The desire to do great work for our clients can lead to over-servicing. How do you spot it, what does it mean for you, and how can you get the relationship into a more balanced state?

We all want to do a great job. We want to meet, and even exceed, client expectations. But we also need to make a profit, and build a happy team who know that their hard work is being recognised and reflected in the success of the business. And not see them being taken for granted by a client who doesn’t appreciate what it takes to achieve their goals.

Over-serviced clients fall into a separate category from the clients behaving badly who we looked at in a previous blog (Do you recognise these difficult clients?). In fact, it’s not necessarily the client’s fault - over-servicing usually arises from mistakes on both the client’s and the consultancy’s behalf. It’s worth addressing because of the long-running difficulties it can cause.

The cocoa will have to wait 

Over-servicing, to us, is the inadvertent spending of more time delivering client work than was budgeted for, or planned for, or paid for.

It’s not the client purposely demanding more for their money, or your team making mistakes that need to be rectified at your own cost. 

You want to wow the customer, or deliver a job that’ll knock them out the water. Possibly one of the team has estimated an ambitiously small time or price for part or all of the work. Maybe it’s the first project for a new client and you’re keen to make the right impression. Then there’s mission creep. Either you or the client spots a better way of doing the work, so you re-do some of it, but don’t adjust the time or budget. Or the client has a small extra task that can perfectly reasonably be done at the same time, but again the budget doesn’t change. Or the client just has no idea that what looks like a small job will mean one of your teams working til well after they should have been tucked up in bed with their cocoa. 

How to spot over-servicing

It might not be obvious to you immediately, especially if you’re not with your teams all the time. In our experience the tell-tale signs are: 

• You see long hours being spent on that project, even if your people are recording only 8 hours a day.
• Other clients or projects are getting squeezed.
• Internal projects like business development aren’t making the progress you’d expected.
• Utilisation rates aren’t reflecting all the client work.
• "Yield" or "average achieved day rate" is noticeably lower in one team / project.
• Fixed price projects are burning more than their planned hours per week / for each milestone.
• You find unexpected expenses claims for takeaway pizza, after the team was still in the office at dinnertime. 

What to do about it

As with so many other aspects of consulting, the key is communicating - with both your team and the client. Get the story from your team, and check with the client too if you can.

Set, or re-set, expectations as soon as possible. Separate genuine re-work from added scope. If your team didn't get something right the first time and it's reasonable that they should have done, then it's on your bill, otherwise it's over-delivery. If you can’t get this across to the client, the situation will continue.

Don't wait until a main milestone. It’s too late and is bad timing - if you leave it to mention a problem to your client, how will they feel? And if you need to increase the bill it can seem like excuses. 

If you leave it too late

All is not lost. At the least, make sure the team gets the credit for the work they did - I mean, the people who did stay late and miss their cocoa rather than managers who were able to leave on time. Ideally this credit should come from the client. It would help the client to realise the extra benefit they’d got, and might help with agreeing more realistic pricing in future. 

Avoiding over-servicing in the first place

I learned how to avoid over-servicing by trial and plenty of error. When I set up Metis, it was one of the things I wanted to build in to our software. It’s one of the reasons we created the real-time dashboards and time and expenses flags. When you set up an opportunity or job in Metis, you spread the work over the days and weeks up to the deadline. If your team are recording less or more time in a week than was budgeted, it’ll be clear to you instantly. I’d love to show you how it works - just scroll down to book an online demo tailored to your needs.