When the Rules Change, How Does Our HR Consultancy Work Out Which Clients Need Telling and Updating?

A change lands, and the spreadsheet gets opened

Something changes that affects some of your clients. Perhaps a statutory rate moves, a new right comes in, or your advisers decide a policy should be worded differently. The directors agree what clients need to hear. Then someone opens the client list and starts working out who is affected.

The list has names, contacts and retainer levels. It does not say which clients have shift workers, which use agency staff, which operate in Scotland, which have a hundred and fifty staff rather than fifteen. So a consultant goes through the list from memory, sends an email to everyone just in case, and then fields a week of calls from clients unsure whether the email applied to them.

The missing piece is client facts

Whether a change matters to a client depends on facts about that client, and those facts are scattered across onboarding notes, handbooks and consultants' heads. Without them, every rollout is either too broad (everyone gets everything) or too narrow (someone who needed to know did not).

The second gap is tracking. Even when the right clients are identified, the update work (a policy amendment, a letter to staff, a manager briefing) happens in separate emails with no view of who has done what.

What an untracked rollout costs

• Generic mailings that clients learn to ignore.
• Consultant time answering 'does this apply to us?' one call at a time.
• Clients who needed an update not getting one, and finding out later.
• No record showing that you told a client about a change and what you advised doing.
• Directors unable to answer how far through a rollout the team is.

The last two matter commercially. Proactive updates are part of what retainer clients pay for, and a consultancy that can show a client exactly what it flagged to them, and when, is easier to renew.

How we build the register and rollout tracker

1. We build a client profile register holding the facts your advisers say matter: sector, nations operated in, headcount band, working patterns, contract types used, benefits offered, handbook version and so on.
2. Facts are pre-filled from what you already hold, such as onboarding forms, HR system exports and handbook settings, and gaps are sent to the account consultant to confirm.
3. When your advisers define an update, they choose the criteria that make a client affected. The register lists matching clients, and any with missing facts, for a person to check.
4. Each affected client gets a rollout task with the actions your advisers set, such as a policy amendment, a staff notice or a manager briefing, assigned to their consultant.
5. Client emails are generated from your wording, personalised with the client's details, and logged against the client when sent.
6. A rollout board shows every affected client and where they are, with reminders for tasks that stall.

What changed in the law, and what clients should do about it, remains your advisers' judgement. The register and tracker make sure that judgement reaches the right clients.

After a few rollouts

Updates go to the clients they apply to, with wording that fits them. Consultants spend their time on the clients who need a conversation rather than answering general queries. Directors see progress on one screen. The client profile register also turns out to be useful well beyond rollouts, for pricing, for planning training sessions and for spotting which clients have grown into a different service tier.

Does your consultancy work like this?

• Updates go to every client because you cannot tell who is affected.
• Client facts such as headcount or contract types are not recorded anywhere central.
• After an update, consultants field lots of 'does this apply to us?' calls.
• You could not prove which clients you told about the last change.
• Rollout progress lives in individual consultants' to-do lists.