Straight Talk: Plain Language for Cross Functional CX Teams

The Gist

Shared vocabulary matters. Without common definitions, cross-functional teams risk miscommunication, duplication, and CX breakdowns.
Plain language is strategic. Clear, user-focused language reduces rework, boosts efficiency, and improves accessibility across teams and audiences.
Language needs ownership. Assigning someone to guide terminology and test content ensures alignment and measurable impact.

Cross-functional teams often rally around a common goal: delivering an exceptional customer experience. But that alignment can falter when language creates confusion. What one team calls a "user journey," another might interpret as "conversion flow," and a third may describe as "feature adoption." Or maybe customer journey.

Without a shared vocabulary, collaboration risks resulting in miscommunication, duplicated efforts, delivery delays, or, worst of all, customer confusion. Customer confusion is not good when trying to build customer trust.

This issue is especially common in organizations where teams, marketers and developers work closely but speak different operational languages. Shared goals only become actionable when teams share the same language.

Why Language Matters in Cross-Functional Collaboration
The Role of Plain Language in Creating Shared Understanding
Lessons Learned and Common Pitfalls
Language Is a Product, Too

Why Language Matters in Cross-Functional Collaboration

The words you use matter more than you might think. Outcomes begin to degrade when you’re in an environment with a high number of terminology misalignments. When teams define "feedback," "engagement" or even "customer" differently, they create processes and technologies that veer off course. The result can be disjointed and frustrating customer experiences. And a lack of customer trust.

Research underscores the scale of the risk. A 2022 Forrester Consulting survey found that disconnected and inefficient processes (often rooted in information and language silos) cause a 24% drop in organizational productivity. Similarly, PMI’s Pulse of the Profession reports that poor communication contributes to 56% of failed projects.

True Story: When Language Derailed Tag Management Efforts

As the program manager leading a major financial firm’s enterprise Tag Management System (TMS) migration, I confronted terminology mismatches on a daily basis. The initiative required coordinating more than 40 teams who did not work closely together, spanning marketing, engineering, legal, data science, platform engineering and design.

Our initiative required removing thousands of hard‑coded tags across hundreds of enterprise websites and mobile apps and implementing a robust tagging framework before a strict regulatory deadline. What we found right away was that each group used different language for identical concepts, and often they didn’t fully understand what each other were saying. Left unresolved, this ambiguity threatened timelines, compliance and ultimately the customer experience.

To keep everyone aligned, communication became my first and most important deliverable. Some of the activities we prioritized:

Published a plain‑language tagging glossary and project timeline, embedding the definitions in every status report.
Hosted weekly “ask‑me‑anything” sessions and regularly attended "Communities of Practice" to establish credibility and visibility, but also so questions surfaced early.
Documented job aids in Confluence and pinned current guidance in Slack, giving teams a single, always‑accessible source of truth.
Repeated key messages at regular intervals to reinforce shared understanding.

The result: we hit our deadline and delivered a cleaner, consent‑governed marketing data collection practice without disrupting site performance or the customer experience. Clear, consistent language turned chaos into coordinated execution.

The Role of Plain Language in Creating Shared Understanding

The Model: The Government? Yes, Actually ...

Plain language is more than just "using simpler words." It is a discipline devoted to making content understandable the first time people read or hear it. In the United States, the Plain Writing Act of 2010 mandates that federal agencies communicate clearly, and the publicly available guidelines at PlainLanguage.gov lay out practical steps to comply. Core principles include:

Write for your audience and their context.
Front‑load the main message so readers grasp the point immediately.
Use active voice and concrete verbs to reduce ambiguity.
Limit jargon and acronyms, or define them the first time they appear.
Structure information with headings, lists and tables to aid scanning.
Test with real users to confirm that content is actually clear.

Government adoption matters because it proves the business case. After the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) rewrote a single benefits letter in plain language, phone calls to one regional office dropped from about 1,110 to just 200 in the following year, freeing staff time and improving service quality.

The private sector sees similar gains. As a technical writer in Oracle’s Hospitality Global Business Unit, I bridged communication between code-focused development teams and hotel staff in more than 100 countries. My approach drew directly from plain language guidelines and included:

Task‑oriented user guides that replaced dense functionality overviews with step‑by‑step checklists.
Screen‑reader‑ready help text that met accessibility standards.
Terminology reviews for every new label, tooltip and error message in the user interface.

Plain language, grounded in proven guidelines, transformed complex software into a more intuitive tool for a global, multilingual workforce with widely varying levels of expertise.

Related Articles: How Can Your Organization Truly Be Customer-Centric?

Lessons Learned and Common Pitfalls

Years of facilitating large‑scale CX initiatives has revealed predictable patterns, both in how language breakdowns derail projects and in how targeted communication practices recover momentum. Below is a quick field guide to what most often goes wrong, followed by tactics that can help put teams back on track.

Common Pitfalls vs. What Works

The table below outlines typical breakdowns in communication strategy alongside proven practices that improve alignment and execution.

What Goes Wrong in CX Initiatives	What Works in CX Initiatives
Afterthought syndrome: Teams bolt on documentation at the end of a development cycle instead of treating language as part of design, forcing costly rework and last‑minute inconsistencies.	Embedding language reviews in software development: Treat terminology like code: peer review it during pull requests and sprint demos.
Code‑first mentality: Writers focus on how the code works rather than how it benefits the user, ignoring plain‑language principles and missing an opportunity to provide clear value.	Assigning a language owner: Whether it’s a technical writer or a product manager, someone must guard the language used across teams and drive consistency.
Documentation drift: Glossaries and job aids go stale; definitions and processes shift across teams, muddying metrics and triggering costly rework.	Testing with real users … repeatedly: Usability sessions, sanity checks and retrospectives expose misunderstandings early.
Invisible exclusions: Content fails accessibility or readability checks, leaving portions of the audience behind and creating risk.	Tracking communication-related KPIs: Metrics like rework, onboarding time, call center support tickets or compliance findings prove the ROI of clear language.

Related Articles: Tactics to Build Customer Trust With Personalized Experiences

Language Is a Product, Too

Clear language is a product that requires ownership, iteration and measurement. When organizations apply the same rigor to words that they give to code and design, cross‑functional alignment becomes second nature and the customer experience improves as a direct result.

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