How long should you respond? When a girl and a boy exchange a phone number the rule is at least one day, ideally two – you don’t want to be too eager, or wait too long. How about in business and in day-to-day life? What is the Service Level Agreement for communication with people in your life. Yes, service. Because communication is necessary to service, support, and build any relationship in our lives. I’m borrowing a very technical term and applying it to communication so we can have some guideposts of what’s expected.
Much of the SLA is relative to the parties involved, but there are some guidelines that help. My wife for example wanted a two hour heads up, if I’m going to be late from the office. She did not come with this demand in writing, but I discovered it over time when I forgot to tell her that I got stuck at the office. On the other hand, you may want to make a rule to keep in touch with friends every week or two. If they are out of town maybe once a month.
At Amazon the goal was to provide White Glove Treatment to our customers so the SLA for response to issues they raised was 15 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 24 hours, and 48 hours – for severity 1 through 5 respectively. If something was marked as Severity 1, it meant that their business was down, and the support organization was expected to respond within 15 minutes. An organization involving support engineers, technical account managers, salespeople all went into high gear. Pages were sent out in the middle of the night, if required, and someone got to work on the problem. This was all done in the name of customer obsession.
In the same way if you want to be obsessed about the people in your life you can build an SLA; you will put tools in place (like a CRM for contacts) and set aside some time each day to contact people.
There are times when you want to contact people just to day hello. This works for family and friends. When talking with business partners it makes sense to prepare a bit more and keep track of some common interests or topics that you are working together on. At the very least have some news about your life so you can sound interesting and add value to the relationship. If you have something specific that will help the interlocutor even better. Each call is an opportunity to provide value and strengthen the relationship because the other person wants to talk with you.
