How accessible should you be?
This is another listener suggestion. Valerie wrote to me on Facebook messenger and posed this question. So, how accessible should you be? Do you have to reply to every email, text and WhatsApp message, regardless of the time of day or night? Or, is it OK to set boundaries and regular business hours?
Listen to this new, 8-minute episode for some ideas on how to set your boundaries.
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– How accessible should you be? Listen to this episode and find out. Hi, it’s Alan Berg. Welcome back to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. This was a listener’s suggestion from someone named Valerie who sent me a Facebook message and suggested this topic. It was probably prompted by a message that she got in the evening at some point and should I respond now cuz it’s 10 o’clock? You know, if I get the inquiry in at 11 o’clock do I respond right away or wait until the morning and it brings up a good question. Are you setting a precedent that you respond right away if it’s late in the evening or early in the morning, outside of normal business hours? Are you doing it? Yeah, you are.
And the other side of that we know is that we want to be the first to respond. Whether it’s a corporate inquiry or a social inquiry or a fundraiser or something, we want to be the first to respond cuz we know that consumers in general are going to choose many of the time. I know with weddings we’ve heard that half the time they’re choosing the first one that responds. So certainly you want to try to be the first one to respond. Of course, I always advocate being the best response not just the first one to respond. And if you can be both the first and the best, even better. But how accessible do you need to be? Well, you are allowed to have a life. You are allowed to have a family and you are allowed to do your job because the most important thing let’s say it’s a Saturday night and you’re doing a wedding or it’s any night and you’re doing a corporate event, while you’re doing that event you should not be paying attention to emails and things like that except for emergency situations. You’re supposed to be paying attention to your client. You’re supposed to be doing the best job for them.
So in normal circumstances, let’s say it’s Wednesday evening and an inquiry comes in at 9.30 at night, do you respond right away? Well, if you do, it gives you an edge although the customer is really expecting to get a reply the next morning. People when they send an inquiry at 9:30 at night would they like to get one? Sure. Well, is it good to give them one? Well, again, if you’re able to have that conversation before somebody else, it’s not a bad thing. But there comes a time in your life where you just can’t respond. And I always say respond as quickly as you can, whatever that means. And for different people at different times it means different things. Some people will check their email in the evening and if they get an inquiry, they’ll respond. I know I’ll do that. But a lot of times with me it’s time zone related. If I get an inquiry in at eight o’clock at night from Australia, I’m on Eastern time and Australia is anywhere from 12 to 14 hours ahead of me well it’s tomorrow morning for them. If I wait till tomorrow morning for me, they’re asleep or they’re going to bed because now nine o’clock in the morning for me could be anywhere from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM for them so we have this difference.
So I will maybe pay attention to that time zone as to when I’m going to reply. For most of you doing business locally or maybe there’s an hour time difference or even if you’re cross country in the US or cross country, even in Australia, that you know two or three hour time difference, you’re going to have your regular business hours so respond accordingly. So how accessible should you be? Well, from a technology standpoint, you want to give people as many ways to reach out to you as possible. So accessibility that way means something different. So I allow people to call me, email me, fill out a contact form, text me, social media messaging, WhatsApp, all those. I do not allow live chat. It’s not one of the options that I have and that’s because I’m not that accessible from a right now standpoint. I travel an awful lot, I cross time zones. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m going to be able to chat with you live now not at least through my website. If you send me a chat message on Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger or WhatsApp or whatever, and it’s an appropriate time of the day where I can respond, I will respond.
And I think you should do the same. I think you should respond as quickly as you can when that makes sense. If you have small children and you’re reading them a bedtime story please do not have your phone with you except maybe to take a cute picture but don’t have your phone with you. So it’s really an individual thing. Are you setting a precedent if you respond at 10:00 PM that you’re accessible at 10:00 PM? Yes. I think you can also, certainly with email you can have out of office messages so that when they send a message at 10:00 PM they get one back that says, “Thanks so much for reaching out, our offices are closed right now. We’ll get back to you first thing in the morning.” Right? I think that’s perfectly fine. You’re setting the expectation.
If you don’t have an out of office at that time they’re just going to get their, send their message not know if it was received and get your reply when they do and that’s what happens to all of us all the time. I put my out of office on when I am physically going to be out of the office or unavailable, I do that otherwise I’m going to respond this quickly as I can. Even when I’m away and you get my out of office I’m going to respond as quickly as I can. And people are very often surprised because it says I’m away and they’re like, oh, I thought you were away. Oh I am but I was able to take a moment to respond to your message. So you’re exceeding their expectation at that point. But do you make yourself too accessible when you start texting with people at 9 and 10 o’clock at night or messaging with them at that time? You make yourself accessible and yes you’re setting a precedent but that’s up to you individually.
Just like I did a podcast if you didn’t hear it on work-life balance. I’m recording this right now on a Friday night at 8:30 PM cuz my wife is in the next room reading a book on her Kindle and I’ve already did my language lesson and my American sign language lessons that I wanted to do and I was like, well, she’s still reading her book. We’re not ready to turn on the TV yet so I’m going to go record this episode. So that’s my work-life balance that works for us. It doesn’t have to work for you. And the same thing with accessibility. It doesn’t, there’s no one size fits all here. It’s what works for you. We know that responsiveness is one of the things that people value. I’m not going to say millennials and Gen Zs I think this is people in general value responsiveness but I think most consumers, I’m not going to say everybody most consumers, no matter what generation they are understand that if I send a message to a business at 10 o’clock at night, they’re probably not going to respond now. They might surprise me by doing it but I’m not expecting them to. I think a reasonable expectation is the next morning. However, they send you a message at 10 o’clock in the morning, they expect a response that day. And I think you would, and I would does it have to be right away? No. Would it be great if it was right away? Sure.
Would all of us be better off if people would pick up the phone and call and do this in real time? Absolutely. But as my book title says why don’t they call me, you open up the cover and it says, get over it. So as far as accessibility goes, Valerie, thank you so much for this suggestion. I don’t have a magic bullet answer for everybody because everybody’s different. Some of you might be just yourself, no partner at this moment, some of you might be have partner or be married, some of you have kids, don’t have kids whether you’re married or not and have a partner or not everybody’s situation is different. You do you let everybody else do them. Your business will be fine if you respond as quickly as you can, whatever that means. Hope it gives you something to think about. Thanks.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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