November 4, 2009 by Judith

Being so many of us are doing business online and technology has become tightly integrated into our business activities and tools, e-mail is one of your primary relationship building tools.

Showing courtesy, taking time to be thoughtful and ensuring clarity in your communications helps to build confidence in doing business with you — and helps to build your relationships. When you are sensitive to the other sides situations, dilemmas or circumstances you are in essence working to build a strong relationship.

When you are only all about you — you contribute to negating the potential of those very same relationships.

Invaluable are the e-mails that reflect concern for the other side above and beyond the
Sender’s interest at the time. You’ll find that when you need assistance and someone is there to respond to your request with a prompt and thoughtful reply that those are the companies you want to continue to do business with and nurture that relationship. Don’t you agree?

An example of this was when I had a hard drive crash. It solidified some of my client relationships and damaged others. When I sent out a notice of the issue apologizing for any requests that may have been lost requesting they be sent again, the responses I received were very telling in regard to the character of those on my client list. Many sent notes of sympathy and wished me luck — others not a word about my situation other than “What about my stuff?!”.

Believe me — when you have hard drive problems you are scrambling. Trying to backup and save all the data you can keeps you pretty occupied. Certainly I didn’t plan on this happening nor would I wish it upon anyone. I was keeping folks posted so that they would not be concerned and to ensure that they could be confident in knowing their requests would be processed.

Then, when realizing I would have no choice but to reformat my hard drive and reinstall Windows, I sent out a courtesy notice explaining that over the next 48 hours I may be out of pocket but would get to requests promptly and as soon as possible. I thanked everyone again for their patience and understanding.

Here again, kindhearted clients sent notes of encouragement. Then, this e-mail came in:

“thanks for sharing your joys.”

Wow… What is that about!? That’s all the e-mail said. No greeting, no sign-off, just the above comment. What do you think that says about a person who replies like that? It was very disappointing — all I could do was shake my head and that the person was probably a very unhappy individual in other areas of their life.

You’ll run into all kinds online in business or otherwise. Don’t underestimate for a moment how your e-mails and how you react to others difficult situations or misfortune will reflect on you.

If you would like to read more about Judith and great articles on Net Manners please click here.

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Action Jackson Virtual Assistant|

Hi Judith,

I think your example clearly shows that not all clients are good clients. One of the joys of being a VA is that you can choose who your work with.

If I got a sarcastic email like that, I would consider very carefully if that was a client I wanted to continue to work with.

~Sandra

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