Confidence in customer understanding comes from a joined-up approach
Customer Understanding has many elements. One of the most important is how firms communicate with customers.
The FCA’s expectation is clear.
Customers should be given the information they need, and it should be presented in a way they can understand.
In practice, that means looking at two things:
How your communication is written
Whether your customers understand what matters
Both matter. At CUE, we combine calibrated Virtual Customer Persona review with real-world testing, so firms can improve communications and evidence understanding in a scalable, repeatable way.
Together, these help firms build the evidence needed to show that customer understanding has been actively considered, improved and tested
How you’ve written it
The FCA expects firms to consider where confusion could arise in their communications, to help consumers navigate the information they provide, to explain jargon or technical terms, and use plain and intelligible language that consumers are likely to understand. It also recognises that even small changes can materially improve comprehension.
Our Client Literature Review is designed to do exactly that, helping firms improve how information is described, structured and explained, and providing an audit trail that shows what changed and why.
We assess:
How clearly information is written, structured and explained
Whether language and processing demands are appropriate for the intended audience
Where wording, structure or presentation may create confusion or misunderstanding
This helps firms assess not just what they have written, but how they have written it. but how easily customers are likely to process and understand it
whether customers understand it
The FCA expects firms to be able to satisfy themselves, through appropriate testing and evidence, that their communications are likely to be understood by their intended recipients.
Our Consumer Testing service helps firms identify what customers need to understand, test whether they actually understand it, and evidence where understanding succeeds or breaks down.
We assess:
The key concepts, risks and trade-offs customers need to grasp
Whether customers form the right expectations from the communication
Where misunderstanding is most likely to lead to poor outcomes
How understanding differs across target-market segments
This helps firms move beyond internal assumptions and build evidence that customers understand the information in practice.
Confidence comes from addressing both
Clear language does not guarantee understanding.
Understanding a concept does not mean it has been explained well.
Our services are designed to work independently or together, depending on your needs and priorities.