Karm City

Why artificially lowering the expectations of your customers is bad

Many efficiency bloggers and Four Hour Work Week folks have said one of the necessities of running a business is proper inbox management. Part of what they mean is: don’t respond to your customers right away; wait until the next day, so they don’t expect you to respond at any moment.

This is good advice for email management, but horrible advice if you want to keep your customers beside themselves with happiness. In reality, for your customers to be happy at all, they need you to respond in a reasonable amount of time. That means on the same day, usually within an hour. Your customers already have staff that barely respond when needed; they don’t need the same treatment from their vendors.

Plus, I’ve found that the “distraction” of email often isn’t a distraction at all. It’s not unreasonable to configure some “set it and forget it” rules in your mail client to funnel incoming mail to appropriate buckets, and the rest is minimally intrusive.

The reality of running a business is that you will always be interrupted by email. So, you can defer it, freeing up two minutes at the expense of a satisfied customer, or suck it up and reap the benefits when you need a good referral.