Ideally, your company's website is loaded with plain language web content—well-written content your customers can understand, care about, and use.

But honestly, your site probably has some not-so-plain content as well—web content your customers struggle to understand, make mistakes using, and abandon to call or email your customer service team instead. Are your customers calling and emailing your because they can't understand the content on your website?

This session teaches you the traits of plain language web content and studies examples from real websites. You'll learn how to identify content that is not written in plain language and develop a plan for (a) rewriting it yourself or (b) getting the team that owns the content to rewrite it. Finally, we will make the connection between plain language web content, self-service, and fewer incoming contacts. You'll learn how to explain and demonstrate how confusing content is causing customers to contact you and creating undue traffic for your team.

Hands-on practice: This session will include a small-group work session where you will find content at your own site that needs a plain language rewrite, estimate how many additional contacts the content is causing, and how much time it would take to rewrite the content. During this small-group session you'll work with your peers on howto make the case that the content needs to be revised.

Takeaway

Participants will learn:

• What plain language is and how to tell if your web content is written in plain language
• Why writing in plain language never involves "dumbing down" the information
• Why customers are entitled to plain language web content from companies
• How plain language web content reduces phone, email, chat, and social media contacts
• How un-plain language harms the customer experience