It is always interesting /frustrating/irritating (add further words as needed!} to come back into work after a Bank Holiday and open the inbox to be met with a deluge of emails.
Not only that, a quick glance at social media and there are a myriad of people suggesting we should be giving updates to clients even if we have nothing to tell them; and if a client emails at the weekend, we should respond because if it is important enough for the client to email, then it should be important enough for us to reply.
Now, I don’t know about the rest of you, but bearing in mind there is insufficient time in the day to stay on top of emails anyway, I am guessing most of us do check emails over the weekend and if you are like me, draft replies which are typically scheduled for sending on the next working day.
Our difficulty as conveyancers is that for us it’s a job, albeit one so many of us are hugely proud of. But those going through the home moving process, it’s a a twenty four hour, seven days a week obsession. How do we tell those clients who email at three o’clock in the morning when they wake up with a random query about moving house or a realisation that they have not asked if the fridge is included theirs is one of a number of imminent deals to go through?. Or the clients who email at midnight after a night out with friends where moving house is discussed asking why it is taking so long – after all, their mate told them it only took him six weeks to move house ten years ago! We have all had that drunken client who emailed to say that they are fed up waiting to move house and has therefore gone back to their ex and decided not to move after all.
How do we deal with clients who live and breathe it? We want to close the inbox down at 5.30 pm and hope not to have to re-open it until 9 the following morning! But that is such a difficult thing to do. The social media posts about conveyancers not caring about their clients is so untrue… we do care. We care enough to email outside of working hours, and even if we do not send an email out of those hours, it is likely that we have already prepared the response to send first thing the next morning.
It’s so important to be clear with clients at the outset, to set boundaries and at the same time have empathy that for us it is 9 to 5.30 (and more!) but for them they are living this experience. We can tell them we understand they are likely to email us outside of working hours but it is not always easy/right/possible for us to respond outside of those hours. Nor it is good for the mental and emotional well being of our profession to be available for twenty four hours a day.
The lesson this week, if we can try and heed it, is to set clear boundaries with clients and stick to them wherever possible!
This column is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed are those of the author and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
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4 responses
Suggestion for discussion, maybe an AI response outside of working hours woud help?
I think it’s a mindset shift that’s needed here. Conveyancers don’t have to give updates manually at all; there are several platforms that can do this for them; however, conveyancers want to stay in control of the transaction. Our team hears that daily, that’s why our progress updates tool gets questioned in every demo, because conveyancers NEED to know they’re in control.
As this article shows, providing updates to clients is a painful and time-consuming process, but something has to give. Either give up the desire to manually update people and automate through a system, or continue as you are, wasting time on manual updates?!
Managing client expectations has to be the most challenging part of the job and such a shame we cannot say “you are not our only client”!
If you set boundaries – and I suggest that is absolutely necessary – you must never breach them yourself because if you do, there’s no going back.
Clients may email me at any time and I will do my level best to respond the next working day between the business hours notified to them. I will NEVER give our a phone number of a phone I carry with me or my personal phone. Many firms now accept text messages so, text me or email me! That’s it 🙂
I find that the way to say “you are not my only client” without actually saying it, is to say “I am working on another file at the moment, but when I have finished that, I will deal with your matter”.
That reminds them that you are dealing with other matters, but still consider their matter important.
Now, any tips for dealing with the “stream of consiousness” client who send multiple emails every time they have a thought but can’t be bothered to go back through the information which you have already supplied?