Do you respond to emails the second they reach your inbox? Do you answer the phone every time it rings? That may sound like the right thing to do for customer service, but how is it affecting the rest of your business?

(if you don't have time to read the article, please scroll down to check out the tips... but if you don't have time, then I promise this article is for you!)

Every time you let those interruptions pull you away from the focus on what you are doing you are letting your surroundings dictate what you do instead of managing the environment around you. Here's what I am referring to:

When you answer the phone or respond to an email while you are in the middle of preparing a document for another department or in the middle of a meeting on a totally different topic, you are shifting your focus too often and this can actually have a more detrimental effect to customer service than you think.

Wouldn't you rather sound professional, prepared and focused when you communicate with a client? People often know when you are brushing them off, when you aren't prepared, or when you are typing an email while talking to them on the phone (yes, we are all guilty of multi-tasking).

Unfortunately, due to the negative side-effects of multi-tasking, you are most likely missing hints and important pieces of information that would normally be detected in conversations and email with clients and business partners.

 If you are only responding to an email or call to get it out of the way, there is a good chance that your response will show a sense of urgency - unfortunately not the way you had hoped. If you give a client a price for the one product that they asked you about and forget to dig deeper to offer them a complete service with a quote so that you can keep them coming back for future business, then answering the phones or responding to emails immediately may not be the best thing for growing and sustaining your business.

Every contact made should be treated as your #1 prospect for new business - You just never know what can change over-night with your existing clients need or who they may have partnered up with since your last contact. You know how they say that first impressions last forever? Well don't forget to leave a lasting impression every time with your existing clients and contacts so that your business can last forever. Knowing your clients and paying attention to any changes in their business is where you will find golden opportunities to build lasting relationships while sustaining and growing your own business. This requires giving each client 100% of your focus while communicating with them in any manner, instead having your focus pulled in every different direction at the risk them feel they are just another number in your system.

Being at the mercy of everything around you can be risky - Take control of your environment by making a plan to effectively handle constant interruptions.

 If you save your sent emails, you can test yourself now by going back to emails that you sent to clients when you were in a rush and reading to see if you missed anything that you could have offered them.

5 Tips to Running Your Business so that it can't run You:

1. Create a time in your schedule - 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours in the evening - to respond to your emails. (only open your emails during this specified time)
2.  Set up an auto-reply so that you can relax knowing that your clients and contacts feel acknowledged and know when to expect a reply from you.
3. Read the article below for tips on "ending email chaos".
4. For the telephone: sometimes you are going to have to let it go to voicemail! Set up a detailed recording that lets callers know when they can expect to hear back from you - 1, 2, 4 hours - whatever is right for your business. Be sure to make time in your shcedule for returning calls within the specified time.
5. If answering the phone each time it rings is essential to your business, consider hiring someone just for that purpose (learn how this may be more cost effective than you think by listening to this audio from Laura. It will only take 4 minutes of your time) Click Play button. 

   Success Tips # 5 in article

 Does your inbox overwhelm you? Do you get tired of deleting the same email every week that you don't have time to read (and I'm not saying this isn't one of them!) It seems that these days any  time you want to receive information from a company you are required to surrender your email address and then it never stops after that. And then there are important, informative emails (such as this one) that you may not have time to read immediately, you don't want to delete it but you also don't want it taking up space in your inbox ... What do you do?

Here are some quick tips to Ending the Email Chaos:

1. Take (make) 10 minutes of your time opening the junk email, offers, and those you constantly delete and click on the "I no longer wish to receive this email" link... It only takes a second and it's worth it!
2. Create a folder for everything! Every business, group, person, event that you are involved in where you will receive email you  need to refer to. Title your folders so they are easy to remember and easy to access. You can even re-arrange their order on most email systems so that they are listed in order of importance.
3. Make "Rules". Most email systems have an area where you can create rules for your inbox. Even the free systems such as hotmail, gmail & AOL. You can locate this under settings > email message filters, or options. To give you an example, in hotmail you would click on: options>more options>customizing hotmail>"Rules for sorting new messages". Once you get to the rules/filters section, you can customize your incoming emails in any way you would like. Using this email as an example, you could create a folder called "Success Tips for Entrepreneurs" and then create a rule that says any email containing this title "Success Tips for entrepreneurs" get's placed into that folder so that it doesn't fill up your inbox and you can open the folder to read it when you have time. This is especially helpful for people on the go using smartphones who only want the urgent emails of the day to show up on their phone. You can also make rules based on the senders email address (move all emails from laura@lifedesigncoaching.ca to the "Success tips for Entrepreneurs" folder. If you didn't like tip # 1 on this list, you may also set up a rule to automatically delete emails from certain senders or containing certain subject lines. Just remember to set time aside to go through the folders you have rules for and read emails so that you do not miss anything time sensitive!