Blog in Wordy thoughts

Doctors and the healthcare industry have unique problems with the way they communicate. Medical terms and words can feel like a foreign language. (Sometimes what’s written literally is, with Latin origins that aren’t generally in use.)

We’ve written about medical language before, and this topic’s been in the news again – doctor’s orders are to write letters that are easier for patients to understand.

To build on what we’ve already shared, here are our observations and tips to help make sure patients don’t feel like they’re in an episode of Casualty.

Patients rely on clear communication 

Good communication and interpersonal skills are powerful tools in any first aid kit. Doctors run the risk that their patients won’t understand basic health information. In turn there’s less chance they can make good decisions about their diagnosis and how to look after themselves. It’s too easy for patients to misinterpret things like warnings on prescriptions and medication small print.

They often have to translate medical language into plain English

The once fastest man over 200m & 400m simplified his diagnosis for us, in a way most of us will understand. Who would ordinarily know what a ‘transient ischemic attack’ is?

Don’t hide behind scientific jargon

Hospital or surgery letters shouldn’t need someone with a medical degree to be able to translate what’s been said. So try:

• ditching all the Latin words and phrases – use words that make patients feel you understand them
• being consistent with the terminology you and medical professionals use
• cutting out platitudes like “It was a pleasure to meet you”, and get to your point quickly. (These are often used as crutches to soften giving difficult news.)
• writing more like you speak – imagine a patient sat with you (a classic bedside chat).

 

Trust me, I’m a writer 

Find us @TheWriter, and share your best and worst medical speak. 

And you can find our stand at The Global Pharma Marketing Summit in Berlin next month. While we’re there, we’ll be talking about why pharma language doesn’t have to be so complicated.

“I’m not sure if you saw my last email…”

“As per my last communication on Thursday…”

“Matt, any update on this?”

Cue rolling eyes and banging heads against keyboards. We all hate email rhetoric, but it’s tricky to avoid, and it’s something many people get wrong. As Adobe found, when they shared the top 9 email phrases that irritate us.   

It’s hard to get a feel for tone when you’re reading off a screen

It’s easy for an email to be misconstrued. We don’t have the luxury of facial expressions or seeing someone’s mannerisms, and can’t always pick up on the way they’re saying it. A message written tongue in cheek, in jest or in haste can unwittingly be flipped on its head and taken the wrong way. And we’re at the mercy of the mood of the reader, too.

Modern inboxes are noisy, crowded, and extremely competitive

The average office worker gets a staggering 121 emails a day.

If you want your email to stand out, be read and be acted on, here’s what you need to do to avoid the pitfalls of email…

1. Remember, it’s not just about you

Think about the person you’re writing to. What do they need to know? How do you want them to feel after reading your email? And what do you want them to do?

Once you know the answer to these three questions, you can play around with the order of know, feel and do depending on what’s most important. If you’re still waiting for a reply, you might want to start with the do. If you’re giving a difficult message, focus on the feel.  

2. Make your subject line your hook

Treat it like your headline. Make sure it sums up what your email is about – in a way that’ll make sense to your reader, not to you. Don’t fall into the trap of using things like reference numbers or generic phrases like ‘important information’ as your subject line.

And put the key info into the first two or three words. Anything longer might be cut short in your reader’s email browser.

3. Break things up and keep it snappy

Subheadings are your friend. Hefty blocks of text, particularly in an email, can make people switch off. Chunk up what you’re saying into sections, with a subheading that summarises the main point of that section.  

Try to keep your sentences under 25 words, and paragraphs shorter than six lines.

Don’t waffle either. Keep what you’re saying snappy. If someone has to scroll a lot, they’re less likely to keep reading. Once you’ve written your email, go back and see if you can cut about 20% without losing the meaning. Your reader will thank you for it.

4. Don’t just think about what you’re saying – but how you’re saying it

It’s harder in an email to pick up on emotions and convey your intentions.  So the tone of what you’re writing is important.

Watch out for overly formal, stuffy phrases – as per, regarding, with all due respect... Imagine someone standing next to you, and write it like you’d say it.
Make any call to actions super clear – you’ll be less likely to have to chase people.

Be direct but polite – remember, people will see right through showy over-politeness, and spot glimpses of passive aggression a mile off.

Your best bet is to keep things simple, and use your brand tone of voice if you have one.

Try it on for size

Test out these ideas in your next email, and tweet us @TheWriter, letting us know how you got on.

Kindest regards…

Personalised letters, tick. Approved list of empathetic phrases (including ‘I’d love to help you with that today’), tick. Think you’ve got this emotional connection malarkey nailed?

Not quite.

There’s more to connecting with people emotionally than mail merging their first name into things. And empathy isn’t sounding friendly, or just repeating back what somebody’s already told you.

Still, there’s been a lot of that going on lately, which means customers have got savvy and expect more. So, if your approach to personalisation is collecting data and regurgitating it back to customers at key touchpoints, you’re probably not going to build lasting connections.

Empathy is talking to customers about the things they care about

Not what’s important to you. And it’s about doing it consistently, even when you’re delivering bad news and dealing with complaints.

For example, we helped BT change their approach to handling complaints. We encouraged their agents to step away from templated scripts and stock responses, and think about how they’d feel in the customer’s shoes. And repeat complaints dropped from 28% to less than 20%.

It’s not just a nice to have. It can make and save you money

We helped a big energy company sound the same in their debt letters as they did in their everyday messages. So people didn’t feel like they were suddenly being treated like criminals for falling behind on their payments. And they were less scared to get in touch to sort it out. The result? Ten percent more people got out of debt.

All this from putting the customer first and using words that make them feel you understand them (and are human beings too).

We’ve learnt a few things about empathy over the years

We’ve spent 15 years helping clients make their words more efficient, empathetic, distinctive and consistent. So we’ve seen the good, the bad and the downright strange along the way. Check out our blog on the Ten ways you absolutely, definitely shouldn’t do CX to find out more.

Plus, come and see us at Technova Connected Customer 2018, Tuesday 3rd and Wednesday 4th July. We’ll be on the CX Leaders stage at 2.40pm on Tuesday 3rd, talking about why your language is your customer experience. Or you can pop by our stand for a chat any time.

On a recent train journey, I was sat behind a jovial group of tech bods. They were talking about their ‘elevator pitch’.

Here’s what they said

Tech bod #1: So an elevator pitch is what we’d say to someone about what we do, if we met them in a lift?

Tech bod #2: Yeah. It has to be short and sweet, so you could say it all in a quick elevator ride.

Tech bod #1 (jokingly): But we’ve got so much to say. We’d have to press all the buttons!

Tech bod #2 (laughing): And they’d hate you for it.

That got me thinking. Because we see this all the time in writing. Businesses focus on what they want the reader to know, not what the reader really wants to know.

They press all the buttons in the lift

That’s a problem. Do that and you’re metaphorically holding your readers hostage. You’re literally wasting their time with information they’re not interested in. And you know it.

When you want to talk about your business, it’s not about what you do and how you do it. It’s about what you can do for your audience. Sounds obvious, but we’ve all come across those button-pressing businesses.

Our advice: next time you need to pitch your business, pick a floor and stick to it.

My running buddy’s a doctor. And while pounding the pavements, she’s given me a few tips on how to get to the point. Because sometimes, it can be a question of life or death.

Before we started running together, I thought I had the whole ‘how to deliver difficult messages’ thing nailed: you say sorry; you explain why; you move on to a fix. But while that might work a treat when you’re writing to customers to say their gas bill’s going up or that a mobile banking app is bust; it doesn’t work with really tricky messages. Like telling someone that if they don’t lose weight they’ll have a heart attack before the year’s out. Or that something unusual came up in a routine scan.

That’s the kind of conversation she has with patients, and their families, every single day of the week.

I never tire of asking her how she does it. How she not only explains the complexities of a cocktail of drugs to a vulnerable patient, but also persuades them to care about it. Or how she’ll listen to a chain smoker’s woes with sympathy but will never sugar-coat her fix to their ailments.

Her calls to action are clear. Her explanations are straightforward (she doesn’t even need to say sorry to give them, either). And she only has 10 minutes to gain the patient’s trust.

These days, I give my writing the 10-minute test too. Assuming I’m lucky enough to have my reader’s attention for that long, I ask myself will they:

*         find my call to action

*         make sense of what I’m saying

*         believe me?

I’d never want my doctor to waste time sitting on the fence or dwelling on background details when giving me news. So, I shouldn’t go there with my readers, either.

As part of Learning at Work week, we’re sharing stories about things we’ve learned in unexpected places.