The state of agency-client collaboration [Infographic]
We all know relationships are hard, whether personal or business. And the agency-client relationship can sometimes be contentious.
I know – I’ve lived it.
While I’ve mostly been on the client side of marketing, I dabbled briefly on the agency side many years ago. One of the big challenges I’ve seen and experienced first-hand is just the day-to-day struggle of working together when we’re coming from two different angles: speaking the same lingo so we come to an understanding (the same understanding) on the goals and needs for a specific project, knowing where a project stands at any moment (long periods of no communication = you’re busy creating brilliance for me or you’re off to another project?), keeping everyone on track (sometimes agencies have to become client-wranglers…I admit to being an offender). And that’s just the start.
So it was no surprise to me when looking through the results of our recent survey on the state of agency-client collaboration that communication and difficulties working together would be a major theme. What did surprise me, however, is how much pressure clients like me are applying to agencies to get collaboration tools in place to help deal with those problems. And apparently, clients are hitting agencies where it counts most – their wallets.
A few of our findings
- Almost 40% of brands have not awarded business to an agency for lack of adequate tools for managing work and communications on the account.
- 71% consider it a competitive differentiator over other agencies if an agency has a single collaboration system to manage project work online.
- 41% of agencies have had a client or prospect require them to have a collaboration system to keep or win a major account.
Yikes!
We put our results in the infographic you see here and also created a brief report. Have a look and let us know what you think.
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Post by Linda Souza
Linda Souza is Central Desktop’s VP of Marketing. Linda enjoys writing about technology as a means to solving a problem and shares in her posts ideas and observations to help business professionals focus on the things that really matter. Inspiration for Linda’s posts often stems from current events, interesting stats, commercials, hallway banter and pop culture.
