Maturing client/agency relationships and a new kind of partnership

As a result there has been a transference in an agency’s remit, from being suppliers of marketing activation services to partners in understanding and nurturing customer experiences that demonstrate real value.

With this evolution, the way agencies work, and how they run and service these relationships, is having to change.

Client behaviours are changing

Digital change impacts how teams are structured. Similarly it affects the relationships that clients value, and the skills client teams need to be a success today, tomorrow and in years from now.

We’ve identified two emerging client behaviours that are leading this change.

We call them ‘ambitious challengers’ and ‘digital agitators’.

‘Ambitious challengers’ are looking to super-charge their growth strategy and to create customer-centric experiences that earn the right for digital relevancy in the eyes of customers and buyers.

‘Digital agitators’, on the other hand, are restless, looking at emerging technologies and tools that will give them the edge over competitors – often creating ‘radical’ internal teams that bring innovation into complex and slow-moving businesses.

Both types have their individual drivers, but also commonality in the challenges they face.

Primarily clients’ needs will always be the same – they crave trusted digital advice that is value driven and, at a time when there is an increasing number of things businesses could be doing across devices, channels and platforms, knowing what to do and why is ever more important.

We think the relationships clients are looking for now offer three things:

1. The creation of excellent yet de-risked solutions
2. Making excellent even better over time
3. A richness of skills that are available, joined up and ideally will mature their own internal capabilities over time

The creation of excellent yet de-risked solutions

Clients are accountable for making a positive business impact with the activities or technologies they implement, and we, as agency partners, are responsible for taking the risk out of how they get there while retaining creativity and imagination at the core of what we do.

Tough brief.

But the best digital agencies are ensuring increased performance from day one by virtue of their user insight and testing methods that build bomb-proof business cases and creative, validated user experiences.

For example, at Code Computerlove we have methods that prove our work will have a positive business impact without writing a line of code or designing a single component.

Adding to this strategic foundation, we further remove risk in the production process, deploying advanced development approaches that take a ‘value first’ approach, spending the most time on the things that drive the most business value – getting things live quickly and frequently – utilising test-driven development methods as standard throughout.

Making excellent even better over time

Guaranteed success is great but the dynamic nature of customer behaviour means even excellent experiences have a shelf life.

Effective agencies have a responsibility to ensure an increasing return on client investment by continually improving the relevancy of the experience – getting more people to complete more goals every month.

This is more than ‘being proactive’. This is about having a commercial place around the table that looks intimately at clients’ business performance across production, service delivery, pricing structures and customer services.

Joined up

The best relationships are those that can be responsive to change, bolstering client teams with capability in areas where the client wishes to grow in knowledge and proficiency over time.

Skills value exchange will be an emerging trend at a time when expertise is finite, difficult to find and even more difficult to retain.

It’s also our shared responsibility to forge relationships with other agency partners to create activities that are joined up and valuable, leaving old-school agency silos and land-grabs for services left to the confines of history.

Steve Peters, sales and marketing director, Code Computerlove

Tel: 0161 276 2080

Email: steve.peters@codecomputerlove.com

Web: www.codecomputerlove.com

Twitter: @computerlovers