For those who deal with multiple clients on a regular basis, handling all of their needs and questions all at once isn’t easy. Author Anthony Park shares his One Big Tip on using virtual tools to manage your client interactions and set business boundaries that will allow you to stress less.
The Client Problem
Anthony Park is not your average lawyer. His specialty is settling final affairs in the event of a death, an executor “to settle grandma’s final affairs,” as he puts it. In the field of law, client meetings and interactions are a given, and professionals can often feel overwhelmed by the various conversations and requests. Anthony manages to avoid being inundated with messages by setting up boundaries and structures for all of his client interactions.
Anthony’s One Big Tip for this issue is to plan your interactions and responses on a schedule. Basically, he doesn’t respond to messages right away or let the client know that he is available at any time to answer a question. In other words, his tip is to be asynchronous. He defines this as the ability “to minimize real-time interactions, but without losing too much value.”
This is the most critical for him as he states, “every client wants to have that live face to face or live phone call. But just as with any service, you only have 24 hours in a day, so you just can't do that for every interaction.” He gives an example as setting timed email responses for later in the day, or even the next day entirely, avoiding those “rapid-fire back and forth emails” that end up taking more of your time.
Reimagining Interactions With Technology
Anthony’s One Big Tip goes further than just scheduling messages—he also gives advice on how to provide information to clients while effectively making use of time. One of the best methods he uses is called screencasting, which is a digital recording of your personal computer screen, often accompanied by audio.
He has been able to utilize screencasting to his advantage in many day-to-day situations, such as going over a contract line by line for a client. This was a huge time saver for Anthony as he compared what the meeting might have looked like. “The video was less than five minutes,” he recalls, “whereas if it was a phone call, it probably would have been 15-20 minutes. I know that doesn't sound like much, but for two busy people, that's actually a huge time saver.”
There is also further value in being able to replay the screencast and further understand the information a second time, a rare opportunity with in-person meetings. Anthony also mentions how this form of learning is promising and becoming more commonplace, especially on platforms such as YouTube, making it suitable for his line of work.
You can find more of Anthony’s financial and time-saving advice by visiting his website, checking out his books that are available on Amazon, or listening to his podcasts which you can find on iTunes, YouTube, and other major sites.
