Why even the best accountants can still lose clients to poor communication

Is there such a thing as ‘too responsive’? I don’t think so, especially when you’re replying to clients and prospects. There could be a few people reading this who are waiting on a WhatsApp response from me (sorry), but flinder was always run with a ‘Reply now’ frame of mind.

We live in a culture of instant gratification. Same-day Amazon delivery. Thousands of TV shows available on-demand. But even before then, no one’s ever enjoyed being left waiting or being left out of the loop.

And it’s bad for business. Twenty years ago, Google tried increasing the number of search results it displayed from 10 to 30. This added 0.5 seconds to the loading time and caused a 20% drop in traffic.

Waiting is an annoyance that we share. And that’s why I think there’s little excuse for it at work. I’d encourage all firms to think about their communication policy and what they expect from teams. People won’t automatically share the same values as you (and you can’t exactly ask people at interview how fast they reply to emails - although you do get a sense of their responsiveness during the recruitment process). If you want a certain practice to be adopted company-wide, you need to make it policy.

flinder once lost a client because we weren’t meeting them where they were (I’ll talk about that in depth later). So, to me, this is something that can’t be undervalued.