How agencies and clients can improve working relationships | WARC | The Feed

How agencies and clients can improve working relationships

Marketers can improve their working relationships and quality of work by boosting accountability, new data from Aprais shows.

Why it matters 

Accountability is one of seven core behaviours defined by world-leading client-agency evaluation experts Aprais as essential to business relationships, the other six being Communication, Challenge, Resilience, Goals, Trust, and Functional (ability to do the job).

Accountability is the process of setting shared expectations and holding people to them. In business relationships, these expectations are ideally linked to the company’s mission, values and goals. It’s a vital quality to leadership because it creates respect and trust, and it can make individuals and teams more confident in both themselves, and each other.

Tell me more

Figures drawn from Aprais’ database of more than 24,000 client-agency evaluations globally across 20 years show both agency and client-side marketers have clear opportunities to close the gap in accountability to put them among their top-performing peers.

Agencies have the potential to improve their scores by 36 points, and for clients, there is an opportunity to improve by 33 points.

Agencies in particular should focus on accountability, says Aprais, because their client partners rank this quality second only to functional ability to do the job in terms of importance.

How agencies can improve accountability

1. Accept responsibility for mistakes.
2. Ensure sufficient depth and quality of staff.
3. Offer recommendations that reflect a thorough understanding of the client brand and its consumers.
4. Show initiative to collaborate with other agencies involved with the client’s business to add powerful value.
5. Demonstrate an understanding of the role of digital across the entire communications strategy regardless of agency type and scope of work.

How clients can improve accountability

1. Ensure briefs are clear and thorough, and allow reasonable response time.
2. Involve the agency in research and strategic issues, where appropriate.
3. Provide adequate staffing and minimise churn.
4. Be transparent when dealing with multiple agencies.
5. Manage the priority of projects, and for larger projects establish RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed).

Sourced from Aprais