A quiet client is not an unhappy client

The first version of the Keepwell score, the one we tested with eleven agencies in 2022, had a rule in it that seemed obviously right: if a client takes more than two business days to reply, that counts against the score.

Within a month, every agency had the same complaint. Their best client was showing up as at risk. Usually it was a founder-led business where one person approved everything on Friday afternoon, had done so for six years, and renewed every January without a conversation.

The rule was measuring the client’s personality, not the client’s health.

Compare a client with itself

What we do now is simpler to say than it was to build. Every signal is compared with that client’s own last 90 days. A client who has always replied in three days and still replies in three days scores the same as one who has always replied in three hours.

What moves the score is change. The three-hour client who drifts to a day and a half has changed by a factor of twelve, and that is worth a look even though a day and a half is, by any outside standard, perfectly polite.

What the baseline catches that a rule cannot

Three patterns come up again and again in the Monday notes:

1. The reply comes from someone new. Timing looks fine, but the person answering has changed. We count that separately, because a new contact is the most common reason a healthy retainer goes cold.
2. Your side slowed down first. Reply time is measured in both directions. In roughly a third of the flags on this signal, it was the agency’s replies that doubled, usually after an account lead picked up two new clients.
3. The rhythm broke. A client who always pays on the 4th and pays on the 20th has told you something, even though day 20 is still inside the terms on the invoice.

The cost of a false alarm

We care about this because a warning system is only as good as the trust people put in it. If the Monday note names a client who is fine, the account lead learns that the note is sometimes wrong. If it happens twice, they stop opening it, and then it does not matter how accurate the third one is.

So we tune for fewer, surer flags. Across 214 agencies the median account lead gets a note that names one client in three weeks out of four, and none in the fourth. A quiet week is a single line that says so.

If you are scoring clients by hand

Plenty of agencies keep a red, amber and green column in a spreadsheet, and it is better than nothing. One change makes it far more useful: next to each color, write down what is normal for that client. How fast they reply, how many hours they use, what day they pay. Then mark a client amber when they leave their own normal, not when they fail yours.