Happy Clients

Building a Commercially-Minded CS team

“Client service has never been more important,” says Jemma Long, Client Services Director of Nonsense London. “But the job has changed.”

There was a time when agencies could grow accounts through relationships alone. Lunches, coffees, and regular catch-ups helped keep the work flowing.

Those days are fading.

“Five or six years ago, I could just email someone and say, ‘Do you want to grab a coffee? And they’d say yes,” Jemma explains. “Now clients are stretched. They don’t want to talk unless they have to.”

And why’s that?

• Budgets are tighter.
• Marketing teams are smaller.
• And agencies are being scrutinised now more than ever.

That means the role of client services is evolving – from relationship manager, to commercial partner.

At Nonsense London, Jemma has been working to shift her team away from simply delivering projects, and towards thinking strategically about the client’s wider business.

“A lot of teams are seen as deliverers,” she says. “They’re working on the project, but they’re not thinking commercially.”

But the reality is that delivery is where the biggest opportunities often sit.

“That’s when you’ve got the client in your pocket,” Jemma says. “It’s the biggest opportunity to ask the right questions and connect the work to their outcomes.”

In this session, Jemma will unpack how agencies can develop more commercially-minded client services teams – without turning them into pushy salespeople.

Instead, it’s about curiosity, strategy, and learning how to connect the dots between the work you deliver and the results your clients actually care about.

What’s AI’s role in Client Services?

“People want to be heard, people want to be understood, people want someone to have their back.”

That’s Catherine Warwick’s starting point for this panel session.

While everyone is talking about AI transformation, most client-facing agency people are still asking a much messier question: where does AI actually help, and where does it break the thing that clients value the most?

Joe Wright, Director of Strategy, has seen both sides. At Ambitious PR, his team has centralised around Copilot, built an internal AI policy, and started using tools for things like reverse briefs, personas, and faster insight generation. But he draws one very clear line: “We don’t use AI for client comms … you can’t replace it for relationship management.”

Adam Reaney has found similarly practical uses for The SEO Works. AI helps him investigate disputes, draft stronger responses, and spot delivery issues earlier. But as he puts it, “the robot can’t do that” when it comes to the human side – the calls, the reassurance, the lunches, the judgement.

And Catherine has taken it even further as Client Partner at Numiko. She tried to build an AI that could do her own client partner role, only to discover that it was excellent at the ‘information work’ and hopeless at the part that actually makes clients happy: empathy, judgement, and trust.

This panel is for agencies who want the real story, not the pitch. We’ll get into what worked, what saved time, what improved service, where the risks are, and which parts of client service should stay human.

The Golden Moments That Grow Project Clients

“Gossip is such gold.”

That’s Adam Millbank’s blunt way of describing what agencies miss when they treat project delivery as a straight line from brief to final sign-off.

Adam is co-founder of JonesMillbank, a production company where the work is often intense, high-stakes, and project-based. Which means the commercial risk is obvious: do a great piece of work, deliver it, then … hear nothing for two years.

So, instead of leaving client relationships to chance, Adam and his team have built a system around the moments when clients are naturally most open, engaged, and likely to say yes.

“It’s working out when those magic moments are,” he says. Not forced networking, or awkward dinners. The real points where your agency is already showing real value, the trust is high, attention is sharp, and conversations about future work can happen (often without the client consciously aware it’s happening).

In Adam’s case, that could be an on set recce, or midway through post-production, when the project is shaping into the final cut and the client’s excitement is peaking. Those are the magic moments where the JonesMillbank team ask for favours, secure introductions, lines up meetings, and opens the doors for the next opportunities.

“It’s about knowing where your value points are and monopolising those moments so the client feels held, but not bugged.”

In this session, Adam will unpack how to map your own project flow, spot the key relationship moments to pounce on, and build a smarter way to grow accounts when you don’t have the luxury of a monthly retainer.

The Relationship Recession

“We’ve got one conclusion, that there’s currently going on out there: a relationship recession.”

That’s the uncomfortable reality Simon Rhind-Tutt, co-Founder of Relationship Audits, sees when he looks at the agency-client world right now.

After more than 25 years evaluating agency relationships – and analysing over 50 million data points all over the world – his team has noticed something shifting. Relationships between agencies and clients aren’t collapsing, but they’re becoming more difficult every day.

This is due to a number of factors:

• Clients feel harder to read
• Relationships feel less permanent
• Teams change at the speed of light
• Meetings happen through screens instead of in person

And the mood on both sides is the same.

“Everybody’s nervous – and nervousness equals indecision.”

“Relationships are also strained by time,” Simon explains. “You only build relationships in face time, that’s where trust is built.”

This talk will explore the real tension points between agencies and clients right now – where perceptions differ, where trust breaks down, and why agencies often think relationships are healthier than their clients do.

And most importantly, Simon will share what agencies can actually do about it.

Because if there’s one idea he wants agencies to rethink, it’s this:
“Let’s shape an industry where relationships aren’t just part of the business – they are the business.”