PR Week’s Hannah Marriott is writing a feature based on a survey the magazine commissioned into clients levels of satisfaction with their PR agencies. And apparently they unearthed some common complaints.
According to Hannah’s Response Source enquiry (*): "The most common grumble was about lack of transparency in billing, with scores of respondents saying they wished PR agencies would provide them
with more detailed timesheets. Other complaints included a perception that agency PROs lacked business
knowledge, were not proactive and that the senior staff who pitched for the
business rarely worked on the account."
Would seem PR Week is devoting two pages to agency PROs responses to these points.
Hannah has kindly provided all the questions PR Week want us agency folk to respond to – in the spirit of public service, why not drop her a line here if, as she says: "you have any very specific, interesting
examples covering any of the following points on or off the record and I’ll give you a call back."
Deadline is 4pm tomorrow – so get your skates on.
Hannah’s questions:
Do you feel that some clients do not understand what their agency can do
for them? Why?
Can personal relationships sour an otherwise successful account? How?
Have you ever dumped a client? Why?
Are some clients totally unrealistic?
Are some of the things they complain about unavoidable?
Do some clients lack the nous/vision/balls to do something different and
daring?
Are some clients a nightmare to work with for other reasons?
Also, why does the pitch team sometimes have to differ from the account
team?
(*) Yes, I got this via Response Source – and I realise that these enquiries are the copyright of Daryl Willcox Publishing. However, as I’m hardly guilty of persistent forwarding of
these enquiries and breaching of copyright, I’m hoping Daryl will forgive me this once.