how much time do you lose to pop-ins and unscheduled phone calls? get it back.
by frank stitely
the relentless cpa
ambush meetings and phone calls are unscheduled events. clients just walk in with a tax document and want to say, “hello.”
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this morphs into, “quick question while i’m here. …” fifteen productive minutes escape your life, which is really 30 minutes when you consider the mental time you need to switch back to the task that was interrupted.
the easy answer is to not allow unscheduled meetings and phone calls.
when did you last walk unscheduled into your doctor’s office and ask a quick question? have you ever done this to your lawyer? you can’t even drop in to speak to an auto mechanic. why should clients be allowed to drop in on you?
the answer is training. you have in your head that always being available is great client service. but it’s not. what about the client whose work was interrupted by an ambush meeting? was this great service to him/her? how easy is it to jump right back into calculating the boot on a 1031 exchange after an ambush discussion on estate tax planning? you trained your clients to interrupt you.
untraining is always harder than training. that client of 20 years barges past your receptionist with, “we go way back. he’ll see me.” giving your admin staff glocks will stop this but may seem a bit of overkill. you’ll run out of places to bury the bodies eventually. we settled on tranquilizer darts. then we drop them off outside strip joints – naked. this is effective training – especially for the guys.
the way to train clients to avoid ambush meetings and phone calls is to be unavailable to them. instruct your admin staff that you’re always in a meeting or on a call when someone asks to interrupt. my telephone has been on “do not disturb” for decades at a time.
most clients only need to experience this once to understand that showing up without an appointment won’t lead to satisfaction. the next time that they have something to discuss, they’ll schedule an appointment time.
obviously, this tactic works best if clients can’t see you polishing your shoes. think about this when you choose an office. glass walls look beautiful but consider how goldfish feel when they’re always on display.
communicate electronically, not through phone calls and unsafe emails
why do people call you on the phone? because they want fast answers. many, if not most, cpas answer emails once per day or maybe twice. time management gurus taught us this alleged time-saving principle from the early days of email. don’t interrupt your day multiple times by answering the call of the “you’ve got mail” icon.
we’ve unwittingly trained clients to believe they’ll get faster responses with phone calls than electronic communications. how do we train clients to reduce phone calls and communicate electronically? we train them by flipping our response times in favor of electronic communications over phone calls. we do this using the basic psychological principle of reinforcement. we reinforce the behavior we desire.
respond to electronic communications before phone calls. our admin staff takes a message from a caller while letting the caller know that i’m in and out of meetings all day. sending an electronic message may get a faster response. then magically, i respond to the electronic message instead of calling. i reinforce the concept that electronic communication gets a faster response than calling.
see? it is possible to train clients.