That’s responding to emails, filing them, sending them to the right teams for their responses, creating the relevant diary appointments etc, well an average business owner can spend up to 3 hours a day, just under a third of their week either glued to a laptop or their phone trying to keep on top of the never-ending flow of communications to and from their business.
For most business owners, their inboxes can very quickly become overwhelming and once you lose track of where you are, getting back on top of responses, becomes an evening or weekend task.
We live in a world where so much now needs a strong paper/evidence trail, it’s imperative to be hyper-focused on your inbox and keep everything filed and easily accessible. Clients also now have high response time expectations, with chatbots and ping-back emails only stalling the inevitable. A high-value customer could be lost, if the response time isn’t within their time-frame of working. It says an enormous amount about you and your business in that first email interaction.
I always think, would I want to deal with a business that doesn’t respond to an email within 24 hours of receiving my communication, in some cases, depending on the size of the business, my expectations are far higher and I would expect a response within hours.
We recently created a 15-minute daily catch-up with a client of ours, with the specific aim of keeping reaction times to a minimum, these calls are happening at 6.45 am some mornings to make sure we are on top of the client’s busy day. Everyone is already feeling the benefit of quick decisions and stress levels have been significantly reduced.
Even simple tasks like unsubscribing from marketing emails, keeping phishing emails out of his way, archiving old emails and filing specific emails into categories or projects, make an enormous difference to productivity.
We work for this client on a 16-hour-a-week retainer, which includes inbox management as well as other tasks in their busy business. We work across all industries, we have ‘specialist subjects and expertise areas’.
If you are looking for executive support from a virtual team, get in touch and we can book an initial consultation today.
