Our focus in Client Services is providing a great service experience.  We accomplish that partly through following a solid process, and partly through maintaining a steady flow of communication between our internal teams and the client. 

Every agency wants the client to have a great service experience.  Ultimately, it’s the success of the projects assigned to us, and how well we fulfill their expectations that determine client satisfaction.  With that in mind, we do our best to set high goals for ourselves, while setting realistic, achievable expectations for our clients.  However, as a brand marketer or marketing director, there are three key things you can do to set yourself up for a better agency service experience.

1. Set clear and specific goals.  Interactive agencies, in particular, are used to having to demonstrate Return on Investment (ROI) for our work.  However, to do that effectively, we need to know what benchmarks we are measuring, what your business goals are for any project or campaign, and what constitutes “success” for you.  The more clear and specific you can be in the beginning, the higher the likelihood that the end result will hit that target.
2. Ask questions.  Marketers hire interactive agencies for our depth of knowledge, because they understand that interactive is a complicated discipline.  A good agency educates their clients on the value of their interactive marketing.  The more questions you ask, the more you help your agency empower you to make good decisions about how your company will leverage interactive. 
3. Let your agency know when they are missing the mark.  No one bats 1000. If the creative doesn’t quite capture your brand, or there are additional features that need to be scoped out before the project moves any further, or if your business goals and strategy have changed unexpectedly and those changes need to be reflected in the project, the sooner you let your agency know, the better.  An agency can’t fix a situation till they’re aware of it. 

Obviously, we hope that you’ll choose us as your interactive agency.  Clearly, the agency’s own commitment to service has a huge impact on the service experience you’ll receive.  But simply by making a conscious effort to address these three key issues, you can make sure that on your end, you’re setting yourself up for success. 

Client Services is a unique position, because we’re more or less the line of communication between the client and production.  Part of how we add value to the company is by making it possible for the client’s desires and objectives to be clearly conveyed to a village of designers, programmers, web-architects, interactive marketers, art directors, copywriters, online media buyers, ad writers, search engine optimization specialists, and all the other specialties required to fully complete the project.   We coordinate schedules, assign resources and shepherd your project throughout the process to ensure it aligns with your vision at every step along the way.  

Client Services is far more than a communication team.  When we do our job correctly, the client is removed from the management, coordination, and processing of the steps required to achieve their goal.  Instead, the client is placed in a decision-making position – provided choices and recommendations instead of assignments and deadlines.  We also act as translators in both directions, letting the client know, in layman’s terms (or at least in common business language) when there are technical issues that arise in the process.  Because of that unique positioning, we’re sometimes caught in the middle when client objectives don’t align perfectly with technical and creative restrictions.   It’s our job to see the big picture. It’s our job to always look out for the client’s best interest and be their in-house advocate.  Sometimes that means making tough decisions that impact a timeline or goal, while other times it means going back to the client and working to develop an idea that better fits the desired result or budget.  But at all times it means being an honest, dedicated advocate – we’ll always err on the side of honesty and integrity…even when it hurts.  

Being the bungee cord between the objectives of the client and the requirements and restraints of implementation can be stressful at times.  But we learn and grown when we are stretched, and we love becoming a valued, contributing member of our client’s team! 

If you’re familiar with the concept of kaizen at all, it’s probably in the context of manufacturing or other assembly-line practices, not in the context of creative work.  Kaizen is a Japanese term that, roughly translates to “continuous improvement.” However, there is a lot more implied by it than the standard Western idea of continuous improvement. There is an element of “respect for people” implied in the idea of kaizen, and three guiding principles must be in place for true kaizen: focus on results and process; big-picture, systemic thinking; and a non-judgmental, non-blaming attitude (blame-laying being considered a waste of time and energy).

As an interactive agency, we’re in a radically new industry that blends the creative with the technological. From a project management standpoint, a kaizen attitude is a great fit for process improvement, because it works well with both the very human creative elements and the very practical process and delivery elements. With each new project, we experiment, learn new and better processes, and we implement them and carry them forward into the next project. We also learn from things that didn’t work well, and eliminate those elements from the process as we go.  I’m not saying that we are formally instituting kaizen here at LeapFrog; just that the improvement process here feels, to me at least, very much like kaizen.
Often in business, instead of making small, incremental changes, you determine that you’re going to “do it right.” “Doing it right” means taking time, making preparations, setting the stage, and totally implementing a complete, fully-formed new way of doing things.

But there are a lot of problems with this approach. First, it fails to take into account the shifting, continuously moving nature of work. By insisting on completely defining both the problem and solution in detail first, a person or organization can effectively postpone making any changes …pretty much forever. Second, it fails to take into account the complex nature of change and how even a small change can have difficult-to-predict outcomes that then need to be dealt with. By trying to implement massive, all-at-once, “programs” of change, an organization is effectively tacking learning the new way, maintaining the new way (building new habits and breaking old ones), troubleshooting the new way (dealing with the inevitable “oops, didn’t think about that” items), and improving the new way simultaneously. In short, it’s a great way to set yourself up for failure.

As LeapFrog moves forward and continues to grow, we’ll need to keep improving to continue to exceed client expectations. That means improving one task at at time, one project at a time, continuously, with respect for the creative people who are part of our team and with an eye on the big picture.