Every customer service team has a metric they wish they could move: call volumes, complaint rates, resolution times, satisfaction scores. Most invest in more staff, better software, longer opening hours. Very few look hard at the thing generating much of the workload in the first place: confusing writing.
Writing in plain language isn't about simplifying ideas. It's about ensuring clarity, accessibility and understanding. And the evidence that it transforms customer service isn't theoretical. It's some of the best-documented evidence in the plain language field.
The case files
These examples all come from documented projects, most of them collected in legal writing scholar Joseph Kimble's research review "Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please":
- General Electric found that customers using one of its old software manuals made about 125 more support calls a month than customers using the plainly rewritten version. GE estimated the clearer manual saved between US$22,000 and US$375,000 a year, per business customer.
- The US Department of Veterans Affairs tracked a single standard letter that generated 1,128 phone calls from veterans in a year. After a plain language rewrite, the equivalent mailing generated 192. Same information, one-sixth of the confusion.
- Royal Mail's redirection form was being filled out incorrectly by 87% of customers, costing more than £10,000 a week in complaints and reprocessing. The redesigned form saved £500,000 in nine months.
- British Telecom's plain language bill redesign cut customer billing inquiries and complaints by a quarter.
- Washington State's Department of Revenue rewrote one letter to business owners about an obscure tax. The number of businesses paying tripled, bringing in US$800,000 more than expected. Their sister agency cut one call queue by 95% just by clarifying the instructions people were ringing about.
Notice what every one of those numbers really measures: customers who needed help understanding something, and then didn't. The cheapest support call is the one your writing prevented.
Why it works
Clear writing reduces miscommunication at the source. When customers easily understand instructions, policies and product details, they don't misinterpret them, and they don't need to ring you to ask what you meant. Each clarified document quietly retires a category of support tickets.
Clarity builds trust. Customers trust companies that sound like they have nothing to hide. Jargon, hedging and convoluted sentences read as evasion, even when they're just habit. This matters more than ever in the finance world: UK randomised trials by the Plain Numbers project found that with typical customer documents, most people said the document was clear, yet fewer than four in ten could demonstrate they'd actually understood it. The plain versions roughly doubled comprehension. Your customers may not complain about confusing documents. They'll just quietly fail to understand them, and remember the feeling.
Plain language is accessibility. Customers with lower literacy, customers reading in their second language, customers with cognitive disabilities, and frankly customers reading your terms at 9pm with a toddler on one arm: all of them are served by clear and simple language. In New Zealand this thinking is built into law: the Plain Language Act 2022 requires public service agencies to communicate with the public in language that is "clear, concise, and well organised" (the Act remains in force while a repeal bill makes its way through Parliament, and the case for clarity doesn't depend on legislation anyway).
It speeds everything up. Less back-and-forth to clarify means quicker resolutions and a more agile service operation. In a competitive market, resolving issues on the first contact is a real advantage, and the first contact often is the document.
Your own people benefit too. The same plain language that helps customers helps the staff serving them. Clear internal scripts, policies and knowledge bases mean fewer errors, faster answers and less of the soul-erosion that comes from explaining a confusing letter forty times a week. Teams that communicate clearly internally deliver better service externally. It's the same skill pointed in two directions.
Where to start
You don't need to rewrite everything at once. The case studies above share a pattern: each organisation started with one high-volume document.
- Find your noisiest document. Ask your support team which letter, email, form or page generates the most "what does this mean?" contacts. They will not need time to think about it.
- Rewrite it in plain language. Short sentences. Active voice. The reader's question answered first, the legal architecture second.
- Measure the before and after. Call volumes, error rates, complaint numbers. This is where you discover, as GE and the VA did, that clarity has a return on investment you can put in front of a CFO.
Clear writing isn't a courtesy you extend to customers when there's time. It's one of the highest-leverage customer service investments available, and almost nobody is making it. If you'd like help finding and fixing your noisiest documents, that's precisely what we do.