Question 1

How do you recognize it?

Accepted Answer

Recordings pile up in the vendor library while nobody opens them; the search bar gets used twice in a quarter and both times by the same account manager. Client-facing follow-ups still get written by hand the morning after a call, because the summary that landed in Slack was never reviewed or edited. Action items extracted by the assistant sit unassigned in a shared doc, and the same three decisions resurface on the next client call. Two people on the same retainer produce different notes from the same meeting, and neither matches what the client remembers agreeing to. Seat count grows past the number of people who actually attend client calls, and the per-seat line item is never questioned at renewal.

Question 2

Why does it happen?

Accepted Answer

Adoption is measured by recordings captured rather than by artifacts shipped, so the tool succeeds at the only metric anyone tracks while producing nothing the client pays for. Nobody owns the 10-minute post-call pass that turns a raw summary into a deliverable, so the output stays in the vendor's interface instead of the agency's project management system. Meeting data is treated as an archive to search later rather than an input to a recurring deliverable, which means the value only appears if someone remembers to go looking. Accuracy on names, numbers, and commitments is assumed rather than spot-checked, so the first time a client catches a wrong figure in a shared summary the team quietly stops sending them.

Question 3

How do you fix it?

Accepted Answer

Pick one recurring client meeting per account and commit to shipping a reviewed summary within 24 hours for four consecutive weeks; measure whether the client replies to it. Assign a named reviewer per client call and put that name in the summary header, so the artifact has an owner before it leaves the agency. Route extracted action items into the project management tool the delivery team already uses, not into the assistant's own task list, so nothing depends on a second login. Run a 30-day seat audit against actual call attendance and cut seats for anyone who has not joined a recorded client call in that window.

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