The Unglamorous Mission-Critical Qualities of Long-term Client Engagements

A lot of our new business comes from referrals. Trust enables this. Trust is a crucial engine for this agency.

We build trust when great work delivers results. And in a perfect world, every client engagement goes just like this – we do great work, great results come next.

But in the real world, on a long enough timeline, mistakes happen. Bugs surface. Dependencies go stale. This is the unglamorous reality of our work.

Sometimes the issue is on us, other times it isn’t, but this distinction is not essential. What happens next is. In these moments, our response makes or breaks our engine.

So how do we build trust despite unexpected, unglamorous moments?

Step One: We Say Something

Recently, a client flagged a major error in one of their site’s core functions early one morning. I happened to be awake and saw the message come in. Within ten minutes, I’d replied — not to explain anything, not to fix anything, just to acknowledge receipt.

"We see the error. We're looking into it."

We don’t know what’s wrong and don’t over-promise. We just acknowledge receipt. We just want the client to know help is on the way.

Step Two: We Have a Process

In this particular case, we went straight into triage. We attempted to reproduce the error. We audited recent code commits. We checked the production server’s vitals.

After all this, the issue didn’t appear to be ours. It took a developer, QA engineer, and a strategist an hour of team time to understand this, which cost us money, redirected important resources and postponed work attached to separate timelines.

From our perspective, this is how we invest in long-term engagements. Don't get me wrong, we were relieved that the issue wasn’t with us, but equally, we demonstrated rigour, took action, and cemented trust.

In this case, we followed up with an annotated, line-by-line reply to every concern the client raised. Even when we’re confident it’s not our bug, we owe our client clarity.

Step Three: We Own It

A separate incident, also recent, involved a 3D animation page that broke because a content delivery network stopped serving a critical script.

We didn’t introduce the problem directly, but also didn’t catch it before our client did, which is a huge big deal for us. Our promise is "Worry-Free Websites". We pride ourselves on knowing something's wrong before the client does. We have curated a stack of tools and developed processes specifically to deliver on this promise.

This time, we missed.

We jumped in quickly, fixed the dependency, and restored the feature. But more importantly, we asked: Why didn’t our monitoring tools catch this? And then we fixed that, too. We updated how Ghost Inspector handles long connection hangs. We cleaned up our Sentry filters to reduce noise and improve signal. We adjusted quota buffers.

That work doesn't get a press release (maybe a blog post, though), but it matters. Fixing issues when they arise is part of the job. Ensuring they cannot repeat, and communicating process changes to our clients, another brick upon which trust is built.

Transparency Isn’t a Tactic

Transparency is what makes long term relationships work. You can’t have a high-functioning support partnership without it. Not if you want your clients to stick around. And especially not if you want them to recommend you when they move on.

So when something breaks — and something always will — we aim to be honest, communicative, and methodical. It doesn’t always feel glamorous. But it works.

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