E-mail exposes the literacy gap

Workforce,  Nov, 2002  by Mary Anne Donovan

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Imagine this scenario: a customer-service department manager comes to you in a panic. Tomorrow is "Go Live" day for a new electronic system. From now on, all customer complaints and queries will be handled by e-mail. The manager has writing samples from several of her reps. There isn't a correct sentence in the bunch. You have a huge training problem.

This dismal predicament isn't all that far-fetched. There is a national literacy crisis, and it is costing business money--big money. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that illiteracy accounts for about $225 billion each year in lost productivity. William Gallagher, a former manager of communication services at consulting company Arthur D. Little, Inc., estimates that 30 percent of all business memos and e-mails are written simply to get clarification about an earlier written communication that didn't make sense.

E-mail is, of course, propelling most organizations to move from oral to written communication with customers and clients. But as managers are discovering, many of their employees don't have the writing skills to do the job. A National Assessment of Adult Literacy study conducted in 1992 by the National Center for Education Statistics reported that about half of the adults in the United States lack the skills necessary to read simple directions or write a grammatically correct letter.

Roseann Clark, a senior analyst at Rochester Gas & Electric Corp. in New York, says the utility company last year wanted to broaden its customer service. "We wanted to expand into e-customer service and open customer-service inquiries through our Web page," she says. "Up to this point, we had been 100 percent telephone."

Customer-service manager Stephen Smythe knew intuitively that customer reps would have to brush up on their writing skills. To better understand employee skill levels, he conducted an informal evaluation to validate his hunch.

"I looked at writing samples, and identified a need within the team," he says. "I wanted to make sure they had all the tools they needed to communicate with customers." To improve employee skills, RG&E hired a local nonprofit writers' organization to develop and deliver a training program.

Marilynn Butler, director of the Graduate Human Resource Development Program at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, promotes formal assessment for finding knowledge gaps in organizations that are moving to more writing-intensive customer service and communications. "Anytime a new innovation takes place, a needs assessment should be done so the gaps can be identified and the path to close them planned--a training program for writing, online communication, response etiquette, Net etiquette." She says it might even make sense for some organizations to hire a full- or part-time writing expert to conduct group and one-on-one training.

"Awareness is key," Butler adds. "Now that e-mail is integrated into the average person's daily life, written communication has become the medium of choice in most organizations. This is a blessing and a curse. We are able to connect with people around the world in seconds, but the curse side is that people now write in fragments, rely completely on spelling and grammar checks, and pay no attention to tone. People need to learn how to communicate what they would normally say in understandable written terms without being too verbose or confusing."

COPYRIGHT 2002 Crain Communications, Inc.
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