We Excel at Excellence, Whatever That Means

I am becoming increasingly wary of businesses that begin by telling us how wonderful they are.

“Best in Class” is a popular choice. “Customer Service is in Our DNA” remains stubbornly difficult to kill off. My personal favourite may be “We Excel at Excellence”, a phrase that manages to say absolutely nothing with quite remarkable confidence.

These statements are usually intended to reassure us. Someone has presumably spent time discussing them, perhaps gathered around a meeting table with coffee and a plate of biscuits, before agreeing that they capture the very essence of the business. The problem is that they tell the visitor almost nothing.

Best in which class? According to whom? What does having customer service in your DNA actually mean when somebody telephones with a problem?

The visitor is not necessarily going to challenge these claims. More likely, they will simply ignore them. We have become remarkably skilled at filtering out corporate noise. We skim past the grand promises, the familiar phrases and the photographs of smiling people pointing at laptops, looking for something that might actually be useful.

That filtering comes at a cost. Every meaningless sentence places a small additional burden on the visitor. They must mentally separate the useful information from the decoration. If they have to work too hard, they may decide that finding another website is easier.

The traditional welcome message creates much the same problem.

“Hello and welcome to our website. We manufacture widgets and have proudly been doing so for more than 20 years.”

There is nothing particularly offensive about it. It is polite, perfectly respectable and probably true. It just does not make especially good use of the most valuable space on the website.

Visitors do not need to be welcomed to a website. They know where they are. Nor, in most cases, is the age of the company the first thing they need to know. Twenty years in business may provide valuable reassurance, but it becomes meaningful only after the visitor has established that the company can help them.

People generally arrive at a business website with a purpose. They may have a problem to solve, something they need to buy or a decision they are trying to make. Their first question is unlikely to be, “I wonder how long these people have been trading?” It is far more likely to be, “Am I in the right place?”

Perhaps part of the problem is the name itself. “Homepage” still encourages us to think of it as the front cover of a company brochure, complete with a welcome message and a brief history of the business. It may be more useful to think of it as a landing page. For many visitors, that is precisely what it is: the place where they arrive, look around and decide whether to continue. That requires rather more thought than simply welcoming them through the door.

A good homepage should answer their first question quickly. Tell the visitor who you are in plain English. Explain what you do and, more importantly, what problem you can solve for them. Then make the next step clear. That might be making a telephone call, requesting a quotation, booking an appointment or simply reading a little more.

It does not need to be complicated. “We repair commercial kitchen equipment across South London, helping restaurants get back up and running quickly” may not win an award for creative writing, but it tells the visitor rather a lot. They can immediately decide whether they are in the right place.

None of this requires clever language. In fact, clever language can sometimes get in the way. A straightforward sentence that helps someone understand the business is worth considerably more than a polished tagline that could sit equally comfortably above the entrance to a bank, an accountancy firm or a manufacturer of industrial adhesives.

This does not mean that personality should be removed from a website. Quite the opposite. A business can sound warm, confident and distinctive without resorting to claims that everyone else is making. Personality comes from speaking honestly, understanding the customer and choosing words that sound as though a real person might actually use them.

There will be a place for the company’s history. There may also be a place to talk about its standards, experience and commitment to looking after customers. Those things matter, but they need evidence and context. Twenty years of experience means more when it explains why the business understands a particular problem. Excellent customer service becomes believable when the website shows what that service looks like in practice.

The opening of a website has a simpler job. It should help someone recognise that they have arrived in the right place and understand what to do next.

Perhaps that is the real test of homepage writing. Not whether it sounds impressive in a meeting, but whether it is useful to a stranger who has just arrived.