The international tax team at LSL CPAs employs virtual communication technologies and services to work with our international clients. When it comes to using such technologies and services, it is important to have basic virtual communication guidelines and warnings for your company’s employees to follow.
Here are six virtual communication guidelines and warnings that the international tax consultants at LSL CPAs have found helpful.
6 Virtual Communication Guidelines & Warnings
- If you are not recording meetings using the available virtual communication technologies, then be sure someone in the meeting is taking comprehensive notes and writing summaries for all parties involved.
- Keep detailed records of any agreements or decisions made during a virtual meeting. A spoken contract is only as valuable as the paper it eventually produces with written signatures.
- Never send important business messages or information over social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. With more advanced messaging options available, there is no reason to put your business at risk by exposing your clients to the vulnerabilities of such open forms of communication.
- Always check the quality of your Internet access and response time before any virtual meeting. Once a meeting has begun, it is too late to explain away a problem with Internet connectivity or your Internet provider.
- Place links to any virtual tools you wish to use or online information you wish to employ in the meeting on a shared server so they can be accessed by all the meeting participants. Google Hangout helps with this directive by providing easy Google Drive sharing. To ensure the effectiveness of such sharing, provide meeting participants in advance with any authorization codes or passwords that might be needed.
- Written up summaries of the content discussed and agreed upon should be emailed to all participants of virtual meetings. LSL CPAs have found it effective to have an internal summary for our company participants and an external summary for client participants. The reason for dual summaries is additional information not needed or wanted by the client should not be distributed to the client. Such information, however, can be essential for keeping accurate internal records. Always respect the value of a client’s time.
Virtual Communication Guidelines Make Sense
By following these virtual communication guidelines and listening to these warnings, you can ensure the future success of your work with international clients.
