Clarity matters
Providing information and keeping residents informed is multi-faceted — whether its face-to-face, a phone call made or received, written correspondence, a website or app — all these touch points create an impression that forms the basis of the relationships we have.
Our personal and professional lives coexist with distractions aplenty vying for our attention as we filter the information around us, deciding what's important or not. How do you cut through the noise of day-to-day life to ensure that what you're trying to say comes across in a way that shows you care, understand and are there to help?
As we come out of the past 18 months, where the normal order of things got turned on its head, there appears to be many other stresses and strains on the horizon making the need for providing reassurance and trust all the more important.
Values of clarity, creditability and respect appear obvious and building them into the culture of an organisation takes many forms. Communicating clearly is the foundation for strengthening customer relationships and conveys confidence that you not only have a firm grip on information but also any processes that may need to be adhered to.
First impressions count and presenting information that it is immediately inviting, well organised, easy to understand, and intuitive helps to put the message you are trying to convey into context. Is this relevant? How important is it? Do I need to do something now? Is it professional? Quite naturally we ask ourselves these questions and form opinions on the credibility of an organisation based on how informative, accurate, balanced or even trustworthy the communications we receive come across. Being clear with a commitment to dialogue and transparency are the cornerstones of trust and respect.
An often overlooked part of corporate communications are the 'service' documents that live at the heart of long term relationships. These less obvious touch points form the bedrock of true customer experience – letters, bills, rent and service charge demands, schedules and the such like. By their nature they're personalised, driven by data and back office systems with a myriad of internal stakeholders all owning aspects of the content requiring the reader’s attention. Get these documents right and you start to see not only a more engaged audience but operational benefits as well.
With the amount of focus and considerable 'airtime' given to customer experience by organisations driven by the desire to better understand and meet consumer needs we can see a move from a genre of generic hard copy documents with little design value that were hard to understand and difficult to maintain, to a hyper personalised environment. Clear information with content relevant to the scenario at hand or services provided, all delivered in your channel of choice and presented with a unified design philosophy.
Change is not easy and there are many obstacles to overcome when it comes to overhauling how best to provide timely and relevant information in a clear, consistent and respectful way but sometimes it's the little things that make it all so worthwhile.
We recently had feedback from one of our clients that they received following the deployment of a substantial overhaul of their service charge demands.
"Mrs Roberts would like to feedback that she really likes the new service charge booklet. She has cataracts and this is first time she’s been able to read it clearly. She says it’s a vast improvement on the old ones."
It’s not difficult to deliver something that makes a difference, it just takes a commitment to embrace change and challenge the status quo.
This article featured in Housing Executive magazine, Issue 4, Winter 2021