How can behavioral science improve customer communications? Emmeline Kite, Head of Professional Services and CX, Broadridge Customer Communications International, shares how clearer language, better design, and a human-centered approach can reduce friction, improve understanding, and drive better customer outcomes.
Matt: I'm Matt Swain, and you're listening to the "Reimagining Communications" podcast, where we discuss the opportunities and challenges facing companies on the road to optimizing their communications for the future. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Emmeline Kite, head of professional services and CX for Broadridge Customer Communications International. Emmeline, thanks so much for joining me.
Emmeline: Thanks for inviting me, Matt. Really pleased to be here.
Matt: So, tell us about yourself. Can you share a little bit about your background?
Emmeline: Yeah, sure. So, I head up our customer experience division in the UK. My background is very much direct marketing, customer experience, both from a marketing lens but also from a regulatory comms perspective as well. So, I feel like being at Broadridge gives me an opportunity to bring all of that together and specifically in my team, and I think what we're going to talk quite a lot about today, is thinking about communications through that human-first lens. So, yes, the delivery of those communications is really important and how they're created, but actually the effectiveness of those communications and shaping them through the lens of actually the humans that are going to receive them is the sort of specialist area of my team, if you like.
Matt: Yeah, and that tool set you're alluding to is one that we actually covered on our last podcast, where we talked about behavioral science. And just for new listeners or those who are not as familiar, can you share a bit about what behavioral science is, how you describe it, and why it's so relevant to communications effectiveness today?
Emmeline: Yeah, absolutely. So, a sort of textbook definition might be that behavioral science is the study of human behaviors through the use of systematic experimentation and observation. But basically, what that means is it's a scientific way of thinking about how we as human beings think and behave. So, there's a big difference a lot of the time between what we say and what we do, and behavioral science kind of bridges that gap, basically, is probably a sort of simple way of putting it. Where it comes into its own is, in communications, is that because it's based on scientific research, it's verified, it's credible, it can take a lot of the subjectivity out of decision-making. So, if you've got a communications challenge or you want to make your communications perform better, ultimately get your customers to do more of the thing you're asking them to do, it, it's easy to have an opinion on that, but employing behavioral science can make that less subjective. It kind of brings something a bit more credible and external into the room.
Matt: Yeah, it's really interesting. The focus on communications effectiveness has only grown more acute. The desire to deliver not only strong communications but also get the recipient to take the desired action has become even more acute.
I'd be curious, in the work that you've done, what are some of the most common behavioral barriers that prevent people from engaging with these communications?
Emmeline: It's a good question, and especially when it comes to financial services communications, which can seem a bit scary, a bit off-putting. There are usually a few different biases happening concurrently. So, first of all, you're trying to get a customer, a human being to interact with the communication in the first place, to actually look at it, read it, try and make sense of it. We've all got limited attention, and deciding what to pay attention to, there's kind of a complex decisioning process happening in our brains, sort of in our subconscious minds. So, we look for shortcuts. And if those shortcuts aren't there or they are inadequate shortcuts, we might not want to engage with the communication, or we might take out the wrong message, or we might kind of put it in the too hard, don't bother bucket and not do the thing that we're meant to do, which is read it and take the action. So, it's really important that we think about in the way that a communication is put together on the page, whether that's printed page or email or webpage or whatever it might be, that we're thinking about how we grab attention.
Matt: Yeah.
Emmeline: And the second quite common heuristic or behavioral science bias that comes into play is procrastination. It's really easy to put things off, and very easy to put off things that feel complicated or that take time, or you've got to engage your brain. So, reducing complexity and again, thinking about how you take a message and literally chunk it into component parts to help your audience understand it is really important. You can do that with copy, but you can also do that with page design as well.
Assuming you've grabbed attention and somebody's actually looking at the communication and engaging with it, you now want them to take a decision and take the best decision for them. There are a few other biases at play, like inertia. It's much easier to stick with what we know and to overestimate the negative consequences of doing something different rather than think about a future positive. So, we need to break through that inertia, give really clear reasons for people to actually take notice and do something. And then closely related is present bias.
So again, it's much easier to do the thing that's going to give you the payback today. This is really common with things like investments and pensions and things like that. Actually, persuading somebody to put money aside for a future and an end benefit is much, much harder. So, there are ways in which you can use behavioral science to reward an action taken now that's going to have that positive long-term impact for you down the road.
Matt: Yeah, it's very interesting. In marketing communications, this kind of design thinking recipient first desired action, I feel like marketers have gotten it earlier, and it's been ingrained in the way that they approach communications execution. I would challenge in the transactional and regulatory communication space to say oftentimes these are very operations-driven communications that the task is more getting the document out, and not as much focus on how well it's designed or what that recipient experience is.
Matt: And that's a generalization. We certainly see best in breed communicators across industries, but generally we see in these operational communications this gap between, what we've seen in the rest of the brand to what we're seeing for these specific communications types that come through and hit that recipient.
Emmeline: Yeah. Absolutely agree with that 100%. I think that’s really exciting about the work that we do, and yeah, in marketing it's become adopted practice to use things like behavioral science and put the customer at the heart of how you communicate. And I think it's a really exciting opportunity to apply that to these more regulatory, more operational communications because, when you think about that experience as a whole that the customer has with that organizational firm, it becomes really disjointed where you're getting lovely, warm, kind of engaging marketing messages, and then possibly quite confusing, off-putting but really important messages about your finances that require you to know something or to do something. And those are the ones that often firms put the least kind of effort into, in terms of that customer cognition and making that a valuable experience for customers. So, yeah, it's, it's an exciting space to play and to bring some of that human-led thinking into those types of communications.
Matt: Yeah, that's interesting. So, Emmeline, can you share an example of a small change in language, structure, timing, or presentation that had a big impact on the outcome for your client?
Emmeline: Yeah, sure. So, a retail bank that we work with here in the UK, there was a particular rate change letter, that's a mandatory communication, needed to send it out for regulatory reasons, every time this rate change happened, and it was causing enormous spikes to the call center with complaints. I know we don't have a visual here, but I'll describe the letter. So, very heavy text over two to three pages, very dense copy, lots of repetition, lots of tables with numbers in, different sorts of numbers expressed differently, and sort of unclear navigation. So, this is a letter that didn't require any action, but that wasn't clear at all. And for example, one of the subheadings talked about your options as if there was a decision to be made. So, it is kind of understandable that customers weren't happy with this letter, didn't really know what it was for, and were therefore kind of complaining about it.
So, what we did in the UK, we use a behavioral framework called EAST, which is an acronym that stands for easy, attractive, social, and timely. So, with this particular communication, it was being sent out at the right time. The social bit is about is this a sort of normal thing that people do? There was no action required, so we didn't really focus on that bit so much. But is it easy, as in easy to understand, and is it attractive? You know, do I feel compelled to do what's being asked of me? Although in this case, that was nothing but, to feel confident that that was okay to do nothing.
So, the first thing was to strip the copy right back, take out the repetition, and to look at the way that numbers were expressed as well. And then with the copy, removing jargon was the next step. So, jargon and acronyms, actually expressing things in plain English so that it was really, really clear what the message was. We used the headlines and subheads to make it clear that this was a communication that was for information, there was no action required. And with a really clear navigation through that message, we were able because of the way the letter was produced, to introduce color. So, we introduced color blocking to call out key messages and to help that navigation.
So ultimately, we rolled out at the next rate change kind of opportunity, and it reduced complaints to the call center by something like 50%. So, although, I mean, there were several changes that we made, but all of them were quite straightforward, but taken together kind of added up to this huge reduction in these call center volumes.
Matt: And the origin of the request was call center volume
Emmeline: Yeah.
Matt: Excellent. How should organizations balance the regulatory, the operational and customer needs when they're trying to make communications more effective?
Emmeline: Yeah. That is a very, very good question, and it's one obviously that we have in mind, when we're working with clients and trying to solve these problems. And we have in the UK additional regulatory and compliance requirements. We've got the thing called Consumer Duty, which is all about doing no harm for the customer, so helping the customer find their best outcome, whether that's the best outcome for the financial services organization or not. So that balance is really important, and where we always start is with the non-negotiables. So, there will always be things that legally must be said or can't be said, operationally must happen. From a capability perspective, what's possible? How far can we change things? So, in that previous example, we were able to add color. That's not always going to be the case in terms of the way that comms are produced. And what are the bits of the message that the customer absolutely needs to know? So having got those non-negotiables in place, you can then start to play around with things like language. So, can you express those non-negotiables in a way that feels more human, is more plain English, reduces jargon? Can you then design the communication whether that's headings, subheadings, bullet points to break down information into chunks that are much more digestible, and that's where more of that human thinking comes in.
And the other thing to say as well is that depending on the organization that you're working with, they'll have different risk appetites around some of this stuff. So actually engaging, compliance functions and legal functions quite early are really important as well. Often the mindset of it's a tick box exercise, I've got to get the communication out, you've got to persuade other internal stakeholders to pay it a bit more attention and to apply a human lens and to give them the comfort that doing that is still compliant but actually will have benefit for the customer. So actually, certainly in the UK, doing that is even better. It's even more compliant. So, it's having those conversations early is really helpful and getting compliance and legal on your side so that it's easier to make those changes.
Matt: That's great. So, what role would testing play in communications design? Are you doing A/B testing, playing around with different formats, launching that communication in market or maybe pre-testing it in a sandbox environment with focus groups and otherwise?
Emmeline: Yeah. Any or all of those things. Testing is important. I suppose that's the first thing to say what testing does through any of the methods that you've mentioned is it gives the client confidence in the change that we're proposing to make and, and that they want to make. But it gives them confidence that it's the right change. So, I think depending on the client, depending on the risk appetite, depending on the scale of the change and the scale of the communication, sometimes we'd advocate for the behavioral science heuristics that we're going to apply do move the dial in the right way.
We know that from research, we know that from work we will have done with other clients. So, it's less of a leap of faith, it's good practice that we're recommending. And so, then we'd probably advocate for running the changes as they are and then sort of measuring response. But sometimes testing is really important, especially if we or the client have concerns that fixing some part of a communication might cause sense of complaints, might cause inadvertently something else to be complained about that we hadn't expected. So, A/B testing, definitely sandbox testing, kind of pre putting something out into the wild is something that we would potentially do.
But yeah, it's really about that kind of confidence. If we've got different options that the client wants to try out, that's where testing comes into its own. You can sort of whittle down two or three options into the thing you're going to do.
Matt: Yeah, makes sense. So, if you could give communications owners one piece of advice for improving effectiveness right away, what would it be? And I'll caveat that by saying there are probably a lot of "it depends" answers depending on the type of communication and who the owner is, what role they play. But generally, when you go into a conversation around effectiveness, is there low-hanging fruit that they should be looking at?
Emmeline: Yeah, that's a good question, and I think there's a couple of different ways of answering it. So, if we're just talking about answering it from the perspective of what's the low-hanging fruit, I think things like really looking at how much jargon you've got in a letter and just stripping it out and rewriting it in straightforward language can go a long way. The answer I would give is to put yourselves in the shoes of the customer. So, we are also all customers of financial services firms, and we are all on the receiving end sometimes of communications that are, that feel unnecessary, feel complicated, are confusing, don't acknowledge the broader relationship we have with the organization. And actually, those are frustrating or they can be confusing, they can be concerning even for some people.
And so actually harnessing that sense that we have as consumers of that poor interaction, that poor experience, and being really honest and, holding ourselves to account about the communications that we're creating and do they meet the test. Are they actually potentially causing the reaction we had to that really poor communication? Then I think you start to move away from, "We've just got to get it out," to, "We want this to have a positive outcome."
Matt: Yeah. Excellent. Okay, now we're going to the crystal ball.
Emmeline: Yes.
Matt: When you look at the customer communications landscape, and you've been working in this space for a while, how do you think it's going to continue to evolve in the coming years? What are we going to see differently in the way that communications are delivered, actioned, managed, all of the above?
Emmeline: Yeah. It's a million-dollar question, isn't it, probably? I mean, hopefully, we move away from just got to get it out to got to get a better outcome. And I suppose alongside that, and thinking about what is that better experience, what is that better outcome, that necessitates a move away from sort of batch and blast broadcast to many communications, and using data, using AI in a much smarter way to connect the dots for customers and being much more measurable as well. You know, often it can be quite difficult if you haven't got all the data feeds set up to really look at the effectiveness of a communication and a change.
And I think as well, thinking beyond individual communications, so not only in the more operational letter or communication space but also with the marketing communications that they get as well, the experience on an app, the experience if they go to the website. So, starting to join that up a bit more and bringing the operational, the regulatory comms into that space where I think they're sort of kept separately from it a lot of the time. So yeah, it's hard to know, it's hard to predict, but I mean, hopefully that's the direction that things are starting to go in, and that will only continue.
Matt: Excellent. Well, thank you for your insights and participation in the podcast.
Emmeline: My pleasure.
Matt: I'm Matt Swain. You've been listening to the "Reimagining Communications" podcast. If you liked this episode and think someone else would too, please share it, leave a review, and don't forget to subscribe. And if you're ready to reimagine your communications experiences, consider the Broadridge Communications Cloud, an end-to-end platform for creating, delivering, and managing omni-channel communications and customer engagement. To learn more about Broadridge, our insights, and our innovations, visit broadridge.com or find us on LinkedIn.