Taking on ‘just one more thing’ for a client may feel like good service, but insurance experts at Everywhen warn that blurred boundaries, informal advice and work beyond an original brief can leave professional businesses exposed to disputes long after the work is complete.
For professionals, saying “yes” is often part of providing good client service. Can you take a quick look at this? Can we add something else to the project? While I’ve got you, could I ask your opinion on something?
Individually, the requests can appear harmless. But over the course of a client relationship, a series of small favours, additional tasks and pieces of informal advice can gradually turn into something much bigger: scope creep.
Insurance experts at Everywhen say the increasingly fast and informal way businesses work means professional firms should pay closer attention to where the boundaries of an original client brief begin and end.
Scope creep is traditionally associated with projects expanding beyond their original timeframe or budget. But for professional businesses, there is another potential consequence: uncertainty over exactly what a professional was responsible for delivering.
An accountant might be asked for an informal opinion beyond their original remit. A consultant may find themselves taking responsibility for additional elements of a project. An architect or engineer could be drawn into decisions outside the work they were originally commissioned to undertake. Often, the professional is simply trying to help.
The problem can arise months later, if something goes wrong and the client and professional have very different recollections of what was agreed.
A spokesperson at Everywhen, said: “One of the interesting things about professional risk is that it doesn’t always begin with an obvious mistake. Sometimes it starts with somebody trying to provide excellent service to a client.”
“A small additional request can lead to another, and before long the work being delivered looks quite different from the original brief. If those changes haven’t been clearly discussed and documented, it can become much harder to establish where responsibility begins and ends if there is a disagreement later.”
When a quick favour becomes professional advice
The changing nature of workplace communication may be making those boundaries even harder to define.
Client relationships increasingly play out across email, Microsoft Teams, video calls, instant messages and mobile phones. Advice that might once have been contained within a formal report or meeting can now be delivered in a few sentences during an ongoing conversation.
At the same time, expectations around responsiveness have increased. Professionals can feel pressure to provide an immediate answer rather than step away, consider whether a request falls within their remit and formally agree additional work.
This can be particularly important when a client asks a professional to comment on something outside their core area of expertise.
Saying “I don’t know” or recommending that a client seeks specialist advice elsewhere can sometimes feel uncomfortable, particularly when maintaining a strong client relationship is important.
However, Everywhen says recognising the limits of professional expertise can be just as important as demonstrating it.
The spokesperson continued: “There can be a natural temptation to help when a trusted client asks for an opinion, particularly when you’ve worked together for a long time. But professionals shouldn’t feel they have to have an answer to everything.”
“Being clear about where your expertise and responsibilities end isn’t poor client service. In many cases, it’s exactly the opposite. Clear boundaries help protect both sides of the relationship and ensure clients receive the right advice from the right people.”
The £0 job that still carries responsibility
Scope creep can also have a financial dimension.
Professionals frequently undertake additional work without charging for it, either as a gesture of goodwill or because formally expanding a project can seem disproportionate to a relatively small request.
However, the fact that additional work has not resulted in an additional fee does not necessarily make the expectations surrounding that work disappear.
Everywhen says this is why seemingly small changes to a professional relationship should not automatically be treated as insignificant.
Clear letters of engagement and defined scopes of work can provide an important starting point, but businesses should also consider what happens when the relationship inevitably evolves.
Recording significant changes, confirming additional instructions in writing and being clear when something sits outside the agreed scope can all help prevent different expectations developing over time.
It is also important to create a culture in which employees feel comfortable challenging a request rather than automatically agreeing to it.
The spokesperson added: “Saying yes can be good for business, but knowing when to say, ‘that’s outside our scope’ can be equally valuable.”
“Ultimately, good professional relationships depend on clarity. The clearer both sides are about what has been agreed, what advice is being provided and who is responsible for what, the less room there is for misunderstanding further down the line.”
For professional businesses navigating increasingly demanding and fast-moving client relationships, the message is not to become less helpful.
It is to make sure that every “yes” comes with a clear understanding of exactly what has been agreed.
