When I made a move from Southern California to a small town in Oregon, back in 1990, I wondered how many clients I would lose from my freelance copywriting business. I’d promised everybody I would assiduously stay in touch via phone and fax (no email then), and to show up in person whenever needed. Even so, I did lose business—including one regular client who said she couldn’t possibly work with anyone who wasn’t local, even though her office was an hour away from me and I saw her maybe twice a year.
We have come a long way since then. It’s commonplace to have people on several continents on a conference call, and to maintain a virtual identity via email and chat. So much so, I think we may take our connectedness for granted and not realize that clients and colleagues don’t find us accessible enough and so don’t have as much confidence in working with us as they should.
I’m specifically thinking of a guy I have worked with for several years in a technical capacity. He’s brilliant, but I always felt like I was second-tier in his book because he was unresponsive to emails and phone calls. I’d voicemail and email several times and get no reply at all, even in the middle of a project. That obviously made me uncomfortable about working with him.
So we had a talk in the middle of a current project. Turns out that a/email is his preferred method of communication, so if you leave a voicemail he’s likely to respond by email and b/he was having some terrible problems with his email provider and ingoing and outgoing messages were simply disappearing without a trace.
He’s now changed email providers and is suddenly very accessible, sending me reports and checking in several times a week. My confidence in working with him has gone up exponentially though the service provided has not changed. Virtual relationships need to be maintained the same as physical ones.