Reading is not listening

posted by ryan on June 24th, 2007

At the end of the day every great relationship requires great listening skills. When you sit down with a customer face-to-face the listening in inherent in the setting. The challenge comes with email as the sender has no idea you are listening unless you answer. I am going to use Hampton as a sample case :)

From John @12:00 --------------------------------------------------- Morning Gents,We're working on a potential deal with ####, but find ourselves facing a technical challenge.... In terms of resolving this issue, a potential option might be to... What are your thoughts in terms of level of difficulty and time to execute? Thanks, J. --------------------------------------------------------- From Hampton @12:45 ---------------------------------------------------- Hrrrm... I'd have to think about that. I wouldn't have a different URL... it would be the same page... and it would just look different. It would probably take about ... Basically what I'd have to do is ... However, once that's done once, its much easier to ... -hampton. --------------------------------------------------------

So in an ideal world that's great response right? If you only have one customer than yes, but most of us have several customers that rely on our expertise. As a developer you often do you best work when you are un-interrupted and you need to make sure the constant client emails and calls don't interfere with your development work. On the flip side when you don't respond your customer has no way to know that you have heard their request. I suggest:

From John @12:00 --------------------------------------------------- Morning Gents, We're working on a potential deal with ###, but find ourselves facing a technical challenge.... In terms of resolving this issue, a potential option might be to... What are your thoughts in terms of level of difficulty and time to execute? Thanks, J. --------------------------------------------------------- From Hampton @12:45 ---------------------------------------------------- Hi John, I got the email, that's an interesting challenge. I will gather my thoughts on it and get some numbers/possibilities to you tomorrow afternoon by 3:00pm. -hampton. --------------------------------------------------------

In the first example Hampton sets a high expectation, that if John needs an estimate he can get it in 45min. This impresses John for now, but the next time when it takes 24 hours to get numbers because Hampton is on a crunch for another customer John won't understand why and will start getting annoyed. He will always expect that speed and anything less will feel sub-par. There is no way to sustain that expectation. Also Hampton dropped everything and thought about the problem and how to solve it. That means whatever work he was doing suffered the loss of focus. My suggestions means you scan the email to make sure it's not an emergency, quickly respond so they know you are LISTENING and schedule time to address the issue in the future. This is where an application like Highrise is really helpful. You can reply to John and then fwd the email to your Highrise tomorrow box then archive it. This will help keep your customers happy, and keep you sane.