Don't Use Jargon When Talking To Your Clients

When I was a kid my parents were looking for a hotel room on a little family trip we took to an amusement park.

What they didn’t know was that we needed to book a hotel room far ahead of time – it’s hard to find an open room near the park the night you need it.

We drove from hotel to hotel looking for a place that had rooms.

One of the hotels told my father: “We’re fully committed tonight”.

As a kid I had no idea what that meant. As an adult I think I know what that means…

In plain English: “We don’t have any rooms tonight”.

The hotel was trying to speak a language that seemed gentle and luxurious.

Maybe the hotel should have cut out the jargon and used language that a young child could understand instead of trying to craft an image by using fancy, punch-pulling language.

I’ve worked with other web developers who like to use words like “framework”, “registrar”, “DNS”, “PHP”, and other web words that clients don’t understand in order to sound like they know what they’re talking about.

But all this really does is make the client feel stupid and disconnected.

Not knowing your industry’s jargon doesn’t make your client stupid, it means that they’ve spent their time learning the lingo in whatever industry they are in.

Jargon excludes people.

Excluding people is the last thing you want to when talking to clients.

Watch the words you use when you talk to your clients and make sure you’re not saying things that a lay-person wouldn’t understand.

You’ll stand out among your competition and make your clients feel like a partner when you break up your industry’s jargon into easily digestible words.