The business case for plain English

Organisations that use plain English save time and money, and improve their customer relations. Here are just a few examples* of how organisations have dramatically reduced their costs by using plain English.

British Telecom (BT)

When BT produced a clearer bill in plain English it received around 25% fewer enquiries each quarter. Customers also paid their bills more promptly, improving cash flow and reducing the cost of collecting overdue bills. Before the change, BT had been receiving a million calls a year.

User manuals

When US computer manufacturer Allen-Bradley produced a new computer manual in plain English, calls to the company's support centre fell dramatically from more than 50 a day to only two or three a month.

UK Royal Mail

Before the Royal Mail redesigned its redirection of mail form it had an 87% error rate when customers filled it in. The company was spending over £10,000 a week to deal with complaints and reprocess the incorrect forms. The new form reduced the error rate dramatically, so that Royal Mail saved £500,000 in the next nine months.

UK Central Government forms

In one of the earliest plain English initiatives the UK Government began a major review of its forms in 1983. By 1985 it had scrapped 15,700 forms, improved 21,300 and reviewed another 46,900. At the end of the initiative the Government estimated that it had saved about £9 million in printing and storage costs alone.

Of course, printing and storage costs are only the tip of the iceberg if your forms are inefficient. Coopers and Lybrand performed one study for the Department of Health and Social Security, and concluded that before the improvements the cost of errors on its forms was around £675 million a year.

What about your organisation?

It's hard to say how much you could save by using plain English. How much time do your people spend communicating - with each other, with customers, with prospective customers? And then with 'outsiders' such as government agencies and regulators? How much paper and how many email messages do they produce in a day, a week, a year?

Many of these communications are vital to your organisation. Some are the oil that keeps the business machine lubricated. Even more important are the ones that go to customers, prospective customers and the world at large. You are judged by these, and bad writing loses customers. It's as simple as that.

If you are selling the benefits of your service or product, what's the point if readers are going to switch off after the first sentence?

It's a real cost to businesses . . .

A survey estimated that UK businesses lose £6 billion every year through badly written business letters alone. It didn't count the millions of pages of promotional literature that companies churn out every week. And these communications are the most expensive, with artwork and printing costs to add to the already expensive business of producing copy.

. . . but there is a simple answer

Any document that is long winded, bureaucratic, full of management speak or contains mistakes in its grammar and punctuation will damage the organisation that produced it. However, if your documents are clear, accurate, friendly and informative, your customers will recognise this and appreciate the care you have taken.

Governments and businesses have saved hundreds of millions of pounds, and improved their customer relations, by applying plain English techniques to their leaflets, letters and forms. If you aren't doing so already, it's time to put your own documents into plain English.

After all, many of your competitors might already have done so.

*(source: 'Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please' - Joseph Kimble, The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, vol 6.)

© The Word Centre 2005