There is nothing I like more than signing a client who has had a terrible experience with their previous agency.

I’m dead serious because the quality of our service is awesome.

Yes, I’m biased, but I’ve had many customers tell us this. As a result, if the customer has had a poor experience, we will ultimately impress the pants off them from the first meeting. No matter who you are, big or small, one meeting with our lovely, friendly and diverse team will make you feel at ease.

But how can you tell that you’ve got a bad agency?

You can say “well the results are not there” but even bad agencies can get decent results. Similarly, even the best agencies in the world have campaigns that go terribly, so how can you tell? Well, in this blog I hope to demonstrate how.

Reporting

First and foremost, how often do you get a report from your agency? If you don’t consistently get one EVERY MONTH or more, then your agency is not doing its job. It’s amazing the number of clients we speak to that say “We never got a report” or “I think I’ve had one report in the past six months.” This is unacceptable. The minimum your agency should be doing is to show you each month what you’ve paid for.

Account Managers

Does your account manager keep changing every two months? Worse, do you ring up your agency and ask to speak to your account manager only to be told “Oohh they don’t work here anymore.” This is again unacceptable. You should have a proper account manager, and if they leave, a full handover and introduction should be arranged with you. Not to do so is the sign of a bad agency.

Response Time

If it takes your agency days to reply to every email or sometimes you’re ignored completely this is terrible. We aim to reply to everyone within 24 hours. I will hold my hands up and say that I’ve personally missed this a few times, but this is the exception. Customer service is key, if they are not there for you when you need them, you should have another agency.

Yes Men

If your agency constantly says yes and never pushes back, then they are more than likely not experienced enough. I don’t like pushing back on clients, but at the same point there is a boundary and we’re paid for our time and expertise, so if our client is about to make a bad judgement call, we will tell them. Similarly, if we keep saying yes to actions that are outside of our scope of work we have to push back. We are paid for our time, and we would hate to do a rush job of something because we’re not being paid for it, this doesn’t leave you with a good service. We push back with some clients, and it provides a good boundary for work and professional relationships because we know we’re being paid properly and so are able to deliver a stellar quality of work. When we (in the past) have just said yes, this has led to us rushing and not delivering a satisfactory quality of work.

Do You Feel Valued?

Going on from this point. The question should simply be, does your agency make you feel valued? If not, tell them. If you’re not happy with the answer, then it is likely they are not the right agency for you.

If you don’t feel valued, then please give us a call and we will be delighted to show you how we operate.