It can be tempting to respond to clients immediately if you know the answer to their queries or requests. Many businesses believe that responding right away will help them build a great relationship with their clients.

This is especially true when clients demand instant solutions. We’re all familiar with when clients urge us to take immediate action on projects.

It may seem like a good idea to oblige them, but it’s often quite the opposite. We know, it sounds counterintuitive. So let’s discuss why we think you should wait for a while before responding to your clients.

It Lets Them Take You for Granted

One of the main reasons why it’s not a great idea to respond to clients immediately is that it lets them take you and your services for granted. While staying alert and available isn’t always a bad thing, how it pans out, in the long run, varies from client to client.

You may find clients who appreciate your readiness to respond to them. But, more often than not, you’ll come across clients who take your time for granted.

These clients might assume that you have too much free time on your hands and are therefore at their beck and call. If you’re handling multiple clients at the same time, this is of course, not true.

You might be responding quickly to one client because they might be offering you a larger project (and therefore higher earnings) than others. But, this doesn’t mean that you should divert all your attention and resources to this client.

Indeed, if clients start taking you for granted, they’ll value your work less than they did before. They’ll lose respect for you somewhere along the way if you give them the impression that you’re available and willing to do their bidding at any time of day.

If you choose to wait instead and respond to them after a while, they’ll know you have other work on your hands. Bearing this in mind will help them respect your time and space.

In time, they’ll learn not to take you and your services for granted.

Clients Will Appreciate Your Efforts

Clients will appreciate your efforts if you don’t respond to them right away. A delayed response will let them know that you’re putting more time and effort into your work.

After all, it doesn’t matter if you have a solution ready at your fingertips or not. Having a ready solution doesn’t necessarily mean that the solution is good.

It just means that your solution is quick. Sleeping on your ideas will help you deliberate on them. Even if your answers were good, to begin with, it doesn’t hurt to dwell on them and ask for a third person’s opinion.

You would work with your employees or co-workers and run your ideas past them. They could provide useful insights that could add value to your ideas.

You could even have time to prepare proper documents and presentations to jot down your ideas. A well-organized flow of ideas is far more impressive than a run-of-the-mill solution, regardless of how easily available the latter may be.

This could help you give clients a well-rounded rather than haphazard solution to their problems or queries. Clients will appreciate the thought and extra efforts you poured into your work.

In the long run, this will help you build a strong, trusting relationship with them. These clients will turn to find solutions to their complex problems.

Offering good-quality solutions over fast solutions to clients will therefore help you boost your retention rates.

It Gives Rise to Unrealistic Expectations

If you have a ready solution for your clients, you may want to convey this to them and get on with other projects. After all, if you’re handling more than one client, there’s only so much time you can devote to each of them.

You can’t be spending all your time on one client to the dissatisfaction of others. Instead, you should distribute your time and resources to benefit each client proportionately.

In this way, you can keep all your clients happy and keep them coming back to engage your services. Besides, it helps them to set reasonable expectations regarding your deadlines.

If you don’t lead them to set reasonable expectations regarding deadlines, you’ll end up in hot water. Each time you work on a project, your client will expect you to finish right away if that’s what you did in the past.

You can’t possibly live up to these expectations every time your client asks for it. It’s simply not practical because it’ll eat up your time, manpower, and other resources.

In the long run, you might end up spending more money on sustaining your client’s expectations than they’re paying you for. Indeed, if you follow the “time is money” policy, you’ll lose a considerable amount of money trying to please unreasonable clients.

Instead, agree on a fixed deadline with your client and stick to it. Even if you complete your work before the deadline, don’t send it to your client.

Remember, if you finish your work well in advance and submit it, your client will expect you to do the same on the next project too. This will create unnecessary strain within your organization.

Sticking to deadlines and communicating effectively is enough to maintain a good work ethic.

Conclusion

Responding to clients before they’d expect you to is often more trouble than it’s worth. It’s a better idea to take your time and give clients what they need during a reasonable timeframe.

You don’t have to rush your work just to appear enthusiastic to your clients. Remember, a task well done is worth more than 10 hurried tasks.