Services
Three ways to improve the communications people depend on.
For communications, compliance, operations, customer experience, and product leaders responsible for the messages people receive.
Not sure where to start? Send one communication and I will return a short read at no charge.
Voice Audit
Where is our language costing us?
Two to three weeks once I have the communications, at a fixed scope and fee set before work begins. No platform, subscription, or retainer.
Share three to five important communications, such as letters, notices, forms, onboarding screens, or chatbot exchanges. I read each one the way the person receiving it would. That person may be under stress, reading in a second language, using assistive technology, or working through a process they had no hand in designing.
I review each communication against relevant plain-language and accessibility standards, check it for consistency with your other messages, and compare it with your organization's policies and commitments. Then I trace each problem to the policy, template, or decision behind it. With your help, I also talk with the people who wrote these communications and, where possible, people who received them.
You get:
- A list of problems, ranked by importance, with the reasoning behind each finding and the relevant standard where one applies.
- The consequences each problem can cause, such as extra calls, repeated work, or unfinished applications.
- Rewritten versions of the passages that need attention first.
- A working session to review the findings with the people responsible for these communications.
- Measures to track after the changes, so you can see whether people understand the messages and complete the required actions.
The audit stands on its own, and you’re under no obligation to hire me for anything more. Its findings show whether the problems are confined to individual communications or point to broader changes.
Voice Governance System
What are we authorized to say, and who decides?
Scoped after an audit. Fixed fee.
For organizations where the audit finds a systemic problem: teams writing their own versions of the same message, with no shared standard and no one accountable for the result.
Before writing a standard, I help your team decide who’s responsible for it. Otherwise it becomes one more document nobody uses.
You get:
- The Voice Governance Standard: operating rules, guidance for recurring situations, shared terminology, who can approve what, and who to bring in when a case does not fit the rules.
- An ownership map: who owns the voice, who approves its use, and who intervenes when it fails.
- A practical process for reviewing messages and deciding who steps in when something goes wrong.
- Templates for the communication types that recur, built from the governed versions.
- A sampling and testing protocol, so the standard is checked against what actually goes out.
- A pilot on one live workflow, so the system is tested before it is extended.
I build it with your team and train them to run it.
Language Assurance for AI
Can we defend what our AI said to that person?
Scoped after a conversation. Fixed fee.
For organizations using AI to draft, adapt, or deliver consequential communications. You or your vendors build and operate the AI. I work with you to define what it may say, and I test whether it does.
You get:
- The permission boundary: what the system may answer, what it must send to a person, and what it says when it does not know.
- Test cases, and a definition of what counts as a passing answer, for each kind of answer the system is allowed to give.
- A process for sampling live AI responses, identifying problems, and routing recurring failures to the people who can fix them.
- An incident review and correction process, with records of what the system was permitted to say and how its answers were tested.
This engagement can follow an audit, or stand on its own when the AI system is the one doing the communicating.
What stays with you
I review language, recommend changes, and design the rules and tests around it. The decisions stay with your organization:
- Counsel decides whether a communication is legally sufficient.
- Clinicians approve medical instructions.
- The people authorized to set eligibility, financial, tax, and policy rules decide those questions.
- Your organization approves the language and standards, and decides which messages a person must review before they go out.
- Changes to AI systems, their technical controls, and their deployment stay with you and your technology providers.
Which one first?
Start with an audit in most cases. If the problems are limited to individual communications, the revisions may be all you need. If they recur across teams or channels, I will explain the evidence and recommend changes to the processes behind them. For an AI-specific concern, I can scope that work directly.