, where we’re doing something in a way that could actually change the way you feel about a company. Often our most positive feelings come after a negative experience. And if we don’t take that kind of discipline and energy around each point that we have interaction with a customer, we might miss huge opportunities. Every communication is an opportunity. So Maria, you often talk about finding those few communication that have the most impact on the relationship. How do people identify those?

Maria Boos:

Well, most companies have great metrics on the communications that are causing the most calls to customer service. So that’s an obvious place to start. And will I completely agree with you that every communication you send says something about yourself and what you want to convey to your customer. And unfortunately, often what it feels like to the customer is they don’t care about me. They don’t care to explain this clearly. They don’t care that this is a problem for me. They don’t care that I don’t understand. So that’s why they’re calling customer service because they don’t understand or accept the outcome that you’re telling them about because the language is so off-putting to them.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, and I think that there are a couple of important elements in here. Those moments are really, they are moments of trust. They are moments where trust can be built or kept. They are moments where trust can be broken based on the nature of that interaction. And I think when you go into the organizations and you talk to the people who are responsible for these things. It often is that they do care, that they have a responsibility, that they are trying to fulfill that responsibility. But often their role is more about what it is that the company needs or feel that they need to say, as opposed to believing that there is what we always focus on, the importance of appreciating and refining and optimizing what it is that the customer needs to hear or wants to hear or the way that they want to hear it in this case the focus tends to be, “how do I communicate a functional message in a way that works for me? And they’ll get it”, right? You know, we need your payment now as opposed to, you know, because it’s 30 days late already. Or here’s something that’s important information from our perspective for you to know, but, you know, but we haven’t really thought through or prioritized or invested in the communication side of that. We had one client who had a department that was named First Call Prevention. So just think about this for a moment. So the goal of this department was to stop customers from picking up the phone to call. Now, on the one hand, if you ask them to talk about it, the positive side of it was that what they were trying to do was communicate to them via email or via letter in a way that would reduce the need to pick up the phone, which would presumably be good for both the customer who could save time by just reading the letter and the company because they didn’t have to pay money to have staff to be there to man the lines. But just the message that it was sending was basically like, we don’t want to talk to our customers. And so that’s what came through in the communication in a lot of ways. And so we had to flip the mindset so that we could get to a more effective approach to communicating.

Will Howard:

When you talk about flipping the mindset, I think one of the things that’s interesting here is to identify moments that are definitively, provably driving negative customer interactions, there’s, as Maria pointed out, there’s metrics you can look at, but there’s another sort of intuitive emotional way into this, which is to just forget for a second that you work for your company, or to forget about your company entirely and just be a consumer of another product, and think about, as I go through this journey, “What is it actually like for me? And what are the moments where I have the greatest frustration?” I think of the brands. There are so many little moments that have stuck with me. We use Slack internally as a communication platform. And they maybe have gotten rid of this as they’ve gotten more buttoned up and corporate and become a workplace software. But early on, if you were using the platform and something went wrong, it took you to a really strange animated wilderness with magical creatures wandering around. “Well, this is weird. Like, don’t know how we got here. Try restarting Slack,” right? Like, it was their bug screen. And so many places will be like the error 404, like there’s something not right here, right? Google Chrome, if you hit the space bar on the no internet screen, it turns into a little game where you make a dinosaur jump over obstacles, right? Like they have these little buried moments where there would have been a frustration for a user. They’ve turned it into an opportunity to do something a little unusual and to communicate a little bit of personality. And they haven’t been afraid of what would otherwise be a painful moment.

Maria Boos:

I love the idea of a mindset shift and part of that is to stop thinking about marketing or engagement communications and service or transactional communications as two completely separate things. So, to your original question, Michael, what are these things? Part of the answer is, well, we need to bring them closer together. And that’s part of how you’re able to fulfill whatever this need is that the company has. We have to communicate something about a transactional or regulatory or service thing, but it’s also an opportunity to think from the customer’s perspective and what else can I do for them because I have their attention now. So just in any industry, you can come up with examples. I mean, Michael, you do a lot of work in the energy industry. Of course, they have to send bills, they have to send notices about usage, and there’s a lot of stuff now about your ability to select your providers and all of that. And those communications are deadly dry. But at the same time, energy companies are doing a lot of great work about educating consumers about how to be smart users of energy, to save money, to feel good about their environmental impact. Those shouldn’t be completely separate communication streams. You know, when you’re communicating with someone because you have to send the bill, take that opportunity to share some of this information that shows you’re really thinking about what’s important to them. So, you know, example after example. In the credit card industry, we’ve done a lot of research that shows if you give people targeted offers that are truly based on their spending patterns in the past, they don’t see that as you’re spamming me or you’re flooding me with advertising. They see it as, Hey, you know that I like to go out to eat or, you know, I go to these types of concerts and you’re giving me a good deal. So, you know, again, weaving in the engagement objectives into a service oriented communication is a great way to bridge that divide.

Michael Maslansky:

So the one note of caution I want to throw into the mix here is that I think often communicators think that once they’ve got the opportunity to get your attention, you can tell them everything that they ever wanted to know about anything. And so we get instead of a communication that says one thing well, or two things well, it says 10 things poorly almost by design and what makes this hard is finding the right balance, is finding the way to get attention and not lose it, find a way to make it relevant without seeming either creepy on the one hand or impersonal on the other hand. And there’s a lot of art and science that goes into finding that right middle ground to make sure that, you know, the main thing stays the main thing and that if you’ve got the opportunity to add maybe one thing you can do that, but if you try and add three things, all of a sudden you’re going to lose everything that you were trying to accomplish.

Maria Boos:

Yeah, really important caution. And I think in terms of the main purpose of the communication, that’s where it’s really essential to be mission-critical. You know, what do they need to know now? Why are you telling them? What’s the context? What do they need to do? And any of the more relationship-building information, it should be clearly positioned to not interfere with the primary purpose of the communication to seem supportive. And you’re absolutely right to use it with a very light touch.

Lee Carter:

I think it reminds me of one of my favorite quotes which is generally speaking, when you tell a story, it should have a point to it, makes it that much more interesting for the listener. And I think that is something in customer communication, you need to know exactly what it is that they need to take away from this communication. What is it that you want to leave behind so that they’ve gotten the piece of information they need, but also importantly, as Will was talking about earlier, what do you want them to know about you as a company? What do you want them to take away from that communication? One, what they need to know. One, what they need to know about you. And if you do that, then you’re gonna have a really big impact.

Will Howard:

On the what you need to know side, I do think, people strive so much towards personalization and they obsess so much around, how can I make this message sound like it’s been really calibrated for you personally? I don’t know about you guys, but in the work that I’ve done, I’ve noticed that it’s a lot harder to find kind of positive examples of personalization where I have effectively tailored a message to you in ways that you notice, sort of zero in on personality through what you cut away like another way to say that is the worst thing a message can be is irrelevant. Like if there’s stuff that is included in that message that obviously isn’t relevant to me, that’s a dead giveaway that this message is not personalized. Whereas the message is just only relevant information whether or not it says, “Hey, Will, who lives at this address…” Whether or not it’s been conspicuously personalized it feels personal because it’s all substance that I can use.

Michael Maslansky:

I think, and Maria, I’m sure you can talk to this, the one advantage in this space when it comes to personalization that feels personal and not creepy is that you’re already a customer or a client or a member. And so, no one’s pulling your activity from retargeting or from a database that isn’t first-party data. It’s the actual first-party data that’s often being used. And I think that that helps.

Maria Boos:

Yeah, when it’s done effectively, I think it’s still amazing how little customization you see because legacy systems don’t talk to one another. So, I mean, we all still get emails or texts that say, you know, if you’ve already enrolled in auto refills, well, how do you not know that I’m enrolled in auto refills? That’s the type of personalization that you should be using in these communications. If you also have a savings account with us, well, of course, you know whether I have a savings account. So use that personalization to make your customer feel like you care.

Michael Maslansky:

So, Lee, I want to ask you about something that I know you have talked a lot about over time. And that is the, you know, we talked about the benefits of doing customer comms well, and the relationship between customer comms and brand and reputation, but often there is this gap between what brands are trying to communicate and, what they say when they’re trying to attract you as a customer and, and how they show up when you actually are a customer. So talk about contradiction alerts and how big an impact that has on perceptions of the brand.

Lee Carter:

Yeah, we say that nothing can kill trust faster than a contradiction in this kind of experience. And so we’ve worked with organizations, whether those are pharmaceutical companies who say they put patients first, and that’s at the center of everything they do, or a financial services institution who says we’re customer driven. When you put that first and foremost in your messaging, when you say that is your priority, you better live up to it. Because the second you contradict that, you’re dead. Because you can’t say we put customers first if you don’t. You know, we have told one of our clients, it’s a major financial institution, and they put a communication out about raising fees. And they said, we heard you. And one of the things that most important to you is transparency. So in the Most Transparent Act in financial services history, we’re going to start charging these fees nine months down the road. Now, that’s a huge contradiction because what we tell, yes, we want transparency out of our financial institutions, of course we do. But what do we want more than anything? We want them to be stewards of our money and we believe that they’re making money off our money. So I don’t care that they’re being transparent, I have a problem with their fees. And it’s a real contradiction saying you’re not putting me first, you’re putting yourself first. And then if your reaction to that is, look, we’re a business, we’ve got to make money too. You’re not living up to your promise of saying you’re putting your clients and customers first. So, if you’re going to communicate a promise, you better live up to it. And that’s a really bigger, you know, that’s a much bigger example, but there’s small ways that this happens each and every day. And if you start taking notice in what it is that you’re trying to communicate to your clients, what you want them to take away and what your behaviors are and the language that you’re using is indicating to them, anytime that there’s a break in that promise, you you’re going to lose that relationship and it’s going to weaken the relationship over time and it’s going to be more susceptible either to loss or they’re not going to listen to you.

Michael Maslansky:

Yeah, and I think that there’s another aspect to it for Maria, the tone of voice component. I think organizations spend a lot of time thinking about the personality that they want to convey when they’re presenting their brand to the marketplace. And Will, you alluded to this as well. But that personality has to come through in every communication, right?

Will Howard:

For me, I go back to when you’re learning to write, they teach you about two techniques. There’s direct characterization and indirect characterization. Direct characterization is Charlie walks into a bar. He’s dashing and clever with a dark past, but a heart of gold, right? That is like slash fiction off the shelf. That’s direct characterization. I just told you all the attributes of my character and you’re supposed to believe me, right? Indirect characterization is over the course of the story, I will write a lot of clever things that belie a dark past, but at heart of gold, like I will have Charlie’s dialogue communicate those attributes in a way that you will pick up on them over the course of the story. Right? That is the higher form of writing and it’s the harder promise to deliver on. Right? If I want you to really believe my character, his dialogue has to communicate it. And this goes back to Lee, the point you made, or I think many of you have brought it up that this is just another side of marketing. This is indirect. This is indirect characterization. Direct marketing is the direct characterization is the tagline. And what I tell you about my brand, indirect characterization here is the way that brand shows up throughout everything I say to you.

Michael Maslansky:

So Maria, how do we do that?

Maria Boos:

Well, how you apply your brand voice in transactional communications is really different from how you apply it in marketing communications. But it is equally important. I mean, it’s back to Lee’s point that if there’s a contradiction, if everything is a well-oiled machine in my early interactions with you or when I look at your public communications and your website, but then my personal customer communications fall off a cliff, there’s a huge disconnect. So, you know, what does it mean to be something like, you know, conversational is, you know, a frequent voice attribute that many companies have. You know, we know we’re supposed to sound human, not corporate in our communications, and they sometimes do a really good job of that in certain streams of communication, and then you get to these customer emails and letters, and they sound incredibly corporate and not human. So, you know, what are the ways to do that? You know, it’s applying the same good rules of writing. Don’t use passive voice. Contractions, write like you speak, don’t use legal jargon. You know, those are the sort of the watch-outs that will help you find ways to infuse your brand voice even in very transactional information.

Michael Maslansky:

But I do think that you’re almost underselling how difficult it is, right? Because it’s kind of easy to be human on the first letter or in the first line. And then when you get into the details, often you end up in a situation where you don’t need to know what it is that you’re supposed to do in terms of being characterized by an attribute in the brand voice. You don’t need one example. You need like 10 examples of how to say the same thing in language that is human. Um, because from a compliance perspective, there’s a limit to how much we want people kind of making stuff up as they go along, depending on the kind of letters that they’re writing, people want to know whether they’re going to be on tone or on voice or not. And so a lot of the heavy lifting here is preparing upfront for all of the different kind of key messages that you may want to communicate, not writing the actual communication necessarily, because that’s going to vary with the time, but kind of arming an organization with the verbal brand standards and the examples and the playbook so that they can put it into practice as the need arises.

Maria Boos:

Yeah, and I think it’s very common that those verbal brand standards and guidelines, they don’t use customer communications as examples. So no wonder nobody knows how to do it, how to infuse the brand voice in those. You’re right. It takes a real rigor and application of those principles in the right context. And for the people who are responsible for creating those communications, it is a different type of training and practice that they need to get it right. I’ll give you one example that it almost makes me cry, especially in organizations that have awakened to the importance of customer communications and they’re trying to do this. Lee and I talked about this example earlier. So in something like a claim denial letter, they have come really far in giving a little bit more context, being sensitive to the member’s information, particularly if it’s something to do with a health matter. But then in the middle of the letter, there’s this blank section where it says like, insert reason codes. And we say to the client, well, what goes in there? And they say, well, that’s spit out of the system. It’s triggered by the claim system. We can’t control that language. That language defines the whole experience. For somebody who’s reading this whole letter, they get to the reason why the claim is denied. And that’s the only thing that matters to them. So. You can’t separate that language from the rest of it and expect that you’re gonna have a positive effect on the customer.

Will Howard:

And having worked with you Maria, I would just wildly echo how much, what Michael’s comment that you’re underselling. So as far as the level of discipline required to do this, I think there’s a couple of places that I notice that really crop up as challenges here. First you talked about is just tactically, what does conversational actually look like line by line and word by word, the discipline and thoughtfulness to execute in each point. Is hard enough right to avoid any contradiction then you add in a new layer, which is that you really you know, I did it in this comma over here in this letter over here, but there’s seven other letters that seven other people wrote and now my contradictions are emerging kind of laterally between my different pieces of collateral and you need someone who can come in and look holistically and make sure that we’re applying our principles and our rules systematically in all instances and we aren’t generating new contradictions between them, and we’re also thinking of all the possible contingencies and variations and permutations that could emerge in the future as followups stem off and new layers are added in. So the level of discipline and thoughtfulness and kind of a holistic approach required is really impressive.

Lee Carter:

I also want to add one other attribute. So I think that the discipline is incredibly important. I also think there is a component of stamina that is involved with customer communication work and our team will often talk about it because these are in-depth long-term engagements, right? You’re going through every communication. You’re trying to figure out systemic way of looking at it. But over time, one of the things that I’ve seen, at least in working on these, is that that emerges. The last minute, regulatory weighs in and they make a change and you’re just like, I’ve just got to get it done. And it’s sort of death by a thousand cuts that happens over hundreds and thousands of communications that you’ve developed, that you’ve communicated. And you let these little things go because you just can’t fight anymore, because it’s just that one sentence doesn’t seem worth it or the lawyer seems to have a better opinion on it than you do or the product person knows technically what’s more accurate. The level of attention to detail and stamina to say the course and say, no, every word on this page matters and we’re going to fight for it to make sure that it stays true is a huge Herculean task. And it takes, I think, somebody that has that level of focus and discipline and really authority to say this is what my job is every single time I look at a communication. Otherwise, I think things flip through the cracks. that can ultimately destroy the effectiveness of a communication.

Michael Maslansky:

Absolutely. So I think I want to get down to brass tax a little bit. And I made fun of the first call prevention department earlier. But, you know, I think we’re in a moment now in the economic cycle where, you know, more and more companies are looking around and saying, where am I going to reduce my costs? And, you know, from my perspective, the first place that a lot of organizations should look is, how do I make sure that every communication I’m putting out there to a customer is as effective as possible so that customers are only calling and spending time on the phone with my customer service reps or my client service reps when it’s absolutely necessary. And so, Maria, talk a little bit about the opportunity to actually reduce costs and how you approach it so that, companies can make this investment once and then really see benefits for a long time.

Maria Boos:

Yeah, I think there are those quick fixes. We said a little bit earlier, companies have good metrics on what are generating the most calls to customer service for the wrong reasons, right? Because people are mad or upset or they don’t understand, not because they’re calling to expand their relationship with you. Those are good calls. So if you know what those worst offenders are, and you look at them through the customer lens and you apply this type of rigor, you can almost surely, reduce calls to customer service and the associated costs that come along with that by simplifying, streamlining, writing those communications from the customer perspective. So that’s one immediate thing to get started. There are also ways to piggyback on other opportunities to touch these communications. And what I mean by that is you have a new product introduction. So there are new communications that have to be modified or created to go along with it, or there’s a regulatory change, or you’re having a systems conversion. So these things all have to be brought into a new system anyway. So anytime there’s a reason why you have to touch them, you can seize that opportunity to say, well, we’re also just gonna make them much better from the customer perspective at the same time. And then I think Lee touched on this idea of, in addition to all the stamina and rigor, what can the organization do to support it? What’s the level of organizational readiness and sometimes that comes down to governance? Understanding who’s really the expert in language, how do we have them embedded in the right places in the organization? Yes, the product people are the technical experts, they are probably not the language experts. So why would we expect them to be able to write customer-focused communication? So who is the language expert that is sort of acting as the facilitator across all of the really critical internal stakeholder departments? And I’ll say one more thing about legal because often people blame like, well legal said it had to be this way. So how are you working with legal and the way that we think is really effective to work with legal is to say, “Here’s the draft. We think this is great. Do you see any risk or any exposure with this so? Don’t line edit this, you know, and don’t send this back to me with track changes. Tell me if you have a concern about this and then we can work together to change the language to mitigate the concern and still be customer focused.” But you have to have an organization where leadership says, that’s the way we’re gonna work with legal. They’re gonna give their legal opinion. We’re the language experts. We’re gonna modify it to make sure that we have taken care of any risk or exposure that this communication is doing. So there are a lot of ways the organization can support this in governance, in having a clear mandate from leadership, having leadership united across the board, the head of systems and ops has to be all in also, or you’re never gonna get away from having those terrible reason codes in the letter. So it takes a lot of consensus across the organization.

Will Howard:

I think having that seat at the table for the linguist, for the language expert in this process is just so easy to overlook and so important. Michael, you talked about costs and there’s one way to think about this, which is shaving out bottom line and saving costs directly. There’s another, which is the potential wasted money if you don’t have a dedicated approach to the language part of this. I’ve seen how much companies invest effort and dollar-wise in new IT systems to conduct these processes, right? Customer experiences, employee experiences. It requires massive software investment and overhaul, huge systemic investments, right? And at the end of the day, if you don’t have somebody at the table who’s as good at the language side as those technical people are at the technical side, you end up with a highly sophisticated, personalized machine for serving up hot garbage. Like you haven’t spent the same amount of time on the content that’s actually going to be delivered by this cutting edge machine.

Michael Maslansky:

Okay, so you’re talking to a client and you haven’t looked at their customer comms, but they’re pretty good at doing this. What’s the first thing that you’re going to look for to get a sense of how well they are doing their customer emails, their customer letters, their website or app experience language?

Maria Boos:

Well, we have our own rubric for analysis, which is, first of all, just basic principles of clarity. You know, is the language clear, jargon-free, written from the audience’s perspective? But customization that we’ve talked about earlier is another critical factor. So does this reflect what you know about the customer, where they are in the relationship, what’s actually happening in their experience right now? So clear, customized, credible, you know, getting back to those contradiction alerts. Does this actually align with the experience that they’re having? Can you back up what you’re saying? Does it feel believable to them that you’re taking the action you say you’re taking? So clear, customized, credible, and then all of it together, you know, customer focus. Does it anticipate questions the customer might have? Again, does it reflect where they are in their experience? So if you apply those metrics of clear, customized, credible, and customer-focused. That’s a quick way to recognize where there are opportunities to improve and when you’re already doing it really well.

Michael Maslansky:

I’ve been known to like things that come in fours and start with the same letter.

Maria Boos:

I heard a rumor.

Michael Maslansky:

All right, well, I’m going to add one thing. And that is in the clear, to me, the thing that companies always underestimate is just how deeply embedded the jargon of their company and their industry is in the way that they talk to customers. And that there is just so much language that assumes a level of sophistication and engagement with customers that it’s extraordinary. I mean, you use energy as an example. You know, it is very, very difficult to parse almost all electric company bills. Part of it’s regulatory and government-driven, but it’s complicated and it’s really hard to simplify. For financial services, I think the same is true. Even in insurance, when we talk about premiums, everybody in the industry knows what it is, but people who bought an insurance policy, don’t necessarily know that a premium is something other than what you pay extra for.

Will Howard:

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s remarkable when you really look at the sort of fictional language of business that’s been created that doesn’t really reflect the way human beings talk to each other. And we all just sort of adopt it as we sink into the world. And there’s the egregious examples that everyone cites like synergy and circle back and touch base. Those ones really stand out because they’re made-up words in a made-up language. But the ones that really strike me are the subtle linguistic habits that form. almost intentionally to put distance between you and your customer. So the one that I always get hung up on is for some reason in the business world, it seems like everybody responds to an email asking them to do something with will do not I will do it. And there’s something about the way that we take ourselves out of the way that we talk to each other and these, and we hold the audience a little bit at arm’s length. And it’s just a reflexive thing that creeps in stylistically around the edges. And when you really step back and go through and read something like a person, I don’t know. It just feels different than the way people usually talk to each other

Lee Carter:

You know, I’m trying to figure out how to characterize this, but I think it falls under a lot of what you guys are talking about here. But sometimes you have to communicate something that’s complicated, right? So I have a financial account and this financial services company sent me a letter asking me if I had taken my required minimum distribution according to tax code, blah, blah, blah. Now, I get this thing and I think it’s not for me because I don’t understand the language and I throw it away. This happens over a few communications. I throw it away. Then I get an email from the financial advisor saying, have you done this? I’m like, I don’t even know what that means or what you’re talking about, right? And so after having a conversation, what I learned is because this was an inherited IRA. I am required to take a certain amount of money out continuing on whatever it was. And it made no sense to me because the language that was coming to me is, have you taken your acquired minimum distribution out of my IRA? And I’m like, what are you even talking about? But in one conversation that lasted three minutes, I was able to understand what I needed to do in something that took 15 letters that I never understood what they were talking about. And I threw it away. And as a result, it cost me. And now I feel worse about that company and more open to another financial advisor coming along. But that kind of jargon, everybody in there knows what the requirement is. I used to be in financial services, so I knew what it was, but I figured it was a mistake because I am not over the age of 60 it is that I’m required to do that, so I just threw it away. Those kinds of things eke through and cost business, cost relationships, and you think it’s not a big deal, but it is. It’s a really big deal because I’m an N of one. Think how many times this happens to people. We have no idea what they’re talking about.

Michael Maslansky:

I mean, that RMD from the IRA is A-O-K.

Lee Carter:

Ahaha!

Michael Maslansky:

All right, so I got one final question for us as we wrap things up, and that is that when you talk about customer communications, when we do, we’re already hearing a number of people asking about AI and the impact of AI on customer comms. So, what do you think? How much is this gonna change the way that companies manage their customer communications and what, to the extent that you have a perspective on it, what do you think that they should be thinking about here?

Lee Carter:

Well, Michael, I might quote you from a meeting we had earlier where you said what we do is hard, right? And so we need to find ways to make the easy parts easier. And so what I think about AI and all of that that can come to play is that we can make the easy parts of customer communication easier so that we can have the mental power to make things the hard part of this, something that we can really focus in on. And at least in the short term, I think that’s really what we need to do. How can we use AI to identify patterns? How can we use AI to make things easier? But ultimately, how do we use what we know in a way that’s more meaningful as a result of it?

Will Howard:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll be interested to see. I was just looking at an article or maybe it was a Reddit post of someone talking about how they’d been using chat GPT to help prepare legal briefs. And now when they try to do it, chat GPT says, “I’m not a lawyer and I’m not allowed to give you legal advice,” and the algorithm’s been reined in out of fears of where it was going. So I think there’s one question, which is how good could AI be and how helpful could AI be in this process? And there’s another question which I’m very curious about given our experience working with kind of the level of regulatory and compliance oversight we get on these kinds of communications, which is how much are those departments going to be willing to trust these computers to make decisions about how their customers are being treated?

Maria Boos:

And the other question that comes to mind for me is how much does that AI functionality depend on recognizing patterns among vast, vast amounts of data that it’s searching now? But if all of that data is bad, I mean, if customer comms are typically not customer focused, not well written, is it just gonna replicate that problem faster, right? I mean, what is it using as the model or how does it create models if the inputs are all not what we would consider good communication?

Will Howard:

We just got to train a bot on a corpus of your lifetime work, Maria. And then we’ll have a truly, truly undefeatable robot.

Michael Maslansky:

So I think I’ll take the last word on this. I think, you know, as we’ve talked about, I think AI is going to be amazing at creating mediocre and will always be somewhat mediocre at creating amazing, particularly in a space where nuance is particularly important. And so I think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for AI. I think that there’s going to be a lot of need for thoughtful. human beings on top of it to really make sure that it makes it that last mile. So with that, I’m going to thank you very much, Maria Boos, Will Howard, and my hoarse partner, would you say Kathleen Turner, slash Lee Carter for today. This is great. And for more language insights and to be in the loop on all the other fun stuff we’re doing, follow us on LinkedIn at maslansky + partners and join our mailing list at maslansky.com/connect. That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more episodes of hearsay because when it comes to truly effective communications, it’s not what you say. It’s what they hear.