The first 48 hours: onboarding a new client without a single attachment

The first two days of an engagement set expectations for the rest of it. A client who spends those days confused about what you need from them will spend the next six months slightly behind, and will remember the whole matter that way, regardless of how it turns out.

Most of the fix is sequencing rather than effort. Here is a two-day onboarding that uses no email attachments, takes about forty minutes of staff time, and does most of its work in the first hour.

Hour one: send one thing

The moment the engagement is agreed, the client gets exactly one message. Not a welcome pack, not three emails, one message with one link.

It should do four things in under two hundred words. Say what happens next. Give the link to the portal. List the documents you need, by name. Name the person they should contact, with a direct address.

What it should not do is explain the software, describe your security architecture, or attach anything. A client who receives an attachment in your first message has learned that attachments are how this relationship works, and you will be undoing that lesson for the rest of the matter.

The document list is the part worth rewriting. “Photo ID, your two most recent pay slips, and the letter from the insurer dated in June” produces a complete response. “Your financial documentation” produces a phone call. Set your document types up in advance so the list you send matches the slots waiting to receive it; document rules and types covers defining those.

Hour two: make the account real

Send the portal invitation immediately after, as a separate message, so it arrives in its own right rather than buried in the welcome note.

Two details decide whether this works. The invitation should arrive while the client is still thinking about you, which is the hour after they agreed, not the following Tuesday. And it should land on an account already set up with their folders, so the first thing they see is structure rather than an empty page with an upload button.

Inviting clients and team members is the mechanical side. The part that is not mechanical is the sentence you put with it. “This is where your documents live, so nothing has to go by email” explains the why in eleven words, which is as much explanation as anybody reads.

Expect a third of clients to complete this within the hour, another third within the day, and the rest to need a nudge. That distribution is normal and it is not a sign the portal is too hard.

Hours three to twenty-four: leave them alone

This is the step firms get wrong by trying harder. Having asked, do not follow up on the same day. A client who receives a reminder four hours after the request reads it as an accusation, and it trains them to ignore your reminders, because they now know the first one does not mean anything.

Use the time internally instead. Assign the incoming documents to whoever will actually review them, so the first upload has an owner before it arrives rather than after; document assignments covers that. Check that work is pointed at the right people, and not at everybody, which is how a firm teaches itself to ignore its own alerts. In Pertavo that is done by assigning rather than by tuning anybody’s preferences — there are none to tune, as notification preferences explains.

If documents start arriving, acknowledge them the same day. Not with a review, just an acknowledgement. “Got the ID and the pay slips, thank you, we still need the insurer letter” takes fifteen seconds and prevents the single most common client anxiety, which is not knowing whether the thing they sent arrived.

Day two, morning: the first honest reminder

Twenty-four hours in, send the first reminder. It should be specific about what is outstanding and nothing else.

The effective form is a list of what you have received and a list of what you have not. Clients respond to that far better than to a general prompt, partly because it demonstrates you are paying attention, and partly because “we have two of your four documents” is a nudge with a shape to it.

This can be automated, and should be. Notifications and alerts covers the reminders the system can send on a schedule, which frees your staff to make the call that actually matters, which comes next.

Day two, afternoon: the call

If something is still missing thirty-six hours in, telephone. Not another email.

The reason is diagnostic rather than persuasive. A client who has not uploaded by now is almost never being lazy. Usually one of four things is true: they cannot find the document, they do not understand what is being asked for, they are stuck on a step in the portal, or something has changed in their situation that they have not told you about. The fourth case is the one you want to discover on day two rather than in week six.

Two minutes on the phone resolves all four. Six more emails resolve none of them.

What the client should be able to say by hour 48

The test is not whether every document has arrived. Sometimes a document genuinely takes a fortnight to obtain. The test is whether the client can answer three questions without checking with you: what you need from them, where it goes, and who to ask.

If they can, the engagement starts on a firm footing and stays there. The documents that are late are known to be late, by both sides, which is a completely different situation from documents that are simply missing.

And there is a compounding effect worth naming. A client who learns the portal in the first forty-eight hours uses it for the next eighteen months. A client who is allowed to email one attachment in week one will email every attachment for the life of the matter, and no amount of later correction will change it. The habit is set early, by you, in the first message you send.

If you would like a copy of the four messages this sequence uses, ask us and we will send the templates over.