Building Client-Relationships That Outlast Employee Tenures

Client relationships are often built over years of interactions, trust and an understanding of what customers need, sometimes even before they articulate it themselves. Yet, much of this knowledge remains with the employees who manage these relationships rather than within the organisation. When they leave, retire or move into different roles, companies risk losing more than experienced talent. They also risk losing the expertise and relationship context that keep clients engaged.

A 2025 survey of 1,000 respondents by APQC found that only 30% of organisations capture knowledge from departing retirees most of the time or always, while 41% rarely or never do so. Lack of time (52%) and insufficient resources (45%) were among the biggest barriers to knowledge transfer. The study highlights a gap between recognising the value of institutional knowledge and having systems to preserve it.

A separate 2023 systematic review by researcher Nataliya Galan examined 91 empirical studies on knowledge loss resulting from employee turnover, underlining the organisational consequences of losing expertise when employees leave. Published in The Learning Organization, the review brings attention to knowledge retention as an important organisational challenge.

As companies expand distributed teams and increasingly adopt AI-driven tools, the challenge is becoming more complex. Capturing information is one thing; preserving the human understanding behind a relationship is another. In this conversation with The Newsroom Nexus, Jamila Carrington Smith, Founder & CEO of The Relational IP Company, discusses how organisations can bridge client-servicing skill gaps, assess their dependence on individual employees, rethink knowledge transfer and ensure technology supports rather than replaces human judgement.

1. How can organisations bridge the skills gap within a client servicing team?

It is the skill set that culminates in client trust. It is anticipating the client’s needs, but it all starts from a place of skill. We see these very talented people who are great at client relationship management. Though training can be absolutely done, it is important to operationalise what the naturally talented people do. Though some people are born with natural charisma to connect with people, it is not always magic. I believe that it can be taught as well.

If you can operationalise the skills, you can do a lot of things. It helps with things like training to narrow the skills gap within the team. Especially with lots of virtual workers, people working from lots of different locations, we do lose some of the nuance that comes from being in person, and so this is a way to capture that and make meaning of it.

2. How to identify whether a client belongs to a specific employee or to the company?

For a client-facing business, from the CEO to the person who greets people at the front desk, everyone is actually responsible for the client experience. But there are indicators of whether a client belongs to an organisation or to a specific employee. The indicator is the bench strength, or the number of people working on a single account.

3. Do you think that exit interviews and forms have a significant role to play in knowledge transfer?

It’s something that one has to work on every single day. An exit interview is absolutely the wrong place for knowledge transfer. Why? Because even if someone with the best of intentions wants to offload everything they know, they cannot possibly do that in that short time. When it comes to a long-term relationship, it’s the little things that matter. Knowing a client beyond work, sometimes work. Those can’t be offloaded during an exit process.

4. In an AI-first industry, how to keep client relations human-first? 

When I was developing my own tool, I considered data privacy. Plus, humans have the ability to observe one another. That is an instinct which builds relationships. To me, automation is thin. It’s thin and soulless, and so, for this to work in the context of relationships, the tool has to sit behind the human. The tool has to support the human, while the human makes a decision.

Making Client Trust An Organisational Capability

Protecting client relationships requires organisations to look beyond individual performance and build collective capabilities. Training employees to anticipate client needs, ensuring adequate bench strength and making knowledge transfer an ongoing practice can help reduce dependence on individual relationship owners.

The APQC findings also suggest that technology adoption alone will not solve the problem. While AI can help capture and organise information, it cannot independently reproduce the human understanding, observation and judgement that go into building trust. As organisations rethink their approach to knowledge management, the priority must be to make expertise transferable without stripping relationships of their human element.

Ultimately, the objective should not be to replace the people who build client relationships, but to ensure that the knowledge and skills they develop do not leave with them.