I posted a new job lead to my team of VAs and one of the responses I got both surprised me but also made me realise that perhaps some VAs (particularly newer ones) probably thought it was ok to do this.  Make the client wait.

The response was:

Could you kindly forward on his details to me and I will contact him within 24 hours.

My reply to her was:

I strongly suggest you reply to him today, sooner rather than later. Clients will rarely wait 24 hours before hearing back from someone – they’ll just go to someone else. Two other members have already responded so important you make initial contact with him too.  Once you have built a relationship with a client then letting them know you’ll be in touch within 24 hours is ok, but not on first contact.

I feel it is really important that the client knows that someone has heard/seen their request and will be acting on it.  If you don’t reply then they’ll think that either you’re not interested or perhaps your email isn’t working. Either way they’ll move on to the very next VA they have contact with.

While I agree that you can’t be at your computer 24/7, that you do have a life and do need to sleep, the reality is if a request comes through during business hours (or perhaps waking hours) then it’s important to give some sort of response.  Let them know you’ve seen their email.  If you are going to be out of the office for a few days, then set up some kind of autoresponder or have someone else monitor your email for you.  Your business is important.

Put it this way. If the phone was ringing would you let it just ring out, thinking you’ll answer it tomorrow? Email is another form of communication but unlike the phone can’t make the urgent sound that demands you answer it immediately. Worth thinking about.

Email, for Virtual Assistants, is often our first point of contact with potential clients. It works like an amabassador for our businesses.

Many experienced VAs, like myself, get a lot of emails from would-be VAs wanting to get work outsourced to them, or wanting to find out if they can work with us as a sub-contractor or similar.  We are, in effect, a potential client for them.

So it concerns me considerably when they don’t take care to read their emails properly before hitting send, correcting any obvious errors.  Nor do many of them sign off their emails properly either.

It doesn’t take a great deal to take a deep breath, read through the email carefully, correct any grammatical or spelling errors, and then make sure the email is signed off before sending it on its way.

Poorly written or constructed emails will be an immediate turn-off for those whom they are contacting.  The same applies for any networking forums they belong to online.  The way they communicate via the forums gives others an idea of whether they could work with them. The written form of communication has become very important in the way business is run online these days. If you are unable to communicate properly via email you stand to lose opportunities for work simply because the recipient won’t have any confidence in your abilities – irrespective of whether word-processing is one of your service offerings or not.

I know that many say they can copy type accurately but I do believe/feel that if that is the case, then they should have learnt something from the copy typing they’ve done in the past.  Take time with your written communications and you’ll find you will be rewarded.

At this time of year (Christmas/New Year) scams will be on the rise and so will phishing emails with promises of all sorts of things through bogus promotions.

One of the VAs from my team posted a warning about a phishing email supposedly from her bank the other day.  A day prior a client forwarded to me an email she got from Paypal (supposedly) but I was soon able to detect that it was not a genuine email.

Here are some ideas to get you looking.

1. Usually not personally addressed. Banks rarely email us but Paypal and other similar groups do and it’s usually addressed to Dear and whatever your user name is.  It’s NEVER addressed to ‘Dear member’, ‘Dear user’ or similar.

2. Check the address it comes from. Often it’s a variation on the real address but not accurate. e.g. I’ve seen no-replay@paypal.com used.

3. Hold your mouse over the hyperlink of the supposed bank web address and you’ll see the reference is very different although if you clicked on it, it might look like the normal website. (I recommend you definitely DON’T click on it though)

4. Check the spelling – it’s usually full of errors and written by those who don’t have a good grasp of the English language.