How to get the best out of your agency: removing the barriers to communication

This is the first in a series of blogs aimed at helping clients get the best out of their agencies.

As part of these monthly posts we’ll be sharing our thinking, approach and knowledge on how to nurture productive client-agency relationships.

This month I wanted to focus on communication and the important role it plays in helping sustain a healthy relationship.

Open communication

You might be more familiar with the traditional agency approach, whereby all comms go through a single point of contact - the account manager.

At Deeson we believe that the most efficient and reliable way of getting the information you need is open communication between the project team and the client.

This direct line of communication means you can speak directly with the person dealing with your task, allowing information to flow freely and efficiently. By adopting this approach, it allows our account managers to focus on what’s important; overseeing your project and ensuring we continue to deliver great work - on time and on budget.

The process of information gathering and responding to client queries shouldn’t be convoluted. Rather than countless rounds of emails, problems could be resolved with a five minute phone call between the technical representatives of the agency and client.

Removing barriers of communication breeds trust, which is one of the most important characteristics of any business relationship.

Some questions to consider

• Do you find yourself caught up in an a web of email threads, with documents constantly being circulated, revised and re-revised with the aim of providing context to what’s being discussed?
• Are you not able to talk directly with the people delivering the work?
• Do you feel as though your business goals are not truly understood by your agency?

Listen and learn

Successful communication is all about listening, understanding the emotions and motives of the speaker. We’re all guilty of spending a lot of our daily lives talking at people and not enough time spent listening to them (and I mean actually listening, not just retaining eye contact and occasionally nodding). This goes for agencies and clients alike.

Calvin Coolidge once said "No man ever listened himself out of a job." Making sure we include the other half of humanity in this statement, it is certainly hard to argue with. A common agency mistake is to focus so much of their time telling clients what they think will solve their problem - rather than actually listening and understanding their needs.

Built into project process

We’ve found that the most successful way of getting under the skin of a project and start to truly understand what success looks like to the client is to onboard them with a Blueprint Workshop. Typically a day-long session, we get the key stakeholders from the client side and all the people responsible for delivering the project at Deeson in the same room to get at the core of the organisation's vision, strategy, and current challenge as they see it.

This high-level discovery gives an opportunity for stakeholders to speak candidly about their primary drivers which helps develop understanding amongst the teams. It also allows us to identify and gain consensus on the fundamental measurable goals for the project.

By having these sorts of conversations early on, we reduce our chances of jumping to conclusions or allowing the focus to drift to functionality that isn’t core to the project’s mission. This mission of the project will remain central to our work beyond launch day because our optimisation phase will make sure we continue to refine as we learn more about user behaviour.

For clients, be brave enough to share real problems and challenges - it’s the only way to get real benefit from an agency. They are there to provide an extremely valuable outside perspective.