Name the three that landed, ask for the four that didn't

Reply to the three. Name each thing that arrived, confirm it’s fine or say when you’ll come back on it, then ask only for the four still outstanding. Do not resend the list.

A client who sent three of seven items read the request, understood it, went and found three documents, and sent them. Then something stopped them — a call, a bank statement they need to download, a passport in someone else’s drawer. What they need from you now is not motivation. It’s a smaller job.

A reminder restating all seven does two things wrong. It tells the client their effort didn’t register: if the message or the portal still lists what they already sent, the reasonable reading is that it never arrived. And it restores the task to its original size at the moment it had actually got smaller. The Behavioural Insights Team’s EAST framework (published April 2014) puts “make it easy” first, and specifically reducing the hassle of the action you want. Four named items is less hassle than seven. Seven with three secretly already done is more hassle than seven, because now they have to work out which ones.

The follow-up, and the thing that makes it possible

Thanks for the passport, the payslips and the tenancy agreement — all received. Still need: the last three months of bank statements, the P60, proof of the deposit, and the signed agreement. Then the link.

That message is trivial to write and almost impossible to write reliably from memory or from an inbox, which is why most firms send the full list instead: their tool only knows the request, not the items in it.

So track items, not requests. In ClientLoop each requested item is its own record with its own status, so approved items stay approved on the client’s page and the scheduled nudges run against what’s still open — the client never sees finished work reappear. Content Snare and FileInvite work the same way. The manual version costs nothing: one row per item per client in a spreadsheet, a status column, and you write the chase from the blank rows.

Whichever you use, the rule is the same. A client who has started is the most cooperative they will ever be. Don’t answer that by handing back the whole list.