Handing over a client relationship when someone resigns

A resignation letter lands, and the conversation turns straight to staffing: who absorbs the workload, whether to recruit, how long the gap will last. The clients that person looked after get attention later. It is an understandable order of priorities, and it explains why so many client relationships look shaky for the three months that follow a departure.

Clients rarely leave simply because their contact did. What pushes them is the handover itself. It reveals how much of the relationship was never written down, and the early weeks with a new face feel like being onboarded all over again.

What actually walks out

Formal documents tend to survive. The contract, the scope and the invoices are saved somewhere. The loss is everything around them, and it is worth listing, because people seldom record knowledge they do not realise they hold.

• Quirks nobody noted: an approver who cannot stand emojis, a brand manager who insists on seeing work before the director does, a colour that will always be rejected.
• Commitments still in motion: a discount floated on a call, an extra video agreed casually, a promise that next month's report would look different.
• Background: the reason a previous campaign was withdrawn, the competitor the client is sensitive about, the problems they had with the supplier before you.
• People: who truly holds the decision on the client's side, who is warm towards you, and who is privately dissatisfied.
• Access: logins, ad accounts, pages and tools registered to the departing person or linked to their phone.

That last category causes harm fastest. If a page or ad account sits under someone's personal login, or a client chat runs through their private number, it does not pass to the business when they leave. It goes wherever they go.

Start capturing it on day one

Open the handover on the day the resignation is accepted. Leave it for the last week, and the notice period has largely been lost to a single rushed meeting. Take the clients one by one, and ask the departing employee to put it in writing instead of explaining it aloud.

• The status of each active project: what is being produced, what is sitting with the client, and what falls due in the coming thirty days.
• Any agreement, however minor, that has not yet made it into the scope or the contract.
• All open questions with the client, and which side each one is waiting on.
• Every account, login and tool, with ownership checked. Whatever is registered to the leaver transfers to the business or, ideally, to the client.
• Each channel of contact, whether email chains, group chats or shared folders. Anything tied to a personal number is replaced before the last day.
• Invoices coming up and invoices overdue, along with the background to any payment discussions.
• A few lines on every key contact: what they do, what matters to them and how they prefer to work.

Read the document back with the leaver before they go, while questions can still be answered. Whoever wrote a handover cannot see its holes. Only the reader can.

Tell the client before the grapevine does

The client should not find out from their account manager mentioning it casually a week before leaving. Nor should they find out from an out-of-office message once the person has already gone.

Let them know within a few days of the departure being confirmed, and arrive with the answer to their obvious next question: who is picking up the account, and from what date. Talk about continuity rather than apologising. The reasons for leaving are not their concern. What they need to hear is that nothing they rely on will fall through the cracks.

To a client, a resignation sounds like risk. The first conversation has to show that the risk is already being managed.

Follow that with a joint call, ideally two. In the first, the departing manager runs things while the successor observes. In the second, the roles reverse, and the leaver is there only to fill in blanks. Before the last day, the client should have worked properly with the new person at least once.

Honour what was promised, or say so early

Handovers become visible to clients at one particular moment: when the new contact fails to deliver something the old one agreed. Whether that commitment was sensible is beside the point. As far as the client is concerned, the company gave its word.

Work through the outstanding promises with the successor and make a conscious call on each. If one cannot be kept, the successor should tell the client early and in person, presenting it as a decision, instead of letting it emerge later as something that simply never arrived.

Stay close for the first month

After the departure, have a senior person stay nearer to the account than normal for a month. They are not taking it over. They are reading the updates, sitting in on a call, and giving the client an easy way to raise any unease. Few clients complain about a handover. They just go quiet.

Watch for the signals: slower sign-offs, briefer messages, an unfamiliar name on the client's side. Each suggests the relationship is under review, and each is far simpler to address in week three than in month three.

When it is your agency's contact who leaves

The same list works from the other side of the table. If the person running your account at an agency resigns, ask who is taking over and when, ask for a joint call before they go, and check that anything they promised still stands. Above all, make sure your pages, ad accounts and logins are held by your company rather than by the person leaving.

So the next departure costs less

A difficult handover is a sign that the business remembers through its people instead of through its records. The durable answer is to attach notes, approvals, contacts, files and conversations to each client while the work is happening, so the knowledge stays when a person does not. Handled that way, a resignation is a matter for the staffing plan, not a threat to the client relationship.

If too much of what your team knows about its clients still lives in inboxes and personal phones, talk to ALXO about setting up the records and workflows that keep that knowledge with the business.