How to Get Interior Design Clients to Stop Calling You All.The.Time

Jun 16

A designer submitted a question that represents the frustration a lot of business owners contend with — how to free yourself from time-consuming and distracting (and sometimes incessant) phone calls during your workday, yet still be responsive and supportive to clients throughout the design process. Please note: this is NOT about getting potential clients to stop calling you (although, I have personal opinions on not giving anyone access to you until they’ve been screened…different post for a different day; this post is how to get paid clients to stop calling you all the time if that’s now how you prefer to communicate.

Designer Submitted Question:

Help! Can you give some guidance about what to do about a client who calls me continuously with issues that could be emails? I feel frazzled every time I see a missed call and voicemail showing up on my phone.

Here’s my response for how to get interior design clients to stop calling you directly:

It can be really frustrating when a call from a client comes through while you are knee-deep in work that is completely unrelated to that client’s issues. Answering the call means you interrupt your mental flow with one task, have to refocus your attention on something different, then have to re-situate yourself back with the original task and try to remember where the heck you were before you were interrupted by the call. It can feel very disruptive.

With email messages, you can (and should) schedule time into your schedule when you regularly check and respond to emails. A dedicated time for handling admin and client questions.

Voicemail messages are much more difficult to digest than written content. It is easy to visually scan a written message for pertinent pieces of information. But a voicemail has to be played, re-played, and maybe replayed again to catch that one important tidbit of info. And VM messages are not easily trackable to be able to go back in time and find key content.

For all these reasons, I strongly suggest that you let your clients know that email is your preferred means of communication well before they hire you. This means letting them know this right from the start of a project. Yes, of course, the initial inquiry conversations happened over the phone — when you spoke to this client about their project and about how you could provide services to solve their design issue. During this phase, you should let the client know how the process works and provide insight into how much involvement there will be on their end and what they can expect from you throughout (for example, some clients may say they want to “partner” and “collaborate” with a designer or they want to “be very involved” and “see progress”. This may not work for you if that’s now how your process is and you may be able to decline the project right out of the gate).

Then, once a client has signed a contract (proposal, LOA, whatever you call it), and they get onboarded into your company, you should dictate a communication method that works best for YOU — likely email — for the remainder of the project. You can include this policy in multiple places:

In your contract.
In your onboarding email.
In the Welcome Guide you send as part of your onboarding process that includes your company’s policies and guidelines.

But what if you haven’t established email as your preferred means of communication yet? Or, you have done all the steps above but the client keeps.on.calling? What then?

My advice is to not take their calls and continually redirect them. Follow up on their calls with an email during business hours letting them know you received their voicemail and would love it if they could email you so you don't miss anything. Let them know email allows you to document all the details of their project and allows you to forward information as necessary to your team/contractors/trades/etc. You could even let them know that email is — in fact — the quickest way to get a response about the question or concern.

Use a scheduler so clients can schedule calls, during hours that work for your business. You can add one extra level to that and say, “If it's something that needs a call, you can schedule some time here” and send a link to your appointment scheduler (We like Acuity, Honeybook, and Dubsado for scheduling). Set up your calendar to have a small window of availability one day per week for active clients only.

Reiterate your call policy in your project update emails. If you send a weekly or monthly project update email to your clients, this is another great place to reiterate your preferred policy about communications methods. You can also share the link to your scheduler (if you are so bold!).

You could say something like, “Please contact suchandsuch@yourcompanyname.com if you have any questions. If you’d like to schedule a call, please find a date and time here.” You could even include language from your contract that says something like, "Calls are billed in increments of XX at the hourly rate of $XXX. For the quickest response, please send an email."

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Think of it like this: if you are working with a contractor, and the contractor tells you, "Email is best if you want a quick response". You would not continue to call the contractor. You would email them. Because let’s face it: we all want the quickest response to our questions.

But you might stop emailing them if you find that they actually aren’t quick at returning your emails.

People will learn how to get the most effective response and adapt their behavior. It is your job to educate them about what your policies are.

So if email is your preferred method of communication, establish regular email hours and share those with your clients and then be thorough when you DO respond to their emails. And don’t forget to remove your phone number from your website and put “Phone calls by appointment only”.

This is all part of i) building a business that works for how YOU like to work and ii) educating your client about your processes and how to get the best support throughout their project. If you inform your clients honestly and candidly about how you prefer to operate, clients will most likely comply. And that will free you up to have more focused, heads-down work time without call distractions or the pressure of knowing calls are stacking up and you’ll have to return them and deal with any related “work” that comes from them.

Here’s the thing: if you have a clearly defined process with well-communicated timelines, and you’ve established from day one what the client can expect from you and what YOU need from the client, you shouldn’t have as much email correspondence anyway - because you’ll be ten steps ahead of your client and they’ll completely trust you to let them know if they need to be doing something. If you’re like, yeah, that would be nice. Check out my Client Experience Templates for Full Service Interior Designers or my Client Experience Templates for Design Day Designers.