Customer Communication

We create clear, simple and human customer communication.

We work with businesses who want to make their customer communications more memorable, easier to understand and act on. Every touchpoint along their journey has the ability to make their lives easier, reduce confusion and prevent irritation. We’re specialists at transforming the operational, administrative and post-sale content you send to customers.

Tone of voice

It’s not just what you say. It’s how you say it. It’s the difference between writing: “Subject to the terms of your lease the payment must be sent by Friday or you will be subject to action” and “Your payment is three weeks overdue. You need to clear your debt by Friday or, reluctantly, we’ll need to take action. If you need help paying…” But, in the end, it’s simply about sounding human, helpful and focused on how your customer is feeling.

Create your tone of voice

Building an authentic brand voice at every touchpoint. Brand language and tone of voice development that runs through the whole customer journey.

We can help you develop a business-wide tone of voice that moves beyond a a simple set of adjectives. By understanding where you are now, what your customers expect and the kind of organisation you want to be we’ll design a new way for you to communicate internally and to your customers. We work with you to define your written and spoken tone of voice, build a distinctive brand language that differentiates you and, most importantly, embed it in every single touchpoint throughout your organisation.

Start with your customers: Understand how your customers want to be communicated with, where they get frustrated and what your current tone says about how they see you. We’ll build a clear picture of the reality using examples, customer feedback and internal comms analysis to create a “current state” and a clear idea of where you need to get to.

Designing a new tone: We’ll define your “reason to change” and back it with customer and colleague feedback. Working alongside you and a selection of key stakeholders (ideally including front line teams and customers) we’ll create a tone thats simple to apply but makes you sound like the organisation you want to be. We work with you to define your own unique tone of voice, and translated it across all your customer touchpoints. Creating consistency across your post-sales customer journeys.

Roadtesting & testing: How quickly can a customer understand you bill? What’s their response to a overdue account email? What do they think your like based on your reminder emails? These are the sorts of question we’ll explore in roadtesting – a way to practixally access what customers and colleagues think. It also gives you the evidence to

Applying your tone: We find a new tone gets adopted best when colleagues can see it used in practice. not just in marketing but in your operational and day to day communication with customers. We humanise all your customer comms material – from digital to white mail – including social media. Helping you create a brand tone throughout all your content.

Operationalising your tone of voice

Ensuring that you sound the same throughout all your operational and service based customer communication.

Very often you’ll already have a tone of voice. Maybe it was part of a rebrand or it’s a legacy from previous branding work. But often, this tone isn’t carried out into your operational and service customer communication. That creates a disjoint between what customers see before and after they’ve bought. We can support in reviewing and improving the operational and service touchpoints that often get overlooked.

Operationalising your tone: From our experience the first step is to translate your tone into a practical, operational format. How do you use “playful” in a debt recovery letter, for example. Turning your existing tone of voice into a range of practical, simple and usable guidance. We’ll help you make it real and useable for teams who often struggle to make tone of voice real in their day-to-day work – like front line team, customer care finance, IT and legal.

Triage and review your operational comms: When you have a huge suite of material, sometimes extending over several departments, it’s a nightmare knowing where to start to rationalise it. We’re experts at gathering everything together, objectively scoring it and giving you recommendations of where to start – as well as defusing the real comms landmines.  And we can give you back simplified, easy to use (for you and your customers), human suites of touchpoints.

Practical training to make your tone of voice real

Championing a new way of communicating that moves your tone of voice from paper to reality

Tone of voice is often the preserve of brand and marketing specialists. But what about the people in your organisation who have to communicate with customers every day? The people who respond to customer complaints, who draft bills and answer customer questions? Give them a practical brand tone they can work with. We train your customer-focused teams with the skills they need to create their own material – and start using your tone of voice effectively.

Operational Service Communication

We specialise in supporting our clients in company-wide customer communication projects. We work across departments to analyse, measure and transform your post-sale customer touchpoints and streamline customer management. We help you get the most value from improvement initiatives and avoid common issues with projects like this – where multiple departments and stakeholders need input.

From company-wide communication improvement programmes to refinement around particular journeys – we’ll create content your customers find easy to use, simple to act on and won’t end up causing complaints. We support customer service and self service teams to make sure every touchpoint and conversation makes a better, simpler, more human customer experience.

Customer Service Communication

Supporting customer service teams with better content libraries, templates and responses.

Customer service departments often use vast libraries of letters, templates and emails to handle customer queries. All too often these libraries are outdated, ineffective and cause more noise than they solve. Customer services teams are communicating with customers every day. Letter libraries, email templates, live chat responses and social media material – it all counts towards how your customers experience your brand. We work alongside teams to refine, improve and simplify the customer communication they use.

We develop content for customer service teams to help have better conversations with customers and train teams with the soft skills they need to write and communicate effectively across all channels. We also support you in creating user-friendly communication across all your self-service channels.

Letter & Email Templates: From standard responses through to key customer information – we develop content templates that reduces queries and simplify relationships.

FAQ & Knowledge Bases: Customer-centric, clear content for all your self-service channels – getting your customers to the answers they need faster, and freeing up your care teams.

Customer Service Training: Specialist customer service training for teams to improve communication skills and manage new channels confidently.

Operational Communication

We help you reduce unnecessary customer noise and improve the support you give to customers by making every piece of communication as effective as it can be.

Over time libraries of “stuff” pile up. Content in folders, on people’s desktops, spread across the business in multiple departments. We rationalise and consolidate the post-sale customer touchpoint your customer service teams use – reducing the chance of “problem comms” and making each letter, template and email work effectively.

Planning for customer care: We’ll support you in planning your customer care needs and develop an approach that fits with your business. Every single touchpoint you send – from the simplest acknowledgement email to the most detailed statement – matters. And we’re complaints management specialists.

Content development: We’ll develop better customer communication for all your key customer service conversations and channels. Enhancing your standard operational correspondence and content to reflect your brand, reduce customer dissatisfaction and increase loyalty.

On-going support: We offer on-going support and material creation to ensure you’re keeping up with customer care needs and business objectives. From welcome to renewal, we’ll give you better communications for your customers at every stage. That means less churn, more loyalty and better net promoter and customer effort scores.  We make you easy to deal with.

Sensitive/legal touchpoints

Working within specific parts of your customer journey to improve the conversations you’re having with your customers – and improve relationships.

Self-Service Knowledge Base

Your customers are looking for answers – we help them find them. Knowledge is a valuable currency for building trust with your clients. We’re specialists in creating customer-centric content for your self-service and customer knowledge base. Clear content for your customer knowledge base.

Self-service communication

You know that sinking feeling when you search a knowledge base and get silly, useless answers? We make sure that your customers don’t. Instead, they can find what they need, understand it, act on it and never have to call you with questions (unless you want them to).

Customer Knowledge Bases

We support businesses looking to make the content of their customer knowledge base simpler, customer-centric and easy to use. Better user experience and fewer calls through simpler communication.

If you’re looking to make your knowledge base as user-friendly as possible, we’ll help by creating better content. We support you in creating clear information structures for your knowledge base that your customers can understand – and create simpler content that helps your customer get answers. Fast. We’re specialists in turning internal information into content for your knowledge bases to get your self-help resources working harder for you.

Information structures: We’ll help you structure and categorise your internal knowledge into meaningful structures and customer-centric taxonomies.

Transforming internal knowledge: We transform internal knowledge into information that’s simple for customers to understand and use.

Customer Centric Content: We’re experts in writing effective, brand-aligned content your customer can understand and use.

In-Life Customer Communication

We develop customer content that aligns with your brand and is easy for customers to use. We make it simple to read and respond to too. We look at the processes that produce it, streamlining them and reducing cost. So you get fewer customer queries tying up your call centre staff and fewer customer mistakes to fix. Customers become easier and less stressful to deal with. Better retention too.

Customer Onboarding and Welcome Communication

Putting out the welcome mat…

We can help you transform your welcome process to reassure, instruct, inform and educate.  If you’re looking to bump up your conversion rates or increase loyalty, we develop processes and content to help you do it. We’ve done it for luxury car makers, property developers, fund managers, and on-line payment specialists.  And on paper, email and in-app.

Customer Complaints Communication

Getting complainers back on your side.

We help you manage your customer complaints to minimise escalation and costs and maximise loyalty.  We do it through helping you sound human, recognising the importance of emotion in complaints and improving the efficiency of your processes. We also train your teams to handle complaint and conflict more effectively using our unique K-conflict model.

Financial Customer Communication

Simpler conversations about money.

We make sure your billing, statement and debt collection communications are clearer and more effective without losing humanity. We help you collect the money you’re owed without losing customers. We’ve made our clients’ invoicing, statements and debt collection processes simpler and faster too.

Customer Contracts and permissions

Asking permission, properly.We help make permissions human, clear and understandable for your customers. We simplify language, create structures that are easy to understand and help customers see where you’ve changed things. We reduce the numbers of people coming back saying ‘…but I didn’t understand” by making your terms and conditions clearer too.

CRM, IT and In-App Communication

Working as a support partner to develop more effective content within CRM and CCM systems. Helping each and every touchpoint be effective.