Man of letters
The business world’s Cyrano de Bergerac
Steve Morris, managing partner of Burton Morris, has written a novel. He keeps it in a desk drawer at his office in Ealing, west London.
Pod and the Sexy Dream Club – as the work is provisionally entitled – is surprisingly conventional. That Mr Morris has resisted the temptation to structure it as an exchange of letters between its main characters is remarkable – because Mr Morris’s day job is all about helping people write letters.
After years of working with companies on their correspondence through his brand consultancy, Mr Morris decided this year to set up a subsidiary called the Letterhouse, dedicated to the art of business correspondence.
His customers, which include some of Britain’s largest companies, would prefer not to admit that outsiders draft their mail. One financial services client – speaking on condition of anonymity – says that Mr Morris and his staff have written thousands of letters for her company. They have done the same for airlines, rail companies, National Health Service trusts, food manufacturers and retailers.
Mr Morris, in short, is the Cyrano de Bergerac of customer services.
To many people, used to rattling off e-mails and text messages, writing a letter may seem old-fashioned. But for others it remains a useful and vigorous means of getting a point across. “The humble old letter is ignored at your peril,” claims Mr Morris. “Businesses spend a lot of money on logos and retail presence but [they] often undermine that effort by sending out poor communications.”
Companies usually plan their direct mail marketing campaigns with care, he says, but then undermine these efforts in the countless other letters they send out each day. It does not help that businesses often see customer services as “a bit of a dumping ground”, adds Mr Morris.
There are many urban myths about companies mishandling their occasional correspondence. Mr Morris gives as an example the story of a disgruntled customer who opened a letter to which was attached an internal memo reading: “Send standard letter”. Even if this really happened, Mr Morris insists, most people working in customer services genuinely want to help their customers.
But such departments can benefit from outside help. The Letterhouse’s anonymous financial services client admits that staff would write stern letters and then, in another letter – to sell something – they would switch to the grovelling tone of Charles Dickens’s Uriah Heep. In each case, this deviated from the company’s preferred tone of voice.
The combination of the two approaches was hopelessly confusing. There was also a gap between “how we spoke to customers, which was friendly and informal, and the letters that followed up those conversations”, says the client.
To tackle this, the Letterhouse asked to see examples of recent letters. “We do an audit. You tend to find a continuum, stodgy at one end and ‘vibey’ at the other. Most of them cluster at the old-fashioned end. You ask them why and they say: ‘I hate the way we write but, if we were to change it, the people we wrote to might not think we were businesslike,’” says Mr Morris.
Staff were initially apprehensive about the training sessions, says Mr Morris’s client. “I would get comments like: ‘Don’t tell me how to write letters: I’ve been doing it for 30 years.’ Everybody thinks they can do it but few can,” she says.
Mr Morris remembers the staff scowling at him, with arms crossed. But they soon warmed up as they studied anonymous pieces of prose, such as passages by the cookery writers Jamie Oliver and Delia Smith. “We get them to spot which is which and ask how they know that.” With the same attention to detail they would then consider each other’s work. “They might ask each other: ‘Why did you do that?’
“People say to us: ‘You can’t teach people to write.’ Well, it can be tricky, particularly if the ghost of school hangs over them. People have these rules they learnt at school, such as: ‘Don’t start a sentence with And or But.’ And they always put ‘Re:’ at the top. We tell them it’s OK to break the rules. It’s OK to write in a conversational style. I’m not saying that letters should be light and chatty but they should be human. We would like people to enjoy using words.”
Adults, he says, can be “a bit po-faced” about language. “I have a five-year old and a three-year old and they have great fun making up words. I’m not sure when language starts to become such a chore.”
Having helped to train 10,000 or so people, he has reached some general conclusions. A few people, he agrees, will always come across better on the telephone. But most can be taught to use active verbs instead of passives and to avoid jargon. And surprisingly large numbers, he says, turn out to be gifted writers.
Bank managers exemplify the tendency to hide behind passive verbs, adds Mr Morris’s financial services client. “They will write: ‘It has been decided that the bank will . . .’ And we want them to write: ‘I have decided . . .’”
Mr Morris also does one-to-one coaching with senior executives. He spends an hour a week with them for a month or so and sets writing exercises as homework.
“The higher up you go, the better they are. You find simple, straightforward prose and you can really hear their voice.” It is a mystery, he says, why it is possible to hear the voice of chief executives in their letters, while less senior people write like Victorians, or robots. At some companies, thankfully, that is not the case. “With great brands, language zips off the page,” he says, citing Virgin as an example. “It’s a personal brand, so staff just have to write like Richard [Branson].”
Letter-writing skills are important whether the message is nice or nasty, he adds. “If you’re going to repossess somebody’s home unless they pay you, you have an obligation to be clear. Give it straight, talk to people like fellow adults.
“The key thing is to explain: ‘We would like you to write to us, we want to sort this out, and these are the steps that will follow if you don’t ring us . . .’”
If you do not answer a letter of complaint with a good letter, you get what we call attrition, with the customer writing again, Mr Morris warns. And other kinds of letter need just as much care in the way they are drafted. “Some customers write in with ideas and suggestions, or to say thank you. And they don’t get a reply for weeks.”
As part of its service, the Letterhouse advises companies on how to tackle a backlog of correspondence, a problem exacerbated by the advent of e-mail. “People expect an e-mail reply on the same day,” says Mr Morris. “Some businesses take weeks.”
1134 words. First published 7 June 02. © The Financial Times
7 June 02