Playbook, marketing agency
Sorting an agency complaint before anybody answers it
Complaints at an agency split cleanly, and the split decides the handling. On one side is service: the report came late, nobody replied for a week, the same asset was asked for three times. On the other is a complaint that the agency's work cost the client money, and since that money is usually media budget which has already left, it is a claim wearing a complaint's clothes.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for complaints holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The largest sums at risk are the client's own media budget rather than the agency's fee, so a complaint about an overspend concerns money already gone to a platform which nobody can hand back.
- A great many complaints are really about results, which the agency never promised and must not be recorded as having promised, so the reply has to avoid conceding a target that was never set.
- The reporting cycle generates complaints of its own: a client watching a dashboard between reports draws a conclusion from a bad fortnight and arrives angry before the monthly conversation.
- An agency's mistakes are often visible to the client's own customers, a wrong price in an advertisement or a message sent to the wrong segment, which turns an internal complaint into a public one on a timescale nothing else here runs to.
How it arrives
- the campaign has spent double what we set
- we still have not had last months report
- the results are nowhere near what we were told
- an ad went out with the wrong price on it
- nobody at your end has replied for a fortnight
- we want to raise this formally with someone senior
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The complaints route, with a named destination and a timescale | Who receives it, who investigates when the complaint is about the account team itself, and how long a response takes. Getting past a person who is part of the problem is the whole reason for publishing this. |
|---|---|
| What was actually committed, in the statement of work | Deliverables, cadence and reporting dates. Almost every service complaint resolves against this document, and it is the only thing separating a slip from a disappointment. |
| How media budgets are controlled, and what happens if one is exceeded | The caps in place, who is allowed to change them, how an overspend is spotted and what your published position on it is. This is the complaint that arrives with a number attached, and it needs an answer written before it turns up. |
| The position on results, in the wording your contracts use | That outcomes depend on the market and on what the client can act on, and what the agency does commit to. Publish it, because it is the sentence the assistant needs in order to avoid conceding something nobody promised. |
The reply
I am sorry this has gone wrong. Our complaints route and the response time are on our terms page, and it reaches somebody outside the account team so it is not answered by the people it is about [1]. If this is about spend rather than service it needs looking at against the account today rather than through me, because I cannot see any campaign or any figure. Leave your name, an email and what has happened and it will go to the right person.
It apologises for the experience without agreeing to a fault, which is the line to hold while a complaint may still become a claim. Saying the route bypasses the account team is the detail that stops somebody escalating in public instead. And it separates spend from service in one sentence, because those two complaints need different people at different speeds.
Where it stops
The trigger. The complaint involves money spent, a campaign that ran wrongly, anything the client's own customers saw, or a request to escalate.
This needs somebody who can look at the account rather than at a page, and it needs it today. Give me your name, an email and a line on what happened and I will get it to the person who handles complaints.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never accept that the agency caused a loss, or that spend will be refunded, credited or paused.
- Never agree that a result fell short of a target, since the target may be one the agency never accepted.
- Never explain why a campaign performed as it did, because that is a reading of an account nothing here can see.
- Never name or blame an individual member of staff, or a freelancer, in a reply about a mistake.
Questions
- Should an assistant handle complaints on an agency site at all?
- For routing, yes. Complaints go wrong when a client cannot find where to send one and posts it publicly instead. What it must not touch is the substance, because a sympathetic sentence about performance gets quoted back in a commercial conversation.
- Can it tell us a complaint has come in?
- It emails the name, the email and the message to an address you nominate, so somebody sees it. It cannot open a case, tag it, or tell the client where it has reached, which is why the reply should describe what happens next rather than imply a system.
- What about a complaint that spend went out of control?
- Treat it as urgent and hand it over with no attempt at explanation. Money may still be leaving while the conversation happens, and the only useful thing the assistant does is get a person onto the account.
Keep reading
- Everything for a marketing agencyService definitions and engagement terms convert. A price quoted for work nobody has scoped is the trap on an agency site.
- Handling complaints in generalThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- Two pots of money, and the client wants one of them backThe fee bought hours that are already spent. The budget left for a platform. Only one of the two is a conversation about a refund.
- Can we get a call booked, typed by four different peopleA prospect, a client chasing an account lead, a supplier and a student all type the same request. Only one of them is a discovery call.
- Our own site, and the sites we build for other peopleOne visitor cannot use the agency's own site. Another is buying accessible work. The honest page answers them in different paragraphs.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.