Voice Governance for
Consequential Communications
When your company speaks,
someone acts on it. Or throws it away.
I help organizations fix letters, notices, forms, screens, and AI answers that leave people wondering what to do next. Then I work with their teams on the words and rules that keep the same problems from coming back.
For organizations in health care, education, and financial services, and the technology companies that support them.
See the method at work
The same notice, before and after.
In a real Voice Audit, I start with communications people have actually received. To show you how that works, I've made up an example. The names, numbers, and other details are fictional, and any proposed rewrite would have to be checked and approved by the organization before going out.
Before
Dear Member, Thank you for your interest in the Complex Care Program. Following clinical review, we are writing to inform you that your referral has been conditionally queued pending panel capacity reassessment1. Program enrollment is contingent upon care-team availability and panel turnover, evaluated on a rolling basis. Enrollment timelines cannot be guaranteed and are subject to change without notice2. Failure to respond to outreach attempts may result in removal from the queue3.
Findings
- 1Critical
The patient cannot tell what happened.
- 2Critical
The wait has no end date.
- 3Critical
The removal threat has no instructions attached.
After
You are on the waitlist: number 14 of 31. Most people in your position are enrolled within three to five months. To keep your place, respond within 10 days when we reach out. Our calls come from 410-555-0123, and our letters look like this one. Keep seeing your current providers; this program works alongside your regular care. If your health changes while you wait, call us.
Note: The governed version tells the patient their place in line and how to keep it.
Voice Governance, defined
Someone has to answer for every sentence your company sends.
Different teams have long produced different versions of your company's voice, and mass email multiplied them. AI adds something new: it can compose a distinct message for every customer, on the fly, and send it before anyone has read it. The rules for what those messages may say, who decides, and who checks them have to come from the company.
At the moment of decision, the message is part of your product, so a language failure is a product failure.
How it breaks down
An organization's mission starts with leadership, but what people hear depends on the teams and AI systems putting it into words.
Leadership defines the promise.
Leadership decides what the organization's mission means in practice and what it promises the people it serves. Sometimes what the organization promises publicly doesn't match what employees are told to deliver.
Teams put it into their own words.
Sales, support, policy, and product each translate the promise for their own work. Without shared standards and decision rights, sales promises one thing, support explains another, and the policy announcement reads like it came from another company entirely.
People are left to interpret it.
The message finally reaches the patient, student, borrower, or employee. If they can't tell what to do next, the consequences can show up in missed steps, extra phone calls, or people simply giving up. That's why an audit starts here, with the messages people receive.
Services
Start with an audit.
Where is our language costing us?
Voice Audit
Send me three to five high-stakes communications: the customer letter, the policy announcement, the benefits notice, the form, the onboarding screen, the chatbot transcript. I audit them against published plain-language and accessibility standards, against one another, and against what your leaders have promised.
Two to three weeks after I receive them, you get a prioritized list of problems, the consequences each one can cause, and rewrites of the passages that need attention first.
Fixed scope and fee. No platform, subscription, or retainer.
If the audit finds the same failure across your messages, I design the standards, decision rights, and AI permission rules to address it.
When the problem goes beyond individual messages.
Voice Governance System
One standard for how you speak, tested against what you send. I build it with the people who will own it, so it can run without me.
What are we authorized to say, and who decides?
Language Assurance for AI
I help you define what your AI systems may say, and I test whether they do. Your team or vendors build and run the systems.
Can we defend what our AI said?
What clear language
can buy you
A notice that answers its readers' questions can keep them off the phone.
You keep the rules your AI must follow and the test results that show whether it does.
The Business Case: the research on what unclear language costs →
Case Examples
Six case examples.
Fictional cases built on real document types, with severity-ranked findings, the cost of leaving each problem unresolved, and a governed version.
- 01Read the audit →
Hospital discharge instructions
The packet that leaves critical instructions buried.
- 02Read the audit →
A care-navigation waitlist notice
It never uses the word “waitlist.”
- 03Read the audit →
A financial aid email
A cancellation warning with no deadline.
- 04Read the audit →
A community lender's decline email
The "no" that should have been a "not yet."
- 05Read the audit →
An onboarding flow
The error screen won't say which detail didn't match.
- 06Read the audit →
An AI chatbot's answer
An eligibility determination the available facts do not support.
Selected communications work from before Treger Voice
- 20+national affiliates, a common voice developed for them
- 1,300+nursing homes and K–12 systems in a COVID-19 outreach strategy
- 600+communications a year under one content strategy
- 24jurisdictions on a statewide platform
I'm William Treger. I've spent 25 years working in newsrooms and organizations across health and human services, education, finance, and technology. Treger Voice is the new practice I've built around what those years taught me about how organizations communicate, and what happens when their messages leave people confused.
Show me the communications you're worried about.
You don't have to know exactly what you need. Start with the email that keeps generating calls, or the chatbot nobody's watching. Send me one and I'll take a look. I'll tell you the three things I'd fix first, on one page, at no charge. Take out names, account numbers, and other personal details before you send it. If an audit would help after that, we agree on the scope and fee before work begins.