Clients, eh? Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. Am I right?

Agencies are high-pressure environments and anything which gets in the way causes stress.

Classic don’t understand:

  • that marketing needs time before you see results
  • how to raise and organise bugs
  • how to give design feedback

They make decisions and compromises that don’t make sense to us.

When any of this derails our hard work we find ourselves needing to privately vent.

The subject of that venting is the perceived cause.

The client gets it.

Your culture

Over time this attitude can seep into your culture decreasing the quality of your work.

What’s the point? When clients always ruin it.

  • The marketing campaign isn’t working because of their decisions.
  • The design isn’t great because they don’t believe in research.
  • The software is buggy because they can’t report issues

The problem compounds, a lack of respect leading to a lack of curiosity. A narrative forms in that starts to play out subtly in every interaction your team has with them.

And then it causes problems.

It reduces your influence because it stops you from treating clients as individuals and understanding why they think the way they do.

It reduces the quality of your work.

And no one takes accountability because it’s seen as a hopeless cause.

How can you provide excellent client service in these circumstances?

Push for empathy and accountability

Sometimes it’s true. Clients are sometimes the issue.

But they are also under pressure themselves and have a broader business to consider. It’s sometimes us who haven’t got the context.

They also don’t understand the process as well as you. Or even, they’ve done this differently before and are bringing an opposing belief around what works into the project.

This is your problem to solve.

The goal is to combine your expertise with the clients, and any failure to do this is partially your fault.

They need the value at the end of the project. And they need the process for getting there.

To achieve this you often need to influence them. To change their beliefs.

This involves empathy and accountability. These two things are reduced because of your attitude towards clients.

A lesson from the past

A good example.

If you were involved in a website redesign between 2005 and 2014 then your client will have told you “Make our logo bigger”

It was such a pointless request that it became an industry joke.

Clients didn’t understand that users don’t come to a website to look at the branding.

Designers who had their work ruined by this narcissistic instruction took a deep breath and counted to 10.

The frustration was real.

But with this week’s warning about your attitude towards clients in mind, let’s revisit and ask if we could have done better.

Did we understand where this ‘stupid’ request came from?

It’s because in other contexts, a bigger logo is better for your brand. The point of the website is partly to provide some brand awareness. If you are sponsoring a football shirt or an event. You want your logo nice and big.

This is often the context the client had come from. It’s the beliefs they have built up around how to achieve their goal.

If you’re going to grow a business, you need to understand others’ beliefs and know how to take them on a journey to what you believe.

But it’s pretty hard to do that while you’re making fun of them.

Just say “no” to client bashing.