What a Head of Client Services does, and what the title hides.
A Head of Client Services runs the people who run the accounts, and answers for whether clients stay. The title hides that most of the job happens inside the agency: who serves which account, what each account costs to serve, and which problem gets the senior hour this week.
The client-facing half is the half everyone can see. The other half is where accounts are kept or lost.
The visible half
The Head of Client Services is the senior face on the portfolio. That means being present when an account changes hands, attending the reviews that decide renewals, and being the person the client calls when something has gone wrong and they want it fixed by someone who can commit the agency.
It also means the hard conversations. The fee that has to change, the scope that has drifted, the direction the client is set on that will not work. Those calls belong to the most senior client person in the building, because they carry the agency's judgement and its relationship at the same time.
The hidden half
- Resourcing. Which people sit on which accounts, and whether the mix of senior and junior hours matches what each account pays. This is where margin is made or lost, long before anyone looks at a spreadsheet.
- Cost to serve. Every account has a real cost in hours, and some of the happiest clients are the ones costing the most. The Head of Client Services is the person who knows which accounts those are, and decides what to do about it.
- Hiring and reviews. The account team is hired, developed and reviewed by this role. Who joins, who steps up, and who is moved off an account before the client asks.
- The escalation point. On delivery, scope, risk and priority, the buck stops here. A good Head of Client Services is the reason the Managing Director hears about a problem after it has been handled and not before.
What else the title hides
There is nobody above you on the account. At BBDO and JWT I sat in every client meeting with a senior person between me and the hard question, and when the client pushed back, that person took it. Running my own agency for eight years, the question came to me, along with the pricing, the forecast and the payroll.
That is the shift the title hides. The job is less about serving clients and more about carrying them, and carrying the team in front of them.
What it cost me to learn
In 2023 a healthcare client paying AED 30,000 a month had a good team on it and a satisfied client. I moved the day to day to an Account Manager who ran it better than I did, and I stopped attending the quarterly reviews. The renewal never came, roughly half a year on. The work had been fine the whole way through. Four meetings I chose not to attend decided AED 360,000 a year.
The same year an account in Abu Dhabi ended with a three-line email. I had hired an Account Director to hold that relationship every week, and I put that person in front of the client instead of beside them, before the client had any reason to trust someone so new. Every time I asked how the account was, the answer came back reassuring, and I took the reassurance as evidence.
Two accounts, and the same mistake underneath both. The senior person was visible without being close.
What good looks like
Read the margin on every account weekly, not at the quarter. Put the senior hour where the risk is, not where the fee is biggest or the client loudest. Stay in the room through every handover, and leave only once the client trusts the new person the way they trusted you. Hire the team yourself, run the reviews yourself, and treat a calm status update as a question to check, never as an answer.
None of this replaces excellent delivery. Servicing has to be reliable every week, and the Head of Client Services is answerable for that too. This is the layer that sits on top of it, and it is the layer that decides whether the account is still there next year.
The longer version
- The clients I did not keep →
- Lead the handoff or lose the renewal →
- Why agencies lose the clients they should keep →