If agencies are hired for their ideas, what are they usually fired for?
The client relationship.
At The Client Relationship Consultancy we put relationships back at the heart of business.
Healthy relationships lead to account growth, better team morale, and higher margins
Imagine applying the intelligence, ingenuity and strategic rigor that you apply to your clients’ business problems to your client relationships. Too often, relationships are an accidental byproduct and not the result of a deliberate relationship strategy. Here is what we know: healthy relationships lead to account growth, better team morale, and higher margins. But for your relationships to thrive they need attention and focus. The Client Relationship Consultancy (CRC) works with independent agencies and every major holding company in the world helping agencies like yours focus squarely on those relationships.
We only work with communications agencies*
Our focus is creative, media, digital, public relations. Because communications is a creative business, it demands great nuance, finesse, and subtlety. It’s about how you communicate, interact, set expectations, listen, deliver on commitments, and trust. All of it adds up to your relationship with your clients. And for clients to believe in your ideas requires that your clients believe in your agency. To help agencies achieve that level of belief requires our complete focus.
* Please don’t ask us who our clients are. We hold all client names and their data within the highest possible standards of confidentiality.
How a client feels about your agency is predictive of future behaviour.
It’s human nature, really. How Person A feels about Person B becomes a prism through which Person A perceives (and judges) Person B’s work, no matter what it is.
We can tell you the same is true with how clients perceive the work-product from creative, media, digital and public relations agencies. A client who has negative feelings towards your agency doesn’t believe in the agency, will be less inclined to approve your work, and may be more likely to send your team off to do extra work just because. Conversely, a client who feels wonderful about the agency believes in the agency, trusts in the agency, and, so, requires fewer rounds of work. That’s why getting the emotional temperature check of your clients over time is smart business from both a growth and margin perspective.
Do you know…
how your clients feel about your agency?
how your agency teams feel about their clients?
how your employees feel about your agency?
“CRC are true partners. Our leadership team and agency take this very seriously. We would not be in the position that we are without this tool and our partners at the consultancy.”
- CRC Client Satisfaction Survey, Manager at Major Global Media Agency (name withheld due to strict confidentiality agreements with all of our agency clients)
Over 550,000 pieces of client data
With CRC it’s not only about getting an emotional temperature check with your clients, it’s about how your relationships compare with your competitors. Since 2004 we have focused only on the communications business, gathering findings from creative, media, digital, and PR clients, in 1,230 offices in 92 countries around the world. The resulting normative data helps our agency clients track their own relationship health against their respective industries.
Now more than ever, it’s time to go beyond the data when evaluating client relationships.
CRC Relationship Consultants are trained to interrogate the client data until it confesses.
Data is utterly useless until it’s turned into insight. While our products generate rich, valuable data about your client relationships, with CRC the data is not an end, it’s just the beginning. Each of our Relationship Consultants help agencies interpret the findings against thousands of normative data points, keep the agency honest, and provoke action coming out of each Relationship Review.
Our Consultants can meet separately with your leadership team to review aggregated agency findings and then with your account teams in breakout sessions to review specific client ratings and comments. Let’s see data do that.
The difference between CRC and other pure-play data vendors is the combination of our communications-industry focus, our rich normative data within it, and the interpretation by our Relationship Consultants with daily interaction with agencies.
Think of our Relationship Consultants as outsiders with insider knowledge:
Over 300 combined years of agency-side experience in client management and agency management
Ex-Chief Client Officers, Managing Partners, Group Heads of Account Management, New Business Directors and a Director of Talent
Creative, media, digital, and PR experience
Located in and serving Europe, North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific
Know an actionable insight in the data when they see one
Trained to coach your teams working on the front lines with your clients to improve their relationships, one by one
“Professional, knowledgeable people who honestly care about how we can assess and improve our client relationships.”
- CRC Client Satisfaction Survey, Manager at Major Global Creative Agency (name withheld due to strict confidentiality agreements with our agency clients)
Why does any of this matter?
Relationships are one of the most powerful and yet most under-utilized levers for growth, morale and margin.
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