A guide to the client-agency relationship: Uncovering 3 hidden opportunities

Building solid client-agency relationships based on mutual trust and collaboration takes work. Not only do you have to ensure your clients get what they paid for and achieve their business goals, but you also have to wrap the whole package up in an excellent client experience.

If you fail in any of these areas, you risk losing your clients to the competition — and getting a negative reputation in the process.

In this guide, we’ll look at what exactly makes a good client-agency relationship, why it’s important, and how to measure client satisfaction. You’ll also learn about three valuable opportunities to increase your customer satisfaction and how to use technology and automation to implement those tactics for optimal results.

What we'll cover

Why is a strong client-agency relationship important?

A strong client-agency relationship is crucial for guiding your clients to success and ensuring they remain committed to working with your agency. It goes beyond taking a list of requirements and going through a standard procedure — you have to truly understand your client, their goals, and what they expect out of the relationship.

This allows you to:

• Build trust by showing your commitment to your client’s success.
• Improve communication by learning about each client’s business and their unique goals.
• Build higher-quality solutions tailored to your clients’ needs.

From a business standpoint, this leads to higher client retention. Satisfied clients stick around, meaning you don’t have constant churn in your client base. And the longer you work with each client, the better you can understand their business and tailor your offerings to their specific requirements.

What makes a good client-agency relationship?

If you want to understand the impact you’re having on clients — and whether they’re happy — you need to know what makes for a good client-agency relationship. Here are a few elements to pay attention to that indicate good relationships.

Clear communication

Your agency needs to set clear communication standards with clients to ensure you understand their needs and expectations. Focus on:

• Open communication to make sure everyone is comfortable sharing their thoughts
• Honest communication to prevent misunderstandings
• Consistent communication to keep all stakeholders in the loop

This means establishing clear lines of communication upfront, which might look like:

• Weekly video calls
• Daily Slack/text updates
• Monthly reporting
• A go-to contact they can reach out to with any questions or comments

Whatever you choose to do, make it a standard procedure. Structured communication reduces communication gaps and helps everyone stay aligned throughout a project’s lifecycle.

Defined goals and expectations

Successful partnerships start with clear goals and expectations. Your agency’s role is to listen to your clients, learn about their business goals, and create clear plans to help them succeed.

Start by working with them to create a roadmap with project milestones, deliverables, and key performance metrics (KPIs) and set clear expectations.

But keep in mind that aligning goals and expectations isn’t a one-time process.. Market conditions, business priorities, compliance requirements, and client needs may shift over time. Regular reviews will help your agency reassess and realign with clients’ evolving objectives.

Mutual trust and respect

Mutual respect and trust are the cornerstone of any working relationship. Your clients aren’t just paying you for simple deliverables — they are trusting you with the success of their businesses.

So they need to feel confident that you have their best interests in mind. This mutual trust and respect will help foster a collaborative environment where both parties contribute towards a common goal.

Building trust will take time and requires your agency to consistently deliver on your promises. But it also means staying proactive and addressing any potential issues before they affect the project. Doing so demonstrates your commitment to your clients’ success.

Transparency and accountability

Transparency and accountability are important factors for both sides. Agencies are responsible for delivering results that align with clients’ needs and expectations, but clients have to give honest feedback and drive decisions.

It starts with budgets, timelines, and scope of work, where both parties address the cost of a project, what it entails, and when the work is expected to be done. This helps you iron out challenges and avoid potential surprises, like clients expecting a feature that is outside the scope and budget for a particular project.

The right tools can make transparency and accountability easier. Give your clients the ability to see what’s happening in real time using centralized project dashboards. There, they can quickly view a project’s status, find the latest updates, and ask questions about progress.

A collaborative proofing platform like Ziflow makes it simple for agencies and clients to review deliverables asynchronously or together in real time. 

Collaboration and flexibility

In a client-agency relationship, both sides bring expertise to the table. You know all about strategies, approaches, and best practices in your field, but your client knows everything about their business.

So it’s a two-way street, where the client is just as responsible for a project’s success. Both sides must work together as a team, be flexible to changes, and adapt quickly to unexpected shifts — especially in fast-paced industries like tech.

Involve clients as much as possible during the completion of projects. Let them know about issues, get feedback on choices, and continuously ensure they’re satisfied with the progress. This collaborative approach leads to better outcomes, because you’re combining your agency’s abilities and knowledge with your clients’ business acumen and industry expertise.

Mutual support

It’s your job as an agency to support your client’s goals by offering advice and insights into the best actions to take. However, it’s also up to your clients to support your agency’s efforts and provide the resources required for your team to do their best work.

Make sure you establish upfront what clients are responsible for providing throughout the process — from onboarding and project requirements to feedback and final approval. And clearly communicate what clients can expect from you in return.

This support also extends to celebrating successes and learning from setbacks. When each party is invested in the other’s success, it creates a stronger, more resilient partnership that can push through challenges and take advantage of opportunities.

Long-term perspective

The best client-agency relationships are more than just transactional. They’re true partnerships that focus as much on long-term success as short-term wins. This means thinking beyond the current project.

By setting up regular strategy sessions, gathering industry insights, and proactively making recommendations, you show that your agency is truly dedicated to your client’s long-term outcomes. You’re a strategic partner — not just a service provider.

How to measure satisfaction in client-agency relationships

Agencies often measure success by things like billing growth, referral business, and awards. But those factors don’t necessarily correlate with how satisfied your clients actually are with your provided services.

Client satisfaction metrics are typically more qualitative and quantitative. So you may have to dig a little deeper to get a good idea of how happy your clients are with your processes, deliverables, and working relationship in general.

That said, here’s how to start measuring satisfaction in your client-agency relationships.

Communication standards

Your communication standards set realistic expectations and prevent misunderstandings. But it doesn’t just boil down to the information shared — it also encompasses the processes and methods used to convey that information.

Look at your current communication protocols and make sure you have standardized:

• Regular check-ins that fill clients in on what’s happening and ensure they’re updated on their projects
• Reporting methods that clearly communicate the value you deliver
• Communication channels — like email, Slack, and client portals — so clients know where to go to find the latest information or give feedback

Client and project visibility

Providing your clients with project visibility builds trust and allows for better collaboration throughout the project lifecycle. You can do this by setting up limited guest access for your clients in your project management and proofing software.

You can use these tools to:

• Create dashboards that show the latest updates, project files, and upcoming tasks.
• Send regular project alerts notifying clients about feedback requests and new updates.
• Create dedicated, centralized project spaces to store files, communicate, and collaborate.

For example, Ziflow allows you to give your clients secure access to all project assets and their associated comments, discussions, decisions, and previous versions.

Response and resolution

Things won’t always go smoothly in your client relationships. People make mistakes, and miscommunications happen. What matters is how you respond to and resolve these problems when they happen. Look at your current procedure for resolving conflicts to see if it’s effective and if there are any ways to improve.

Some key areas to look at are:

• The time it takes to identify problems, communicate them to clients, and implement a resolution.
• Repeat issues that could potentially be eliminated with policy or process changes.
• Client feedback trends that may indicate a quality drop or gap in your procedures.

Best practices for managing a client-agency relationship: 3 hidden opportunities

Managing clients and building successful relationships takes a lot of work. But there are a few best practices that will help you build a better, more successful client-agency relationship. Let’s look at three opportunities worth investing in.

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Opportunity #1: Improve communication standards by getting out of email

While email is often the gold standard for business communications, it’s not always the best choice for agency-client communications. Project information often ends up scattered throughout multiple email threads, making it hard to locate key details, find project files, and get the right feedback to the right people.

In other words, email can be a bottleneck that hampers progress and wastes time. In fact, on average, employees still spend over an entire work day drafting emails each week.

Instead, agencies can use project management and dedicated proofing and feedback tools like Ziflow to streamline communication (and take it out of email). These solutions help agencies organize project information, manage project updates, and provide contextualized communication.

Here’s how to get your agency out of the email rabbit hole:

Get an agreement with your clients early on the cadence and context of WIP updates

When initiating a new project, it’s critical to get an agreement on what your client or partner wants to see throughout the project, what you suggest they see, and the formats in which that information will arrive.

The context portion of your updates to customers or clients is a big value add too. If it's predictable, they will know where to look for the information that's most important to them. That information will differ across your different stakeholders who are receiving these updates.

Automate reminders where possible 

Automation is one of the simplest ways to streamline client communication. Project management tools offer many features to automate communication based on predefined variables.

For example, if an agency team member posts an updated file to a project — such as a new graphic or content deliverable — you can send an automated reminder if the client doesn’t check in to give feedback within three days. 

This saves account managers time by ensuring both clients and team members are regularly reminded of their current tasks. But it also lets clients know that you’re dedicated to collaboratively moving projects forward.

Create transparency in activities

Keeping your clients in the loop is one of the best ways to increase their trust in your agency and ensure they understand what’s going on. You don’t want them to be in the dark, regularly sending emails or calling to get updates about their projects. Instead, use your project management solution to post project updates, statuses, and upcoming tasks.

Of course, this can get overwhelming if you bombard them with every little detail — especially when you’re producing a lot of marketing collateral for large campaigns. So may want to limit it to important updates on elements that require client feedback or input to avoid overwhelming them with information.

Still, some clients prefer a more hands-on approach, so talk to your client to determine what they want to see and focus on conveying those updates. This type of targeted transparency, combined with automated notifications, will ensure visibility into the most relevant information and keep clients informed — at their convenience.

Opportunity #2: Automate client and project visibility in the client-agency relationship

Project visibility is one of the key things to get right to maintain your client’s trust. But keeping them continuously updated can take a lot of time, especially for larger or more complex projects.

Automation can help your agency give clients access to and visibility into their projects. You can use your project management solution to automate notifications and create detailed project dashboards to take some of the work off of yourself and your team.

But making the most of these tools will take some work, so let’s look at a few strategies to help you use automation effectively.

Provide clients with non-managed updates via dashboard (i.e., let the technology do the work)

Automated updates through project dashboards are a great way to improve client visibility without adding more work for your team. You can design your project workflow to automatically post updates, so clients can log in and see the real-time project status at their leisure.

The idea is to let technology do the heavy lifting. Spend time setting up systems in your software and creating automated alerts and custom dashboards with client access. Once done, you can rely on your system to let clients know what’s going on and allow them to find whatever project details they wish without taking time away from you and your team.

Integrate with client systems 

You aren’t the only one who will be using project management solutions to track client deliverables. Your clients will also do the same, setting up internal processes and software to monitor their projects and ensure they are on track.

It’s a headache to manage projects from two separate locations, but you can use automation to integrate these systems and make life easier. Most software platforms have APIs that allow them to communicate with other systems, meaning you can automate the transfer of data from your PM platform to your client’s.

This approach reduces communication delays, minimizes errors, and allows access to agency information in more familiar environments. Even better, other stakeholders in your client’s organization can view project details without being onboarded into your own project management system.

Standardize but adapt to new information requirements

Finally, visibility isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it approach. It’s important to provide consistent methods of communication, but you should also regularly discuss modifications to the data and information being reported to your client. 

Think about what you can standardize but also adapt and make those standards modular over time. Consistency makes it easy for people to consume information, and it makes them feel like they are getting a level of visibility that will contribute to their overall customer satisfaction and happiness.

Opportunity #3: Client response and resolution

Addressing your client’s concerns will be one of the main ways your agency improves and maintains client satisfaction. Even if you do great work, some clients may still have questions and concerns about the process — concerns you must address quickly before they snowball.

It’s up to you to set the expectations for your new clients, while taking their preferences into account. Some clients may expect you to address their concerns straight away, while others may be more flexible. You have to strike a balance between being available and setting expectations for reasonable response times. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of tools and strategies you can use to improve response time and address client concerns more effectively. Let’s look at a few ways to tackle this opportunity.

Automate new project kickoffs

A good step to take to improve client response times is to streamline the time it takes to kick off new projects. Using a traditional approach, you have to manually create project boards, collect client information, distribute materials to team members, and much more. 

However, with automated project management and onboarding tools, this process is much easier. To start, you can: 

• Use web forms to automatically gather information and route it to the appropriate team members.
• Automate the creation of project tasks, workflows, and approvals in your PM software.
• Create automated welcome email sequences to keep clients informed and aware of what to expect from day one.

This will help ensure a smooth start to the project and show your clients that you’re ready to get up and running quickly.

Audit project activity, learn from it, and share with the client

Even the most reliable and optimized processes will require tweaks as your team structure, software and tools, and client roster change over time. Auditing your client response process regularly will help you uncover any new gaps or weaknesses that may affect the quality of your work and your client relationships.

But these audits can also serve a positive purpose: finding outlying techniques and approaches that led to successful results. Analyze your positive outcomes and see if there are ways to formalize those processes to replicate the results.

Provide access to the systems they influence and affect

If you have shared resources, you can show how response times have downstream impacts. This is a big one that many agencies and brand teams have embraced to try and drive greater client satisfaction and it definitely kind of spans the things that we talked about today. It spans visibility, it spans communication, and it's definitely about response time as well. It just demonstrates a greater response time.

Elevate your client agency relationship with Ziflow 

When it comes to your client-agency partnerships, you can’t afford to just do the bare minimum if you want to retain clients. Clients want to work with agencies that clearly communicate, work collaboratively to solve problems, and support their businesses to ensure future success. 

As an agency, it’s your job to ensure your clients' satisfaction and do what you can to help them complete projects and achieve their business goals — and Ziflow can help.

With Ziflow, your agency can build a collaborative client proofing process you and your clients can use to streamline project feedback and revisions. Ziflow is built specifically for creative work and supports the way agencies do business. You can automate data collection from clients, collaborate in real time, and centralize your client feedback — all in one easy-to-use platform.