Dump The Jargon

Want to know what can really frustrate your customers—or worse, make them feel stupid? It’s jargon. And this applies to both your external customers and the people you work with every day.

Jargon confuses, alienates, and often sounds patronising. 

If your goal is to help people understand, use your product or service, come back for more, and maybe even recommend you to others—then ditch the buzzwords. 

After an initial career as an engineer, Alan moved into sales and management in engineering supplies and the beer industry. He then started his own business in 1992 as a Motivational Speaker and Author, helping clients worldwide grow their businesses through seminars and workshops in sales, leadership, and staff motivation. He has been working as a Voiceover Artist and Narrator since 2021.

In addition to voiceovers, he has written and voiced several audiobooks, most notably How to Manage Difficult People, How to Get More Sales by Motivating Your Team, and How to Make Sales When You Don't Like Selling. A Scottish Speaker in California, Holy Water, The Viewpoint Murders, The Celebrant, and Running the Race: Eric Liddell – Olympic Champion and Missionary.
You can contact him through all the social media sites or directly at voiceovers@alanfairweather.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Documentation Podcast. This is Alan Fairweather giving you something more to listen to, to think about and to take action. So let's do it. Do you know what can really embarrass a customer or make them feel stupid or just fail to help them understand? And I mean an internal as well as an external customer. Jargon will cause all of this to happen, and you certainly don't want that if you want these people to use your product or service, keep coming back, and recommend your business to other people, or to have happy staff and colleagues. When you use technical terms, buzzwords or acronyms, the other person may not understand. They may also feel that you're talking down to them, and this makes them feel patronised and uncomfortable. Any forms of jargon are best avoided. Every organisation has its jargon, and yet, when I ask people in a seminar to give me examples of jargon in their business, they really struggle to come up with something. And the reason for that is, they don't know they're using jargon. I used to do a lot of work with a large telecommunications company. Every time we had a coffee break, the participants get together and talk about work stuff. I've listened in on these conversations and I haven't a clue what they were talking about. They'll say things like, we need to do an AB1 to get a 465 and then we'll do a WOPO to pull the DD12s through. Okay, so that's not exactly what they were saying, but it sounds a lot like that to me. I just hope the customers are never on the end of this. I was in the bank one day, depositing a cheque from a grateful client. The lady behind the counter took the cheque and the pay-in slip and said something to me that I didn't understand. I said, I'm sorry, I don't understand. And she repeated herself five times before I got it. What she was saying was, Now I know you're listening to this and thinking that it makes perfect sense to you, but this lady was softly spoken and not very distinct, and because I didn't understand the jargon, I had to ask her to repeat herself five times. She kept saying the same thing, and didn't seem to be able to translate it into everyday language. She could have said something like, This amount won't be available to withdraw from your account until Monday, Mr. Fairweather. Or it'll be three days before that money will be available to you. Or something like that. But repeating the same thing over and over again was not helpful or good for customer service. It was slightly embarrassing for me and made me feel a bit more stupid than I really am. Remember, every business and every industry has its own jargon. So you'll need to know not just general slang, but also the industry-specific jargon in your organisation. So make sure when communicating with other people, you dump the jargon and kiss. Keep it simple, stupid. This is Alan Fairweather. Thank you for listening and I wish you every success.