Customer email overhaul

Problem

The emails that project managers send to keep customers in the know when they’re in the implementation process had grown with little to no governance. These were the post contract signed but pre billing activation emails. Templates were added, copied and edited by whoever needed them.This created a bloat of emails that had inconsistent voice, tone, labels and descriptions of process. And while they had a professional voice and tone, it inconsistent to our brand voice that uses more human language.

Going through the enterprise telecom service installation process is complicated. There are many milestones, construction may or may not be involved, timelines shift for many reasons and there can be a lot of scheduled dates throughout the process. A lot of coordination happens internally before services are installed or activated.

The business had been trying to get these emails audited, culled and rewritten for seven years, but for whatever reason, it always paused before completion. I knew I had to be in it for the long haul.

Business goal

Align all customer-facing implementation emails to our company’s voice and tone. Reduce the volume, simplify and humanize content.

My added goal as a content designer in product design knowing what was on the roadmap: Build modular content blocks ready for digital automation and UI.

My role

As principal content designer, I led this project, working alongside a member of my content design team who joined after the project was in flight. I owned the audit and the strategy, we rewrote and led review sessions together. We were a dream team. We also had a small team of project manager and service designer to step in with their skills as needed.

Audit and reduction

The audit phase was where the most time was spent. We inventoried every journey and email, documenting everything in Lucid. Sticky notes from our conversations with subject matter experts (SMEs) covered the board. We ran weekly working sessions with a group of project manager SMEs who knew these emails better than anyone. They brought the business and process knowledge that we couldn’t know and we brought the content and experience standards knowledge.

The process was cyclical: we reviewed independently, workshopped with the SMEs asking questions, revised based on these sessions and came back for approval of edits. We could not have made confident reduction decisions without them. But they were still in draft mode as we learned more and more with each new group of emails. Sometimes this affected previous work.

Journey phases

The emails were grouped into five phases of the customer implementation journey from introduction to billing activation. The introduction phase saw the biggest reduction. We cut the volume by 75% and replaced complicated content with one consistent human voice: their project manager. This aligned to the work being done in the PM group where a single project manager owns the journey from start to finish.

Voice and tone overhaul

Before this project, emails came from a project manager but frequently said things like "this team will be reaching out" or "you will hear from this department." The customer was being handed off on paper, but not in a way that felt connected.

We rewrote everything to make sure all communications came from one person. The PM knew the customer, knew the timeline and guided them through the process. Hand-offs in copy were removed, per the SVP’s request. So was internal jargon, which again, we learned from the SMEs. “Do customers understand this? Do you have to define this to customers?” - all parts of our normal workshopping questions. It felt like sometimes the PMs were happy to actually say it outloud. “No they don’t, it confuses them.”

In the end, the emails read like they were actually written by the person sending them. I ensured we used the same font and size as Outlook so when they copy/pasted and added fields or data into the template, it all matched. When the customer responded and the PM replied, there would be no weird font transition.

Taxonomy

One of the most significant parts of this project was establishing content label taxonomy. Before this work, dates, appointments, customer contact roles and milestones had inconsistent naming conventions. We defined and documented it all and I met frequently with directors and VPs to nail down finals.

Terminology was standardized, dates and data points followed the style guide and customer contact roles were defined and named consistently across every email. This taxonomy work was not only useful during the implementation journey. It created a baseline to be used throughout the entire customer journey, setting a standard for how we spoke to customers.

How we used AI

About 75% of this project was manual, prior to our company’s integration to AI. The audit, strategy, SME collaboration, decision-making and most of the rewriting were all manual.

AI helped tremendously with finding and iteration on repeated content that appeared across multiple emails. When the same information showed up in more than one place, AI helped us write it once and hold it consistent everywhere. It was a tool for precision, and helped ensure we were rock solid in our consistency and helped create modular content blocks.

Modular content blocks

This was not part of the original plan, but quickly came to the top of my list as I worked through each email, noticing that the same information kept popping up in different emails, written slightly differently every time. For example, site prep information, appointment details and simple things like salutations and closings. Also, there were different data blocks displayed in each email, which we were able to bring consistency to.

We explained this to the executive stakeholders like lego bricks, and we created many of them, each written once and built to drop into any email where that content belonged. Every time that information appeared across the journey, it was the same, word for word. This was important as I knew the roadmap included automation and modular content blocks would simplify this.

Built for automation

Automation was in flight, and digital UI would soon be the delivery method for many of these emails, as they tied to order tracker and status work. Given content is so important with that, that project team would have something solid to start with. The modular blocks were designed to work directly into that project in a way that a rewrite alone would not have.

Outcome

Every new customer moving through implementation would have one consistent, human voice guiding them through. The emails were shorter, simpler, used plain language and terminology as appropriate and had easy-to-understand action steps. The PM voice was genuine and the taxonomy work followed customers well beyond the implementation journey.

The content library was delivered ready for use as is and for later automation

This project reinforced

• Content governance matters everywhere, especially in enterprise. With clear, human communication, experience improves and is even trackable on things such as CES or NPS scores.

• We could not have reduced and rewritten with confidence without the SME project managers who were willing to sit in the weeds with us week after week, digging into their process. Big, complicated processes do not have to mean big, complicated communications.