How to avoid overservicing clients

Overservicing has long been one of the real monsters in agency land. It can plunder profits, steal time allocated for new business or internal work and get in the way of prospects who will pay you more fairly. 

Scope creep is often to blame, with sprawling briefs, inaccurate estimating, an abundance of stakeholders and overdemanding clients all contributing to the exhausting slippery slope of projects running away with themselves. 

But while it’s common, it doesn’t have to be inevitable. 

In this guide, we’ll look at why so many agencies overservice and some of the tangible techniques and strategies you can put in place to keep your projects running smoothly, your clients happy and nurtured, and your teams’ morale upbeat and energetic.

What is overservicing? 

Essentially, this is when agencies work beyond the bounds of what’s been agreed with the client – anything you’re doing for them that they aren’t paying you for. 

And this can be difficult. It’s natural to want to keep your clients happy and it can feel that saying ‘no’ will seem churlish and send them fleeing off to a more accommodating agency. 

But being a ‘yes’ agency isn’t actually good for you or your clients. You’ll start to resent them and they’ll become frustrated if you do pull back, wondering why you’re suddenly not bending to their every whim. 

Time is your agency’s commodity. Value it, use it wisely and smartly, and you’ll find you have much happier and more productive client relationships in the process.

Why does overservicing happen?

It can be for any number of reasons but the main ones are: 

Scope creep
As the name suggests, this shifting-the-goalposts from clients can creep up on you and before you know it the project you’re doing bears no resemblance to the project you agreed to do. You worry about losing your client, accept every additional demand and extra set of amends and then boom, you’ve lost money and lost control of the project. 

It’s a really easy trap to fall into, with small requests often seen as deliverable and easy. But if you go over by just one hour on each project, with 20 projects on the go, that’s a potential revenue loss of around £2k every month. And if you overservice a client by 10%, you’re effectively working for free for about six weeks every year. 

Not why you get up and go to work every day.

Once you’ve agreed the scope of the brief, you need to work within these parameters. If the client starts demanding extra work or more amends than you’ve agreed on, client services needs to go back with a new quote. 

Around 50% of projects go out of scope and 40% of agencies go over budget as a result.

Underestimating
Your estimate is your internal assessment of how long a job will take. Even if you quote your client less, or you decide to fit around budgets, you need to make sure you’re allocating the right amount of time to your teams. 

Talk to the people who are working on the project, as they will have a good idea of the scope. You can also look at similar past jobs. (Remember, over estimating isn’t great either – you want to work efficiently and be cost effective for clients). 

Too many stakeholders
Spoil the project, to paraphrase. Feeding dribs and drabs of amends back into your teams will just frustrate everyone. Collate all feedback together before you pass it back for actioning. 

Badly planned resources
A creative would always rather be working than sitting around twiddling their thumbs. Which means if they have too much time on their hands, they’ll just eke a project out to fill their timesheet. Lots of creatives are also perfectionists: not a bad thing at all, but they need to be reined in on spending longer on projects than you’ve estimated for.

Equally, you need to make sure you have the right resources available for the work you’ve sold. Brilliant, you’ve landed a new design job but all your designers are busy, while your digital team are bored. Look at what resources you need for project delivery, and if you’ll need to get freelancers in upfront. 

Miscommunication
There are different documents all over the place, no one takes full ownership of the whole project, a phone call with a client isn’t passed on... little things can add up to big things and cause tensions and frustration, as well as missed deadlines.

What are the impacts of overservicing? 

None of them are particularly great. Your costs will go up, your profits will go down, and you’ll find that you don’t have time for other things, like internal work or pursuing new business. 

Your working relationship with the client will suffer, as they will simply assume this is how you work and continue to push and push – rendering quotes and deadlines meaningless. 

It could also impact on other projects which you’re being properly paid for – and giving these clients a rushed-out job will have a knock-on effect on future work. 

And morale will start to dip. Your people will start to get fed up and frustrated working endlessly for the same impossible-to-please client and the joy becomes sucked out of their working day... leading them to looking elsewhere.

Strategies to avoid overservicing

Get clarity, right from the start
A well-defined brief can make all the difference. This means outlining everything in the project, from objectives to deliverables, all clearly articulated to prevent misunderstandings and skewed expectations further down the line. 

Ask as many questions as you can, digging deep at briefing stage, and make sure all stakeholders are completely aligned on goals. 

Document everything
This will serve as your reference point throughout the project to keep everybody on track and focus on the agreed-upon scope. 

Have a clear statement of work
Why you’re doing it, who it’s targeting, what it needs to achieve... this will help you stay objective if pushback from the client becomes subjective. 

Define amends
These can be anything from minor tweaks to significant changes that need additional time and resources. So get your amends ducks in a row upfront. Include a set number of revisions in the initial scope and make it clear any additional amends will be billed separately. Create a formal, structured process for amends, all documented and signed off by stakeholders. before you begin the job. 

Get your estimate as accurate as possible
It can be tempting to retrofit this to your client budget. They have £1k to spend so you estimate 10 hours, when it will really take 15. You might still decide to do the job, but underestimating means you’ll be doomed to overservice right from the off. 

Plan your resources
It’s about the right mix of talent and time. Under-resourcing can lead to burnout and mistakes, while over-resourcing leads to inefficiencies (and overservicing). Build in a buffer for unexpected delays or changes, which can help you stay on track, even if things don’t go to plan, and can prevent excessive overservicing. Using a good agency management system can help you keep track of your resource and identify if things might start slipping.

Track your time
Look at estimated time versus actual values, to see how far you are through the project and if you have enough time to finish. Monitoring work in progress gives you a good platform from which to have productive conversations with your client. Everyone pretty much hates timesheets, but communicating to your team that you are not spying on them, you’re just trying to work productively and profitably for the good of the whole agency, can help to smooth things along. 

Communicate clearly
Set expectations from the very first meeting that you need to discuss and agree what’s included in the scope, how changes will be handled, and plan regular check ins to discuss progress, challenges and potential issues. Transparency is key. If your client does request something outside the agreed scope be open with them about the implications for the budget. It’s important to be assertive, protecting your agency from scope creep but maintaining a positive client relationship. 

Conduct post-project reviews
This helps you to learn from successful projects as well as those out of scope. Ask your clients for written feedback and make sure everything is documented so you can share with your wider team. This kind of evolving learning means you’re acting more as a ‘strategic partner’ to your clients, rather than a ‘supplier’. 

Data-driven decisions
At the heart of all this is a need for good, reliable data, and clear visibility of that data. An agency management system can highlight what’s on track... and what’s not. Everyone working on the project will get instant visibility of a job’s health, with potential overruns or other impacts clearly highlighted. 

If you do overservice, the system will show how much time you’ve spent working for a client compared with what they’ve paid you. These figures can be quite eye-opening, showing up your vampire clients (who take up more of your time than they pay you for). 

And behind all the data is your people. Here is where it’s important for agency leaders to support their teams, making sure they have the confidence and the skillset to have honest conversations to implement healthy boundaries.

What to do if you know you’re overservicing

The reality is, if it’s already happening there might not be much you can do. But you can start by speaking to the team and your client to see if there’s any way of getting things back on track (an easier conversation if you have a predefined brief). 

If it’s too late, then make sure you learn from it in your project washups. If it’s gone well, why? If not, what can we do in the future? Try to look for patterns in terms of clients, teams and job types. 

Reframe your thinking. This might be a good opportunity to upsell additional services and time. 

Remember the Karl Sakas quote “Be strategically free, not secretly free.” If you’ve done something for nothing, tell your client so they know it’s a one-off favour but you’ll be charging next time.  

Is it ever okay to overservice?

Occasionally, agencies take the overt decision to overservice. 

Strategic overservicing. You have the opportunity to get into a growing industry area or practice area and want to be competitive and part of the action early on.

Opportunistic overservicing. A large organisation has given you a project and you believe it may lead to further opportunities down the line. 

Ultimately, the decision is up to you. Commercially, it may pay off once in a while. It might be a great fun project, or one which will get you kudos if not currency. As long as the decision is strategically made, rather than fallen into headfirst, then you can at least account for the overservicing realistically. 

Client happiness is key. But if you’re bowing down to every unscoped edit and amend, you’re stepping away from the coveted role of strategic partner and into the more unbalanced one of the supplier. You’re then expecting your team to deliver quality work with a smile, when the reality is they’ll be increasingly frustrated. 

The key is balance. To maintain relationships and revenue you need to set boundaries with your clients. It’s in everyone’s best interests to be on the same page, and it shouldn’t feel like you’re breaking bad news to prevent scope creep. Working alongside your clients, you can establish productive professional relationships, respecting each other’s time and expertise and setting clear boundaries and parameters you are mutually happy with.