Client Service Design
Your firm WORKS…somehow.
Our audits clear the fog. You get a detailed, decision-ready map every leader can navigate.
Four to eight weeks · Fixed price · Nothing to install
You have more work than your people can carry.
Your firm can only grow by adding people, and the people who hold the context are already stretched. AI is supposed to change that. It can only move as fast as the road around it allows: the tools it can reach, the data it can trust, and the decisions it is expected to support.
AI feels like a Ferrari you can only drive at 4mph. The engine was never the problem. The road is.
Some sense of the road may be there. But parts of it may be undocumented, inconsistent, or clogged by tools and approval layers that slow progress.
That is where good AI ideas stall. Leaders can see the potential, but not always which workflow, system, or decision path is holding it back.
- Key processes live in certain people’s heads, and the firm runs on memory — until they leave.
- Clients feel the handoffs you can’t see. The experience changes depending on who picks up the work.
- Software costs keep rising for problems the tools were supposed to solve, and the licence renews again.
- Success is untracked, so nobody can say whether last year’s changes worked, or which ones are worth repeating.
- You plan next year on instinct, because you cannot sequence improvements to flows and systems you cannot see.
A workflow audit turns that friction into a clear map: where AI can move now, where the road needs work, and which practical changes can create value first.
For service firms whose demand has outgrown the people who deliver it.
This audit is for consultative professional service firms, and service organizations that run like them, where the work is high-touch and the demand is already there. The constraint is the rainmakers and senior people who hold the context.
Your work repeats across clients, projects, or teams, but each situation brings its own history, exceptions, approvals, and judgment calls. That is not noise around the work. It is the context the work runs on, and it is split between the person who owns the client, the person who owns the firm’s direction, and the person who owns its data and security. No one of them has ever held it whole. AI cannot reach what no one has assembled, which is why the audit starts there.
Some firms should not buy this yet.
If you’re looking to add AI to how the firm already works, it’s early for this. The audit is for leaders ready to change the work altogether.
If the real problem is not enough demand, an audit won’t create it.
If you’re a practice of one, we’ll point you somewhere better suited.
An audit you can walk.
We interview the people who do the work and map how your firm serves clients, from first conversation to loyal client, down to the systems and data underneath. We look at everything around your craft and leave the craft itself alone.
Five steps. Open any one to see it in a sample audit.
01ElicitationWe interview the people who do the work. Every claim gets a source and a mark.
- What they said
- “Marcus owns the renewals. He just knows when they are coming.”
- What we found
- No renewal date exists in any system. Six of eleven contracts renew in a ninety-day window. Marcus leaves in June.
- Mark
- Practiced, never written down, enforced by one person's memory.
Every step carries a mark: practiced, proposed, or retiring, and whether it is enforced. Point a model at documentation without these marks and it learns the process that never ran.
02LifecycleThe program drawn end to end: stages, steps, the standing lane beneath them, and the gates.
The lifecycle, inside the document. The diagram sits in the page with its reading guide beneath it, and opens full-screen to pan, zoom, and inspect each step's artifacts.
03RegistryEvery system: what it holds, who can reach it, what breaks when it is gone.
The dependency register. Eighteen systems, every claim with its source mark.
04AnalysisWhere the process as practiced diverges from the process as written, ranked by severity and by what closes it.
Findings at a glance. Every finding, its severity, and the priority that closes it. The whole audit on one screen.
05FindingsEach finding in four lines, then the evidence with its sources, then what shares its cause.
One finding. What is, what should be, why it is this way, what it costs. The same four lines every time.
You get all five as a private site your team browses and a PDF your board reads. No jargon, no scoring, nothing that needs us in the room to interpret.
Findings arrive ranked, and the ranking is an order of work: what needs a rule before anyone touches it, what can be built now, and what waits on something else to land first. That order becomes the scope for anything we build together afterward.
From a complete sample audit of Ashgrove Development Partners, a fictitious firm. Every name and number is invented; the findings are real classes of defect from real audits.
An audit does not fix anything.
It tells you what is true and what to do about it, in order. It does not do it. We would rather say so now than have you find out in week three.
Some firms take the findings and run with them. Most ask us to build what the audit found. In Engineering we build the system that carries what your people carry, and in Development we stay to keep it getting better. If you want that, the audit’s last deliverable is the scope for it. You decide after you’ve seen the truth, never before. The questions below cover how that works and what it costs.
What firms ask before they book.
What does it cost?
The audit is priced on its own, by how many decision makers, roles, and systems are in scope. A smaller firm with one decision maker typically starts around $9,000. A mid-size firm with layered approvals typically starts around $18,000. Anything we’d scope above $27,000 we’ll break into stages instead.
How long does one audit take?
Four to six weeks for a smaller firm, about eight for a mid-size one.
What happens after the audit?
You own the findings either way. If you want help building what it found, Engineering is scoped from the audit itself, so you’re never buying blind. Development keeps it improving after launch.
If the right answer at that point is that you are done, we will say so.
What if we already know what is wrong?
Then an audit is the wrong instrument, and you need someone to do the work. We will tell you that on the call instead of selling you an audit.
Start here
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes, no deck. We will tell you whether an audit is the right instrument for what you are facing, and if it is not, what is.
Or write to hello@arthurarchie.com
Booked.
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