The faster you respond the less brilliant you need to be

Happy new year, 2015 has been awesome for us, really, really hard but awesome. No new year resolutions, just keep pushing the limits and making the most of each day.

Anyway, We've been hanging out on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland Australia. It's awesome and we've been here working but also travelling a bit.

I feel a bit bad as I've been slow to reply to some emails from clients and a couple have been waiting 5 days or so for me to get back to them. I really prefer to respond within a day but I'll cut myself a small amount of slack since it's the holiday period but the show goes on when you own your own business. As I was writing the replies I was thinking that this reply would be way more valuable if I'd sent it 5 days ago.

It made me think of a quote I heard recently I think on a Facebook post but I couldn't track it down to reference it so help me out if you know the source.

"The faster you respond, the less brilliant you need to be"

That doesn't mean that you should respond quickly with a lame reply, it just means that if your reply is the same if it's straight away or 5 days later the value you will add to the relationship with your clients will be exponentially more for the fast reply than the slow reply.

I remember vividly my first day of my first IT job in London, UK. I was working on the help desk and the guy who was helping me get settled in gave me one piece of the most terrible advice I've ever heard and I'm grateful that I was raised well to dismiss it straight away.

"When you answer a support call, even if you aren't busy, tell them you are too busy to come now and will be down in a couple of hours". WTF?

His justification for this was that "If you respond to quickly now then the customers will begin to expect fast service all of the time". Enough said.

There obviously needs to be some balance around this because you don't want to be watching your inbox every minute as that is detrimental to your productivity but if you schedule time to check for messages and respond to those you can as soon as you can you won't regret it.