Cadent, the UK’s largest gas distribution network, has teamed up with Plain Numbers, a leader in simplifying communications, to help improve how it communicates with customers who struggle with numbers. Nearly half of working-aged adults in the UK have numeracy skills equivalent to those of an eleven-year-old or below, which can create challenges when dealing with essential services like energy.

In response to low customer satisfaction in the energy sector, Ofgem has announced it will launch an ambitious ‘Consumer confidence: a step up in standards’ programme, aiming to restore trust by raising customer service to the highest industry standard.  

Organisations and professionals are striving to ensure that their messages are not only received but understood by their audience. Popular tools that assess readability, such as Flesch-Kincaid scoring, have emerged to assist these efforts.  These are based on simple algorithms and are very easy to use and implement. It's a metric many turn to with the belief that a good score ensures their content is easy to understand. However, this belief is not as straightforward as it might seem.

Green energy company ScottishPower has become the first British energy supplier to join forces with Plain Numbers as part of its ongoing commitment to ensuring its customer communications are clear, simple and easy to understand.

We recently hosted the launch of our ‘Plain Numbers in Practice’ report, highlighting the diverse applications of the Plain Numbers Approach across a wide range of communications. The report features case studies from six different organisations and a range of thematic stories.

Plain Numbers announced a strategic collaboration with Visa, focused on enabling inclusive financial services for adults in the UK. With Visa’s vast network and the Plain Numbers Approach, the collaboration will strive to bring enhanced financial inclusion and design in government disbursements, fostering access to the global economy.

Using research to inform how you write your communications is an important opportunity to assess the communications effectiveness. This is particularly helpful in understanding whether changes you’ve made have indeed improved customer understanding.

Anglian Water has become a Plain Numbers Partners, marking a significant milestone as one of the first utility companies to do so. The partnership underscores Anglian Water’s dedication to enhancing their customer communications through the implementation of the Plain Numbers Approach.

NatWest joined as a Plain Numbers Partner in 2023, with a commitment to enhancing the clarity of their communications and have already trained a number of practitioners, with more to follow, and undertaken embedding activity.

Signal, who work with leading regulated brands to build out capability for better customer communications, has strengthened its commitment to customer-led experience design by becoming a Plain Numbers Partner. 

Santander UK, the high-street bank serving 14 million customers, recognises the significance of empowering its customers to understand its communications around numbers. To help them to do this, Santander UK has partnered with Plain Numbers, aiming to deliver crucial numerical information in a more accessible and impactful manner.

Policy Expert, the UK’s leading personal lines insurtech, has become a Plain Numbers Partner, underscoring their commitment to enhancing customer understanding of financial terms and numbers. Over the next three year, this partnership will improve the communication of numbers within insurance documents, ultimately leading to even more favourable outcomes for Policy Expert’s customers.

We are delighted to announce an exciting partnership with the debt advice charity StepChange. Their team of experts help hundreds of thousands of people a year to deal with their debt problem.

Everyone is talking about AI. Unsurprisingly, across every business and every sector people are keen to harness the power of emerging technology to improve efficiency and meet their challenges at scale. Customer communications are no exception to that.

I did my Plain Numbers training over a year ago now. As a Copywriter for a credit card company, participating in the training seemed a no-brainer. Working for a business in the financial industry, part of my job as the Copywriter was ensuring our communications were clear and easy to understand.

Plain Numbers is proud to announce its latest partnership with Legal & General, a partnership aimed at enhancing the clarity and accessibility of financial communications, with a primary focus on pension-related information.

David Lever, Senior Customer Experience Manager at RSA, is passionate about the RSA’s commitment to enhance their customer experience by prioritising clarity in communication and helping to improve customer understanding.

As we step into 2024, it’s a perfect moment to look back on the year. We’ve had a fantastic 2023 forming new partnerships, participating in exciting events, engaging with diverse audiences, and spreading awareness about the significance of our work.

The Lord Mayor, Nicholas Lyons, has led a group calling for a raft of new measures to tackle financial illiteracy in the United Kingdom.

Our Chief Executive, Mike Ellicock, enthusiastically joined forces with the Financial Literacy and Inclusion Steering Group, led by the Lord Mayor of the City of London. The Group have announced a six-point plan to address low levels of financial literacy and numeracy across the country.

Plain Numbers works with leading brands to improve customer understanding by changing the way they present numbers in their customer communications.

The statistics around numeracy are stark. In Ireland, 1 in 4 adults score below level 1 for numeracy . In the UK, almost half of working age adults have the numeracy levels of a primary school child, that’s around 20 million people. Northern Ireland is the second worst performing area of the UK for numeracy skills.