The flexibility that comes with working from home can make your clients falsely expect you to be at your desk and available to talk to them any time during the day. To maintain good relations with them and keep up a professional image, you’ll need to be able to respond to their inquiries in a timely manner. At the same time, you’ll need to create a system so you don’t let every incoming phone call and email interrupt your work flow.

Here are tips for managing 3 primary communication mediums practically and effectively.

1. Email

Emails are a primary mode of communication and must be answered in a timely fashion. If you are unable to answer your emails within 12 to 24 hours, you can put up a note on your contact page that lets the people who contact you know when to expect you to follow up with them. For example, you could say something like, “All emails will be answered within 48 hours, except on weekends and holidays.” Also, be sure to put up an auto-response whenever you take a vacation, specifying the exact dates you will be gone for and when you will return.

2. Phone

Responding right away to every phone call you get can be very inefficient. Each time you stop to pick up the phone and talk, you have to waste precious minutes getting back into your groove and remembering what you were doing before you picked up. A good way to get past this is to get an answering machine to screen your calls before you decide to answer a phone call. This will help you determine how urgent the calls are and how quickly you will need to get back to your callers. You can use your answering machine message to indicate a timeframe that callers can expect to receive your return call.

3. Social Media Comments and Direct Messages
If you are blogging and marketing via social media for your business, you’ll need to spend 15 or 20 minutes each day checking your marketing avenues for anything that needs to be addressed and respond to questions and issues within a reasonable time period. You also need to spend that time building and maintaining your online presence. You have to do social media on a regular basis for it to have any effect, so you’ll need to keep up with what people who are important to your business are saying so that you can build relationships with them. You can attract potential clients by posting your own content on a regular basis. This, you can do all at once at the beginning of every week by deciding what you want to share and scheduling your posts through a social media dashboard like HootSuite to appear throughout the week.

Follow these tips to build good relationships with your current and prospective clients while at the same time maintaining your productivity. For more tips on how to boost your productivity, check out 4 Ways to Get the Most Productivity Out of Your Work Hours and 3 Ways to Create a Productive Home Workspace.

By Cathy Lau

Tags: Productivity