There’s Gold in the Golden Rule
The quest for cost-cutting overrides common sense. When the phone company wants to take the customer service phone number off the bill because “It encourages people to call,” you know that efficiency and cost-cutting have gone too far.
Have corporate executives lost their minds? Now there is technology that monitors the tone of your voice as you respond to telephone prompts, and when it detects increased irritation it offers you a live person. If you are so certain that you are causing irritation, remove the irritant. Don’t wait until I’m ready to strangle myself with the phone cord.
Many health insurers rely on policyholders to detect fraud by reviewing their EOBs (Explanation of Benefits statements). How unrealistic is that? Most people within insurance companies can’t explain the calculations or translate the procedure codes into plain English. Unless the charge is for a broken bone and my procedure was a Caesarian section, I’m probably not going to be able to discern the error. While consumer advocates are constantly admonishing the public to inform themselves, motivated consumers are often hard-pressed to do so.
A Renewal Packet from your insurer will no doubt include “endorsements” explaining that your coverage has changed and will tell you to keep it with the original policy. The average policyholder only makes a claim on a homeowners’ policy once every 11 years. If you religiously keep the policy and endorsements over that period of time, you would likely have a hundred pages of text, most of which replaces or negates the rest of it. A document titled “Notice” is almost always a telltale sign that the company is communicating something you need to know but won’t be able to understand.
Are regulators at fault for requiring too much information or too little? Are companies deliberately spewing out reams of unintelligible information in an attempt to hoodwink their customers? Are consumers to blame for their own laziness?
Companies Use Compliance Language as a Suit of Armor
Companies keep amending documents that were unclear to begin with because they no longer know the derivation of the original and wind up with lengthy, unintelligible gibberish. Rewriting the entire document from scratch requires time and effort. Many companies view disclosure documents as somewhere between “necessary evils” and “useful smokescreens.”
A Lack of Common Sense
Some companies have no evil intent. They simply don’t understand the language of their customers. They are swaddled by industry jargon and blame the outside world for miscommunication. They literally speak to themselves so constantly that they’ve developed a business-speak dialect.
Ironically, they also often turn to the same legal and operations staff who created the original, incomprehensible documents to “go and simplify things.” The result is that people are faced with many so called “plain English” documents, which aren’t really much clearer than the old ones. They represent a cosmetic rewrite, not a commitment to simplify substance as well as style.
What can companies do differently?
- Change the underlying policies so that when they are expressed clearly, they are acceptable to most consumers.
- Appeal more to customers by providing people, not empty slogans and ad campaigns.
- Guide the reader to the items of note. Summarize and place significant items where readers can easily see them.
- Customize the content so that readers do not have to sort through numerous “if, then…”
- Use common sense.
What can regulators do differently?
- Require real-world testing with the target audience to evaluate the actual usefulness of the information. This means task-based testing—asking people to do what the information is supposed to help them accomplish—fill out an application, choose a health plan, name a beneficiary, make a payment, etc.
- Do spot checking (a la mystery shopping) to determine whether information is working.
What can consumers do differently?
- Change their buying habits to reward companies that inform rather than delude them.
- Remind companies that they are their own worst enemies when they sacrifice customer loyalty in their rush to cut costs.
- Petition their lawmakers if they are dismayed by the quality of information they are given.
- Vote.
Living by the golden rule can mean more gold in the corporate coffers.
Irene Etzkorn is Simplification Practice Advisor at Siegel+Gale, one of the world’s premier strategic branding companies. She has helped set new communications standards for several industries, and she’s anxious to see more companies do the same.