Embedding communication best practice across siloed teams

Here, there, and everywhere – Call centres, operational teams, legal and risk departments – Thousands of key customer communications are created by siloed teams working way outside the world of marketing and brand.

These ‘non-marketing’ comms about changes to terms and conditions, fee increases and much more, make up the crucial everyday experience of any financial brand. And gaining control and consistency of them is more crucial than ever in the light of the FCA’s Consumer Duty.   

Consumer Duty requires that all communications are written, designed, deployed in a way that best supports customer understanding – helping them to achieve their financial objectives and avoid harm.

Our client, a leading UK Banking group, had multiple siloed teams authoring and distributing millions of communications across the service, mandatory, operational and marketing estate.

These made up over 80% of their customers' communication touchpoints – yet many had been developed with little consideration of customer understanding or behaviour in mind. 

Good for customers. Good for business.

With the costs of complaints and rectifications; production and distribution and call centre demand all rising, the challenge was to equip any colleague involved in the creation, approval and management of customer communications with the skills and tools needed to deliver consistent, on-brand communications that supported customer understanding. 

A robust set of Customer Communication Principles that would be used as the overarching standard for all of the Group’s customer communications. To support the roll-out and embed these new principles into BAU we: 

• Developed a comprehensive toolkit of Communication Principles collateral. 
• Ran the training for colleagues within the regulatory comms Centre of Excellence.
• ‘Train the trainer’ coaching for their inhouse ‘Champions’ and copywriters.
• Ran wider training sessions for over 300 colleagues.
• Resources developed included immersive Teams sessions and the creation of checklists; crib sheets; pop-up banners and away day resources.
• Ongoing surgeries with our behavioural science & financial copywriting specialists. 

In addition, we provide ad-hoc advice, audits and design services, where the risk of customer harm was highest. For example, using behavioural nudges we redesigned the persistent debt journey for credit card customers – helping more customers move more quickly out of persistent debt. 

• Consulting

• CX strategy

• Communication principles

• CXM training

• Design

• Content