How to stop chasing clients for paperwork

Every firm has somebody whose week is partly spent chasing. It rarely appears in a job description and it never appears in a budget, but it is there, and at a firm of ten people it can be the better part of a full-time role spread thinly across everyone.

The instinct is to chase better. Write firmer emails, add a third reminder, escalate sooner. That treats the symptom. Most chasing is generated by four specific things upstream, and firms that genuinely reduce it did so by changing the request rather than the reminder.

Cause one: the request was ambiguous

A vague request does not produce a slow response. It produces no response, because the client cannot tell whether they have what you want and would rather deal with it later than get it wrong.

“Please send over your financial documents” is unanswerable. The client has a drawer of things that might qualify. Deciding which ones is work, and it is work they are not equipped to do, so it moves to the bottom of the pile.

Name the items. Say how many. Say what date range. Say what to do if they cannot find one. “The three most recent bank statements for the account ending 4471, and if you only have two, send those and tell us” has a clear finish line, and a request with a finish line gets done.

The same applies to format. Tell them a phone photograph is fine if it is. Half the delay in document collection is a client who thinks they need a scanner.

Cause two: the client does not know where it goes

If the answer to “where do I put this” requires any thought, the document waits until the client has time to think, which is never.

Set the destination up before you ask. Folders in place, document types defined, everything named the way a client would name it rather than the way your file plan names it. A client looking at a folder called “Identification” knows what goes in it. A folder called “KYC/AML — Tier 1” does not help them. Organizing with folders covers building a structure, and it is worth doing once, properly, rather than per matter.

The related fix is making the destination one click from where the request arrives. Every extra step between the reminder and the upload loses a portion of people, and the losses multiply rather than add.

Cause three: nobody acknowledged the last thing they sent

This one is invisible from inside the firm and enormous from outside it.

A client uploads two documents and hears nothing for five days. From where they sit there are three possibilities: it arrived and is fine, it arrived and is wrong, or it did not arrive at all. Not knowing which is uncomfortable, and the discomfort attaches to your firm.

More practically, it kills the momentum. A client who gets a same-day acknowledgement sends the next document sooner. A client who gets silence learns that the deadline was not real, because nothing happened when they met it.

An acknowledgement does not need to be a review. “Received, thank you, we still need the insurer letter” is enough, and it can largely be automated; notifications and alerts covers what can be sent without anybody typing it.

Cause four: the reminders come from a person

This sounds backwards, so it is worth being precise about.

When a reminder comes from Dana, twice, the client starts to feel they are being personally pursued by Dana, and an awkward social dynamic forms around a routine administrative task. Some clients then avoid the whole channel rather than face it. Meanwhile Dana feels rude sending the third one, so she does not, and the document goes missing for a fortnight.

A reminder from the system carries none of that. Nobody feels chased by their bank’s automated notice, and nobody feels awkward sending it. The client reads it as a status update, which is what it is.

So put the routine reminders on a schedule and let them run. Keep your people for the escalation, where a human is genuinely better. Watch the load on your own staff while you do it, because a reminder system that also buries them will be switched off within a month. In Pertavo the lever for that is assignment rather than per-person settings, which do not exist — see notification preferences.

The reminder schedule that works

Once the four causes above are handled, the remaining chase is small and can be mechanical.

Day zero, the request, specific and with a destination. Day three, an automated reminder listing what is received and what is outstanding. Day seven, a second automated reminder in the same form. Day ten, a telephone call from a person.

Three things about that schedule. The first reminder is not on day one, because a same-day reminder reads as distrust and teaches people to ignore you. The reminders list received-and-outstanding rather than just outstanding, because showing progress is more motivating than showing a gap. And the escalation at day ten is a call rather than a fourth email, because by day ten the problem is no longer forgetfulness and email will not find out what it is.

The better version of that middle point is not a reminder at all. If the received-and-outstanding list is somewhere the client can open whenever they think of it, you stop re-sending a snapshot of it on a schedule — the list is simply true, all the time, and a client who wonders at nine on a Sunday evening whether they have done their part can find out without asking you. Most portals keep that list on the firm’s side of the wall, which is why “waiting on the client” ends up being a line somebody types into their own notes and then chases. Ours does not; tasks covers how it works here.

When they still do not respond

After three reminders and a call, something specific is wrong. The usual causes, roughly in order: they cannot obtain the document and are embarrassed to say so, the matter has changed in a way they have not told you about, they are dealing with something in their life that has nothing to do with you, or they have decided not to proceed and have not said.

All four are better discovered than chased. The way to discover them is a direct, unembarrassed question: “We are stuck on this one document, is it hard to get hold of?” Clients answer that honestly, and the answer usually points at a solution you can supply.

Then make the status visible internally, so a stalled matter stops consuming attention. Marking it as blocked on the client, with a date, means it stops appearing in everyone’s mental list and starts appearing in one review. Document status and approvals covers the states available for that.

What this is worth

Firms that do this well do not eliminate chasing. They reduce it to the few cases where something is genuinely wrong, which is where a skilled person should be spending the time anyway.

The measurable version: count how many reminders your firm sent last month, and how many of those were the second or later reminder on the same document. If the second-and-later reminders are more than a quarter of the total, the problem is in the request, not in the following up.

If you want to look at where your own chasing is being generated, get in touch and we will go through a recent matter with you.