improving the smell of gas
A Comms Cop series entry—exploring good and bad communication I see and hear—with satire and a straight face—offering fixes where I can. Through ongoing deliberate attention and practice, we can all get better—creating more smiles while reducing the wear and tear on each other.
I love where I live.
But I find my city’s communication weak. Upside—it me makes smile and laugh at times. Look how enthusiastic!
That’s a reminder email to pay my gas bill. It doesn’t say it’s for gas but I think it is. This was the follow-up a few weeks later—
I assume a human (hopefully not a team of humans) made the templates for those. And of course, there’s a boss who allows it. That’s important to remember. A leader enables this.
I get our Department of Public Utilities has bigger priorities. But these were created before our city-wide multi-day water outage back in January and our 2-day boil water advisory in May. I understand why that communication wasn’t great. Fortunately, not a lot of practice communicating those crises.
“What’s wrong with it, Sam? It’s just a gas bill reminder. Relax.”
Easy to eye-roll this stuff, but eye-rolling (and ego) are greasy paths to mediocrity—and worse. I assume there’s little eye-rolling of the details in the NFL and MLB.
Why do so many people elsewhere so often need to be pushed to continually improve things? It’s more fun to create better things.
Good communication is love. It contributes deeply to the smell of a place.1
When organizations communicate poorly, the boss is saying "I don't care enough about your experience to think this through with my team."
Flipside—clear and warm communication says the boss and team respect and value the customer. It might also help deescalate the tone of some inquiries—an act of human calming.
Here’s the gift—
Wonderful external communication can spread beautifully to internal communication. That’s money in so many ways. The reverse is also true. Nurture beautiful internal communication and you’ll find it difficult to communicate poorly externally.
° Most companies, particularly large companies, have created downtown Calcutta in summer inside themselves.
Sumantra Ghoshal | Indian educator | 1948 - 2004
Occasionally, I’ll try to be a good citizen—a part of the solution. Challenge is my local government rarely makes it easy and fast to connect with a named human. Too many organizations do this in addition to not genuinely acknowledging people.2
Unfortunately though, my experience says if I was easily able to offer my thoughts they’d explain it away with some form of ‘standard operating procedures’ that were developed in the 90s or “We could never do that because of the thousands of calls or emails we’d get.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
I know. They’re busy—the busiest.
For more fun, below is my attempt to help.
Solutions—
I was talking with a group of leaders in a keynote setting once.
I shared some improvement thoughts for one of their customer experience journeys in the same way as I did above and below. The organization has over 30,000 employees. They fixed the improvable experience I shared before I got off the stage.
Big 212 smiles. It amazed me.
My city has 4,000 employees—a much smaller ship to turn.
Here are a few kind, cheap, and what should be quick solutions to improving these customer/user/reader experiences. Maybe some of this can help you in some way with something of yours.
First—
From line—Richmond Gas Bill. Not an email address.
Subject lines should minimize the need to open an email—clear facts, maybe some fun. “😊 Payment due 06/05/25 - $20.49”.
I also don’t think an exclamation point is necessary for the announcement of a bill that needs to be paid.Interior could be warmed up aired out—
Hi. Let’s keep the gas flowing.
Please pay your new bill of $20.49 by 06/05/25. This is for account number INSERT.
We’re here for you if you have questions. Just email by replying to this or give us a call at INSERT PHONE NUMBER A HUMAN ANSWERS INSTEAD OF DRAGGING A PERSON THROUGH SOME SLOW BITCH OF A PHONE TREE ULTIMATELY TO LAND IN AN UNATTENDED VOICEMAIL BOX.
We appreciate the opportunity to serve you/keep you warm and help you cook.
”We can’t do all of that.” What could you do?A named human in the sign-off would be nice but I can see that being a tough sell to people who are used to hiding.
Next—
First time I saw this one, I thought it was spam. All of the ideas above work here too.
I can hear the knee-jerk response to my suggestion—
“You know it’s us because it says dpu in the email address. Everyone knows that means Department of Public Utilities and everyone knows that’s your gas bill. We don’t need to say it. You know that, right?
And cust and serv are in there too—well-known abbreviations for the words customer and service.”
More fun—
I sent the following email earlier in the year for clarification about the reminder emails above and to find out who I might offer suggestions to.
Because of the two spaces after some of the sentence-ending periods, my guess is the person who made this was born before 1985. Many of them—including me—were taught to type on a typewriter.3
My favorite part buried within the mess is the confirmation that my email will be addressed within 5 business days and if I don’t hear from them in 7 business days, I should follow up.
Oh, and the “invitation to learn more” in their unlinked FAQs is kind but I’m a little disappointed that any adjustments to my account might take up to 3 billing cycles to complete.
Good news—it only took about 25 hours to get a response with names attached! It was followed by some fluff but it was there letting me know I should feel free to respond if I have any additional questions—which is very kind.
The first name in the sign off was a pleasant surprise. I love that. Really.
I replaced the actual names and personal email addresses.
Inevitably, there’s an explanation of all of this being necessary for internal process/tracking/legal/hr blah blah.
Solution—
Have fun fixing everything I just joked about.
Start with the words and move to the tech. I’m sure the latter will take some time. Maybe with some love and teamwork, it can be fixed within 3 billing cycles.
🚨bloooooooo🚨 4 (the Comms Cop siren)
Next up: how to start jury duty in a kinder way→
If anyone learns of this getting fixed, please let me know.
Please email me with edits, thoughts, comments, or suggestions (or put them here in the comments). Please don’t be shy or worry about my feelings. Quick, blunt, and maybe interesting or helpful5 is always welcome.
I first heard 'the smell of the place’ in the context of organizational culture from Sumantra Ghoshal. He was a gifted Indian professor. If you need a reminder of the importance of culture in an organization, this 8 minutes is one of the top 5 things I’ve ever heard about culture. The first 1:39 is a tribute to him. His talk begins at 1:40.
A good development opportunity if you lead a team of people. Watch and discuss.
Another standout point—
° Individuals do not change fundamentally in who they are without a very serious personal crisis of some kind. Revitalizing people has a lot less to do with changing people, and has a lot more to do with changing the context that companies, that senior managers ... create around their people.
At the start of January’s water outage, the city put up this graphic. It has the words “Preparing food” on both sides. I emailed the person in charge. They removed the words from the tap water side within an hour.
Not that I needed a giant kudo but a quick thanks would have been a kind acknowledgement.
Two spaces were a thing because typewriters had monospaced fonts where each character took up the same space. In the 1990s, things evolved as we moved more broadly into digital type.
🚨bloooooooo🚨 sounds like—
“Maybe interesting or helpful” is meant to free you of concern.
I’d rather you risk sharing something with me than being concerned it might not land well. If your thought implies I’m stupid or an asshole, you might be right. If so, I’d like to try to fix it.