Leave a message and I’ll get back to you at my earliest convenience..

Leave a message and I’ll get back to you at my earliest convenience = Bad phone etiquette!

Ever hear that on someone’s voice mail?  I do, way too often!!!!

 

What? You’ll get back to me when it’s convenient for YOU?

I did just call your business phone, right? You do like having clients and making money?

Or are you just in business out of the kindness of your heart and doing us all a favor by even letting us leave you a message?

 

Yes, I am venting.  I find that  outgoing message to be extremely irritating and frankly, unprofessional.

 

I know we can’t return every call within minutes of receiving it.  Sometimes we might be tied up with something that keeps us from being able to call you right away. But in those cases, we should return calls at our earliest AVAILABLE moment.

Maybe people are confused about the difference between convenience and availability.

 

There are many things that we do in business that are not convenient…. we meet with a client at 6 PM when it may have been more convenient to do it during regular business hours…. not we are missing happy hour!  

It would be much more convenient if the client came to us so we didn’t have to battle traffic, but never the less, we get in our cars and head out for appointments.

It would be super convenient if our craziest client didn’t call us at 7 AM when we are trying to talk ourselves into working out but we take the call.

None of these things are convenient, but that doesn’t mean that I am not available.

Call me at 2 AM, want to chat for 2 hours when I have a client coming in…. I’m not available… get the difference?

Are these the same people that can never figure out the difference between  then and than, or your and  you’re,  or  there, their and they’re?

 

So please, change your voice mail!

I’m OK with you letting me know that you may not be able to get back tome right away, but PLEASE don’t tell me that you will do so when you have nothing else that is more interesting that you’d rather be doing.