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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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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