Email policy

As you may have seen from an email auto reply of ours, we only check email at scheduled times a day.

Here’s why.  It has saved me 10 hours a week doing this very thing.

I know it seems odd. In a day and time where most Internet hosting and consulting companies try to force you to use email and not speak face to face, we are different:

We actually want to hear from you.

But it’s more than returning a sense of humanity to our customers. It’s about productivity. Research has repeatedly shown that each interruption can take as long as 15 minutes to regain focus. My own personal research and testing found that by not handling every email as they came in gained 2 hours a day!  That’s 10 hours of productivity back per week!

How did my other customers respond? Overwhelmingly positive. Some even implemented the idea for themselves.

Since we don’t live on email – that can slow some things down if you are someone who uses email like chat. Here are a couple of time-saving tips:

1. During an outage or if your site needs repair, it is worthy of a phone call – regardless of the time of day.
2. When you do email, please ask your question as thoroughly as possible. Don’t forget the details like error messages you received, what happened, what you expected to happen and any changes you can think of that may have caused the issue.
3. If you are requesting a meeting or conference call, please use my booking site. https://bookme.ronshank.com
   Pick any time that you see works well for you. If you don’t see a good time, then give us a call and we can schedule outside of those windows.
4. Sometimes email is just the only way and it’s still urgent that we read it and it just cannot wait. That’s okay, call or text us and let us know you just emailed. We are happy to open an email when we need to. We don’t hate email – we just want to control it instead of it controlling us.

I hope that helps to let you know why we’ve setup this policy.  It really does help us to serve you better.

If you would like our help setting up your own auto-responder. Please let us know. We’re happy to help.

Thanks!

Ron

PS: Let us know what you think of this idea in the comments section below.