What to do when agency employees continue to over-service clients
In this episode, Chip and Gini focus on the issue of employees over-servicing clients. They discuss the reasons behind over-servicing, including fear of client dissatisfaction and insufficient initial project scopes. The hosts emphasize the importance of educating employees on the long-term negative impacts, both on agency profitability and client relationships. They advocate for involving employees in strategic planning and scoping processes to ensure accurate budgeting and foster accountability. Chip and Gini also highlight the benefits of regular communication and collaboration with team members to prevent recurring problems and enhance overall agency efficiency. Key takeaways Gini Dietrich: “Even though your employees think that they’re helping a client, in the long run it’s more upsetting to the client to find out that you’ve been over-servicing all this time.” Chip Griffin: “We need to be collaborating so that our team feels empowered. Because the more empowered they are, the more likely they are to produce the results that we want and our clients need.” Gini Dietrich: “Because they’re over-servicing, working more hours than they should, they’re not able to get to other clients that they should be working on.” Chip Griffin: “We need to listen to our team and accept that we might actually be wrong. It might be in our minds over-servicing because we were budgeting a certain amount of time, but maybe our time budget was wrong.” Related Hidden overservicing by agency employees The difference between over-delivering and over-servicing agency clients How agency owners can avoid scope creep (featuring Steve Guberman) View Transcript The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy. Chip Griffin: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin. Gini Dietrich: And I’m Gini Dietrich. Chip Griffin: And Gini, I don’t really have a, a cute opening to this one, so I’m just gonna dive right in, which I don’t, I don’t know, I just, in, in the 10 seconds that I had waiting to, you know, to start, I come up with, come up with anything that, okay. That was even halfway lame or useful or anything. So it is what it is. We’re gonna talk about over servicing, but not the way we’ve talked about it before. Because we’ve talked about over-servicing in terms of how big a deal it can be to the profitability of your agency. We’ve talked about how to identify over servicing. We’ve talked about how to, how important it is to show your employees when they’re over servicing. But we’re gonna talk today about how do you solve that with employees who understand that they’re over-servicing, maybe they understand that it’s a problem, but they continue to do it anyway. And it, it’s not out of malice. They’re not doing it because they want, you know, you to suffer from a profitability standpoint as an agency. They’re doing it because, as I think I’ve shared previously in my earliest role in an agency, I would overservice a client because I knew that they were gonna be unhappy with me if I didn’t do it. And, and so I didn’t want to be yelled at by the client. Mm-hmm. Other people might over-service because they’re afraid that if they don’t do something today, it’s just gonna cause more work for them in the future. And so in their minds, they’re making a rational decision for their own situation. But it may not be right for the business. So how do you handle that? I mean, other than just firing the employee who refuses to stop over-servicing? Because that’s, that’s not a great solution in most cases. No. Sometimes I, I imagine it might get there, but, but that’s what we’re gonna talk about. How do we, what strategies do we have for dealing with those employees who are over-servicing despite our best efforts? Gini Dietrich: I’m sure I’ve shared this story before, but I’m gonna repeat it for those who have not heard it. Um, I had an employee who was doing exactly that and was o