Our work with
Halifax
How we helped a bank build a target-busting retention team
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It doesn’t matter how good your brand promise is if it isn’t backed up by real experience. That experience is delivered every day by the people who write and speak to your customers. We help those people use words more powerfully.
Our approach is simple: we want to excite people about what they can achieve with words. Training’s a word that makes a lot of people wince. But if people come back fired up – and able to do some things they couldn’t do before – then it becomes a really good investment. They’re happier and they perform better. Your customers are happier too. You can measure the difference in the bottom line.
Events
Interactive sessions that excite people about words
We take groups of up to a hundred people through speeches from world leaders, artworks from grand masters, arias from grand opera, extracts from Fleming, Dickens and Shakespeare and clips from Mad Men, Top Gear and the X Factor with just one aim: to steal the best ideas.
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Writing workshops
Sessions for people who want to improve their copy
We deliver writing workshops for groups of up to 12. We use your own material to create exercises. Each one demonstrates a simple way you can improve your writing. Ideally, the material’s current, so the workshops have a tangible output.
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Conversation workshops
Sessions for people who speak to customers on the phone or face-to-face
We use a mixture of training, role play and forum theatre to help teams have better conversations. We’ve worked with sales teams preparing for big pitches and with customer services teams who talk to customers on the phone.
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Coaching
One-to-one working sessions for people who want to build their skills and confidence
We work with people one-to-one to help them hone their skills in a ‘real world’ context. We can work through a piece of written material you need to produce, either face-to-face or remotely. We can also be on the end of a phone to help you practice a call.
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Learning materials
Handbooks, video, websites and widgets
You can’t always take a team out of the office to train them. Even when you can, it’s good to have a reminder of what you’ve learned. So as well as delivering training, we also create learning material. It can be something simple like an annotated ‘before and after’ piece or something more involved like a training video or a set of e-learning modules.
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Stories
Our work with
Lloyds
How we helped an internal comms team engage colleagues by enjoying words
more >We don’t like to get into protracted theoretical chats about grammar in our workshops. We’d much rather look at a piece of fantastic communication and let it do our talking for us. We used this extract from The Merchant Of Venice to convince a room full of senior civil servants that they should do away with flowery adjectives and pompous abstract nouns, and use strong verbs to drive their messages home instead. The animation highlights the verbs in Shylock’s famous speech. To borrow the current vernacular, it’s verbtastic. training
