Time has come for PR agencies to use external expertise to keep clients happy
Happy Clients = Growth + Steady Revenue
One can’t doubt the above equation, but the question is – how can we keep our clients happy?
Now I am not going to discuss client strategies, media relations or crisis communication; I am not an expert at that. However if you are a PR agency, I’d like you to take a look also at how things are handled within your agency, and the effects it has on your deliverable to your clients-possibly leading to dissatisfied clients.
Clients seek a consultant in a partner and more so in a PR agency. The PR agency bringsintellectual expertise on the table, else the client could hire few PR resources themselves to serve their need, isn’t it?
This being true, then take a look at how is the intellectual time of PR executives within the agency is invested? Quick estimates of the time spent by the executives suggest that 70 to 80 % of their time is spent on mundane activities that do not require their scale of intellect. These time consuming activities are- monitoring, news dissemination, news evaluation, preparing reports, research… I am sure some of you might want to add more to this list.
Now I am not suggesting that these activities are not important, infact they are critical, but they do take away a huge chunk of intellectual time of the executives.
Instead the clients would be better served if the executives invest time in -
- Analyzing the report of the PR activities
- Providing cerebral inputs to the clients
- Strategic communication objective
But if the executive is spending more than 70% of their time in mundane activities, where is the time for them to analyze? This can only be possible if you use outside expert help instead of your people time.
Of course there are several agencies that have built processes internally to deal with these tasks, it is not as if they didn’t know of the problem. But only a handful of agencies have successfully been able to reduce the burden of mundane task from the executives and utilized their time more resourcefully. This is largely because of lack of economy of scale or lack of readily available technology to save time and effort.
To sum it up if PR agencies truly want to keep clients happy then they must seek external expertise for the critical yet laborious tasks of monitoring, analysis, reports, etc. This will not just increase the productivity and therefore more profits, but will also provide greater value to your clients.
Executive’s Total Intellectual time – Mundane activities = Happy Clients!
