The blog for anyone that works from home

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About the Author

Who is Nexus Publishing? Originally from a small town called Darlaston – about ten miles north of Birmingham – I moved to West Sussex about ten years ago to help develop one of the first online retailers. Having recently moved to Shropshire I am now enjoying the working from home life in a semi rural location. I have been a freelance writer and journalist for about fifteen years. Eight of them were spent doing various other jobs such as bookshop assistant, print finisher and returns clerk for a large library supplier, with the writing taking up evenings and any of my spare time. As you can see, much of my life so far has been spent working with books and publishing of one kind or another. My time as an employee came to a conclusion some six years ago with redundancy, so I took the opportunity – and the money – to see if I could survive as a full-time freelance writer. That was five years ago. There have been some lean times – just ask my wife, Joanne. But after tasting the freelance life, there’s no going back.

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Fast response rate key to winning new business

Sunday, June 29th, 2008 • Related • Filed Under

All homeworkers know that email can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand you need it to keep in touch with clients, but on the other hand it can be a massive drain on your time.

New research has indicated that a fast response to an enquiry is now being demanded by more businesses, and what’s more, slow responses could cost £18,840 per business. It seems that businesses now demand a response to a query within 30 minutes these days. Location also seems to play a part. In Birmingham one in five now expect a response within half an hour. Other cities where the 30 minute time-bomb is becoming increasingly normal are Manchester (18%), Newcastle (18%), Cardiff (17%) and London (17%).

How fast do you get back to clients that have sent you a query? Personally I have tried to stop checking email too regularly. I used to have Outlook set-up to do a send/receive every 10 minutes. But as you can imagine, I was distracted by the desktop pop up that appears when a new email arrives. I’ve now switched this off and check for email just three times a day. This I think is plenty.

New contacts will get a response within a few hours. And if their query is really urgent, most people pick up the phone and call me. One thing, though to watch out for is messages getting stuck in your spam folder. I always scan this every day before I delete its contents just to make sure a new client hasn’t emailed me, but BT’s servers not knowing their email address has marked their message as spam. How fast do you get back to your clients?

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