I have had some great customer service interactions this week from the comfort of my home office at incredibly odd hours of the day.

I had mentioned in a previous post awhile back that I used to be concerned about answering email inquiries outside of office hours for the fear of being seen as “unprofessional” or “amateur”, or worse yet, to be uncovered by my customers that I work from home. 

It seems like working from home has worked well for servicing our clients.  We noticed that in our target market, many people sign up and log in outside of normal business hours.  If I can make the assumption that most of our clients are self-employed or small business owners, this would make perfect sense.  The other day, I was doing my own bookkeeping from 10 pm to 3 am on a Saturday night er…morning… and my web analytics are showing me that most of our clients actually prefer to do their bookkeeping at night or on weekends (strangely enough, no one else works at 3 am though).  I also feel that there is more authenticity in my responses because I am in my own element.  I guess there goes the idea of “work life balance” (which I think is a total myth by the way). 

One time, due to pregnancy related heart burn, I got up at 6 am to drink some soy milk.  I thought I would take this perfect opportunity to check my email and how many new sign ups I’ve got (I wake up to new sign ups on a daily basis and this makes interrupted sleep that much more fun) when I noticed an email inquiry from someone in Eastern time.  6 am my time was 9 am their time and their work day has already started.  Needless to say, the person who sent the email was pleasantly surprised and impressed at my “excellent customer service”.  Another time, a client who just signed up wanted to know how to enter multi-currency transactions in our accounting software.  It was around 7 pm at in the evening when I got a help inquiry and I was able to provide a response within 16 minutes of receiving the inquiry.  I even got a reply from this new client saying “You guys rock”.  This could not have been possible if I was working during “normal” business hours.  I have even been responding to email inquiries from Japan at 11 pm with much appreciation from the client.

One thing I am beginning to realize is that our clients do not work during normal business hours and neither should we.  If I could speak to the decision makers of large companies, I would suggest they consider allowing their workforce to work from home.  Give each support staff an iPhone / Blackberry so they would be delighted to receive emails at all hours of the day.  Responding quickly and authentically to client support inquiries seemed to be more useful than looking productive during office hours.

That’s all I have to say for now.

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Less than 12 hours ago, I received an email sent through our contact form from a potential client who wanted to know more about our company.  He wanted to know how long we have been in business and how big our firm is.  He noted that our mailing address looked like a small business running out of some one’s apartment.  He wanted to know if the business he is dealing with is a big, fail-proof company. 

At first I was worried about how best to respond to this inquiry. After all, we are a small company that is run virtually.  Everyone who has ever worked on this project has been contracted virtually.  In the spirit of being an online accounting software, we conduct our business using as many “online tools” as possible.

I wrote back telling only the truth:

• we are a small company
• we operate from home and allow our contractors to operate from home
• when customers write or call, the founders are the ones who answers the emails and the phone – sometimes at very interesting hours (make sure you turn your email notifications off on your blackberry or iphone while you sleep at night)
• when people from Europe and Asia contact us, they get the same quick response as people contacting us from North America
• we don’t have to abide by certain office hours that are restricted to location and timezone
• when there is a quick feature request like adding multiple currencies or fixing software bugs, it is fixed within days (if not immediately).  Some bigger desktop software vendors will require you to wait for a whole year before they release a new version of the software
• we hire the best security and hosting experts with 24/7 security and support to ensure all client data is safe, even while we sleep

I wasn’t sure if it would be ok for me to be so transparent about how we operate.  After all, some of our competitors spend millions of dollars a year running their businesses.  They have offices in multiple locations all over the world.  Recently I found out that a company providing similar services as us burns 6 million dollars a year.  I thought to myself, “wow, give me 6 million dollars and I would only spend a fraction of that amount”.  In fact, within 1 month of our full launch, the business is already paying its own bills. 

Maybe there are many people who have the misconception that small businesses are more likely to fail.  While this is not my belief, I didn’t have any famous people to back me up until this morning when I ran across Seth Godin’s blog where he spoke about how “small is the new big“.  I think Seth is famous enough for me to quote him on this matter:

Small means the founder makes a far greater percentage of the customer interactions. Small means the founder is close to the decisions that matter and can make them, quickly.

Small is the new big because small gives you the flexibility to change the business model when your competition changes theirs.

Small means you can tell the truth on your blog.

Small means that you can answer email from your customers.

Small means that you will outsource the boring, low-impact stuff like manufacturing and shipping and billing and packing to others, while you keep the power because you invent the remarkable and tell stories to people who want to hear them.

A small law firm or accounting firm or ad agency is succeeding because they’re good, not because they’re big. So smart small companies are happy to hire them.

Needless to say, I was relieved.  We are doing something right after all and there is no shame in being small and telling the truth on my blog.  A R&D team of 50 software engineers may not be as effective as one software engineer who created Clarity Accounting within one year.  Talk about real ingenuity and effectiveness…

Seth Godin wrote this blog post in 2005 and I just happen to come across it when he referred to it in his newest blog post “Too small to fail“.  While this post was written 3 years ago, there is really an element of timelessness in his writing. 

Some things will never change…

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In my last blog post “How to provide customer service online“, I generated some discussion from people at Hubspot regarding the speed in which they respond to customer inquiries.  Needless to say, my comment section was filled with people from Hubspot within an hour plus I got a follow up email from Bonnie Lieberman, the person who was handling my account. Bonnie raised a great question that got me thinking for 5 days through my sleepless nights (no Bonnie didn’t cause me to lose sleep).  The question she asked was:

“…we are mostly virtually connected – would you feel differently if you knew the person writing back to you at midnight was wearing PJs and bunny slippers…?”

Now I will have a good idea what people might look like when I get a response at 9 pm or 12 am.  Maybe I can let my imagination run wild when I get a response from people at any time of the day if they are “virtually connected”. 

In the old school business world, how you look was (and still is) very important.  People judged you by the location of your office, how you dress, how you present yourself, and how you speak.  In the new virtual business world, people still care about looks, but now, it is about how well the website is designed, how well the content is presented, how well the product / services worked, and how well you respond to social media comments and client inquiries. 

When I first started in the online retail business 5 years ago, I was a doctorate student who was doing the customer service for an online retail store.  I tried really hard to answer email and phone inquiries within office hours to make it look like I was working from an actual store location somewhere.  Weekends were the hardest, someone would call my “office line” and it would be ringing in my bedroom and I thought I needed to ignore those phone calls and let them leave a message.  This way, it will appear like we had “office hours”.

Fast forward 5 years to 2008 and things are now drastically different.  I am now running my own business and getting emails from people at all hours of the day.  Maybe this is because our clients come from all over the world.  There is no such things as “office hours” anymore and I certainly do not feel like I have to confine myself to an “office” from 9 am to 5 pm.  Last week, a client who is using our online accounting software called from Singapore at 11:30 am my time.  He told me that he had to make sure he was awake at 2:30 am his time to reach me during my “office hours”.  Poor guy! I told him next time he could book an appointment with me over email and I would happy to talk to him at 9 am his time (6 pm my time).  He told me he thought sending an email would be too slow.  Personally, I don’t know who he has been dealing with to make him think that email is slow.  Since then, he and I only communicate via email and it has been fast enough for him not to bother calling on the phone anymore.

I also like the level of authenticity and comfort people have with regards to disclosing that they are “virtually connected” i.e. “working from home”.  In fact, I really appreciated Bonnie’s authentic email response because I feel like I am connecting with someone like me!

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Technological advances have changed the way businesses are operating today. This is particularly true for the increasing number of small business owners who are now working from home.

I was reading a blog post called “Is Your Home Office Cooler Than Mine?” where the author commented on the different set ups of home offices. Currently, I am writing this blog post from a La-Z-Boy chair!  I am not sure if it is a good idea to admit to the readers that this is where I do my work.  However, I sincerely believe that a small business has a greater chance of success and providing better services to their clients if they can keep their cost and expenses low.  Oftentimes, the biggest expenses for businesses are overhead expenses such as office rentals, infrastructure set up for staff, and of course, paying salaries.

In an article by Business Week called “Should you tell your clients you work from home“, there was a discussion on whether home-based businesses should disclose that they have no commercial office space.   It is astonishing to note that there are roughly 16.5 million home-based businesses in the US today that are providing great services and excellent prices.  In fact, I sincerely believe the movement of working from home is helping to lower the cost of goods and services provided over the internet.

This is definitely true for Dobes Vandermeer, the creator of our online accounting software for self-employed professionals.  In fact, he has created a tool to support the new wave of entrepreneurs who are discovering the freedom and joy of working from home. It allows business owners to collaborate with accountants, bookkeepers, and business assistants virtually so that even accounting professionals and support staff may enjoy the benefits of working from home.

Having people working from home has allowed the Clarity Accounting Team to offer a truly innovative way of delivering technology and services to small businesses reliably at an extremely low cost.  This is because we understand how important cash-flow is to entrepreneurs and we feel that we can truly understand the needs of small business owners who work from home. 

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