Boundaries and expectations for voice memo async support sessions

I’m curious to hear from those who offer the asynchronous voice memo support asynchronous support office hours:

do you allow clients to respond to your voice memos in writing or only with voice memos of their own?
If you do allow written responses, do you have a limit on how lengthy responses can be or what will be addressed?
About How frequently do you find yourself checking in and responding during the day? How many “back and forths” do there tend to be?

I’m currently testing this with one client who took me up when I offered this to as an early bird enrollment bonus on my last launch. They are biweekly and I’m not really loving it so far.

It kind of feels like most of my business is now structured to not be constantly connected or glued to messages or anything like that, which I LOVE, and this actually gets me out of that vibe.

I did my best to set clear policies, using Mariah’s example as a springboard, however I’m not really clear how much support I should be providing in the timeframe. If I let too much time pass I feel like I’m copping out even though I do say in my policies there is no set turnaround time and please be patient.

This is one thing I say in my policies: “WHAT: Before our 1:1 asynchronous Office Hours support sessions, I recommend you let me know the main question or topic you’d like to focus on during our time together. We will go deep on one specific theme, rather than trying to “pack everything in.” If we organically get to explore other topics, great!”

However with one particular client what ends up happening is I will record a 3 minute audio to address their main topic or question, then rather than us actually having a dialogue and conversation about the theme, they will respond with several fragmented text replies sometimes with a bunch of different topics or questions at once, that I then feel pressure to reply to or if I don’t I feel like I’m not really serving the client or being lazy trying to escape the delivery work. It can easily snowball as we then have several threads going back and forth and sometimes it feels like I’m being treated as a replacement for google in those sessions, it feels transactional and gets very time consuming to answer all the separate threads.

It seems this may partially be just the way this client’s brain works or their communication style. I’m starting to think about being a bit more firm with enforcing my policies or reminding them of the intent...or maybe just discontinue this support feature in the future since I don’t seem to enjoy it.

I do think having a true dialogue and going deep on one theme would be more similar to a live coaching session and better serve the clients and feel more enjoyable to deliver as well. It just seems tricky to redirect when communication style feels so far off. And also tricky not knowing how much expectation I should put on myself of realistic or acceptable frequency of check in and responding during the time range.

I appreciate any thoughts or tips!

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