One year into our Partnership with Bupa Anne Marie, Head of Communications at Bupa and a Plain Numbers Practitioner, reflects on how they’re embedding the Approach across their business.

Anne-Marie: We started our three-year partnership with Plain Numbers in 2022 and I was part of the first cohort of Bupa colleagues to become an accredited Plain Numbers Practitioner.  

As an experienced communicator, I’m pretty confident that I can write a customer communication that’s clear, fair and not misleading. So, I was slightly sceptical about what the training would offer.  

How wrong I was. The poor numeracy stats from Plain Numbers were shocking, as was the fact that they’re such a barrier to customer understanding for so many people. And when I started thinking about how many numbers appear in our customer communications, I quicky realised that we had a lot of work to do. Phone numbers, dates, policy numbers, claim numbers, prices, no claims discount percentages … the list goes on!

As content creators developing communications for customers, our focus is on jargon free copy using measures such as readability to check for clarity and understanding. We don’t think about numbers.

The Plain Numbers approach really opened my eyes to presenting numbers in a way that all customers can understand, irrespective of their level of numeracy.  As businesspeople, we’re very used to seeing and interpreting numbers and data in spreadsheets or on PowerPoint slides. But whatever your role or level of seniority, you can take something away from the practitioner training. Our seven accredited practitioners are from various teams across our UK and Global insurance businesses – Product, Marketing, Sales and Digital, as well as Communications. They’re all involved in communicating numbers to customers.

So how are we applying the Plain Numbers approach in our business? As part of our preparation for Consumer Duty, we’ve been reviewing our customer communications. We’re seeking Plain Numbers accreditation for our critical communications that include numbers and require customers to make an informed decision. Examples include quotes, renewal communications and explaining how no claims discounts work.

During the accreditation process, the Plain Numbers team have been really easy to work with, offering helpful insights and advice on changes. They provide two categories of feedback: must do, and nice to do. They also recognise that some of their recommendations may not be possible due to systems constraints.  It feels very collaborative with a shared goal of finding a way forward that delivers clarity for customers.

As well as testing our updated communications with our customers, we’ve also shared some of them with colleagues in our business with dyscalculia, dyslexia and ADHD.  One lady who really struggles to read numbers says she has no concept of what they mean. She can’t use cash because she’s unable to check whether the change is correct. She needs help finding her hotel room when she’s away from home and doesn’t understand any of the bills she receives. We asked her for feedback on our updated no claims discount leaflet once we’d applied the Plain Numbers approach. She said she liked the fact that the copy was broken down into bite sized chunks and that it felt much less daunting than the original, which made her feel uncomfortable when she read it.

The changes we made in many cases were simple, but hugely impactful in terms of customer understanding.

We’ve also introduced a section about numbers into our tone of voice communications guide. Previously this focused solely on what language to use and avoid, nothing on the numbers. We’re sharing this with content creators across multiple teams.

We’re now looking at other ways to embed the Plain Numbers approach across our business, so it becomes part of our culture.