Personal Assistant
Scheduling with Success
Having a human scheduling appointments on your behalf sets you apart from the crowd more than ever in a world of web-published calendars and do-it-all mobile devices
Technology-powered tools now available for scheduling are amazing:
- Web apps like Tungle.me and timebridge provide slick functionality for publishing your calendar to the world of people who’d like to select a time to meet with you
- Apple’s Siri takes key scheduling steps on your voice command without you even having to click or swipe
But simply saying “I’ll have my smart phone call your smart phone,” has some key limitations.
Relying entirely on these tools naively implies a business environment in which all parties have an equal interest in meeting. Your most important contacts will appreciate a more personal touch, and human input is critical to navigating the art in that the back-and-forth of “scheduling Ping-Pong,”
So how do you empower your remote admin in the complex and subtle game of business etiquette that starts when two busy people decide to meet and then need to lock down place and time?
It’s not “just” scheduling
Prospective Prialto members will sometimes say they “only” need help with scheduling, as if to imply this is a simple, commodity task.
They are right when the playing field is even and the parties looking to meet have plenty of time. Then it really is simply a matter of finding the next open spot on the calendar. The algorithm is indeed simple, and technology alone may get it done.
Those experienced in leveraging a professional scheduler will more often understand how much time gets consumed. They also know that there is an art to navigating through the complexity of how to time reminders, decide on where to meet and at what time.
Three tactics for getting it right
So how does one best leverage their assistant to track down targets and get you the right meetings in the right place and at the right time?
1) Start slow in the beginning to go fast later:
Many tech equipped, near autonomous knowledge workers have forgotten this basic management need, but there is always a tradeoff between the ease of getting something done yourself today verses taking the time to enable someone else to take it off your hands later. One should never offload key tasks to a new employee without great care. True, you might as well do a task yourself if you will always have to micro mange and explain it to your helper with painful specificity. But micro managing your new scheduler in the beginning is totally appropriate. Take the time to:
- Explain the etiquette of your business and client base
- Download the places you like to meet for which kinds of meetings
- Download the names of your VIPs, the key clients and/or personal contacts that get the highest priority
- Sensitize your assistant on how to discern in your email exchanges the importance of a contact and how that should translate into how a meeting is scheduled
To do all this, you ought to initially watch every email your assistant sends out and then set times to go over and give feedback on how they can be improved. Doing this for just a few days, will quickly yield great time savings and peace-of-mind.
2) Surface key information to the top of long email threads.
A good assistant may successfully disentangle long and complex email threads to decipher what you want done on an email, even if you simply copy him in with no instruction. But it may require a lot of unnecessary energy and time.
A couple of simple specifics as you CC your assistant will save lots of time and energy.
Here’s an email that works well:
Here is an e-mail that does NOT work well:
Develop a scheduling vernacular with your PA
Maintaining positive client relationships with a PA in the middle requires sensitivity. You can’t meet with everyone all the time. You have to prioritize and, while most everyone understands this need, you want to avoid inadvertently insulting even a lower priority contact.
Develop special words that you can place in the kind of email copy above to help your PA prioritize on your behalf.
For example:
- To indicate that you indeed want to meet while tactfully letting your assistant know that this meeting is not the highest priority, say things like “please schedule a coffee” or “please schedule for this month”
- To indicate that a contact, Charlie, is a high priority client who you want to defer to, say something like “please schedule at place and time that works well for Charlie
Oh, and one more thing
See Andy Mowat’s article on how to leverage your assistant to do CRM right. If you are looking to have an assistant help you schedule, you probably are tracking lots of contacts. A CRM and a good CRM process can be amazing tools with which to collaborate with your assistant and track key interactions. But if you’re a relationship person, you probably don’t want to spend too much time meticulously inputting data. Configure your CRM to work with your assistant.
What is the mark of a great service? Read on to find out…
Mr. Allen is planning a business trip to Los Angeles this weekend and has a very busy schedule, packed with back-to-back meetings with multiple clients located in different parts of the city. Included in his agenda is a dinner meeting with a client who selected the venue. This client sent him an email with the name of the restaurant where they would meet for dinner.My task was to include the appointment in his calendar so that he had the name and address of the restaurant. I did not stop there, however. As Mr. Allen’s schedule was pretty hectic, and I thought that it would help if he was familiar with the restaurant’s menu – one less thing to think about. So I called the restaurant and asked them to send me a copy of their menu.
As I was updating Mr. Allen on his agenda, I mentioned to him that I am sending him a copy of the restaurant’s menu so that he could get an idea of what he wanted to order. He was very pleased about it and mentioned that those are the types of things that he expects from our service.
This was an email from Bert Landa, one of our personal assistants. Bert was given kudos by the member who felt compelled to speak with one of Prialto’s managers to let him know how impressed he was with Bert.
We can’t say it too often: People are at the core of what we do here at Prialto. They are our most important resource. And when every single employee feels empowered, and when they care about what they do and the quality of work they produce, you get service that is, well, pretty great.
“You rock!”
Here’s just one of the ways we make life easier for our members:
After trying unsuccessfully to book three nights at the Yosemite Lodge where he is planning to take a vacation with his wife, James, one of our members, sought my help. He gave me the dates and asked me to call the Lodge every now and then to see if any rooms become available – he was aware that the dates fell in the middle of the high season.
I called the Lodge consistently for two weeks when finally, a room freed up. Although it was only for two nights, not three, I asked the Lodge to hold the room and notified James immediately. I was hoping to add an extra night later on. I suggested to James that he take the room. He said yes, and the reservation was made.
Today I called the Lodge to see if we could extend the reservation to three days. They answered in the affirmative. I booked the extra night right away.
James was thrilled to know that he can plan his vacation the way he wanted without spending a lot of his valuable time making it happen, and I was glad to do it for him.
He sent me a succinct email that said it all:
“You rock, thank you.”
James
Yes, you can still afford to travel…
As a travel junkie who’s always looking for deals, I came across this great article on money-saving travel tips from Travel + Leisure. Reading it, however, I began to wonder how much time I’ll be spending on the phone and on the web researching the deals that are currently being offered by hotels, cruise lines, etc. Then I thought, “I’ll just have my Prialto assistant do it for me.” Problem solved. Now I can continue with my work so I can afford these vacations!
To read the article from CNN.com, click on the following link:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TRAVEL/traveltips/01/20/money.saving.tips/index.html
Why hire a personal assistant?
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Monday. You’re staring at your calendar for the week and already you can feel the stress building up: board meetings, department meetings, emails and phone calls to return, hair cut appointment to be made, soccer practice to attend, new hard drive to research. How will you get through it?
Hire a personal assistant. Too costly, you say. Well, not any more. Thanks to the Internet and advances in technology and telephony, gone are the days when having a personal assistant is the domain of wealthy entrepreneurs or CEOs. Remote personal assistants can perform any tasks that do not require face-to-face interaction. Prialto’s remote assistants or time managers have been helping our members with a myriad of services ranging from restaurant reservations, event planning, research on a new computer, and recurring reminders, tracking down a specific style of antique desk on Craigslist, research on financial sponsors, etc.