Understanding and Managing Client Expectations

As client budgets continue to get squeezed and time to deliver results gets shorter, the expectations of what is needed and wanted from research has evolved.  Clients are looking to other sources, rather than traditional research agencies,  for their research as they look for more complete and customer ready solutions.  This course helps research agencies understand the process that clients go through from the initial research question to after research has been delivered.

Delegates will go through the client internal decision process and observe examples of what works well and what really frustrates clients. 

This course aims to help research agencies win more pitches and work better with clients through the research process.

Who will find it useful 

This course is relevant to anyone involved in designing and delivering research to clients within research agencies.  This course is not open to client-side insight teams. 

Objectives – In this course, you will:

• Learn about the clients’ internal research process and what that means for agencies
• Learn how the pitch process works from a client’s perspective and what you need to think about to win
• Learn where the pressure points are for clients and how you can manage them
• Learn what clients expect from interim and final debrief stages
• See examples of what clients want to see from the outputs
• Look at how you can work differently with clients
   

Learning outcomes – by the end of the course you will gain an understanding of:

• the internal process clients go through to determine the scope of a research study
• how the pitch process works from a client’s perspective
• where the pressure points are for clients through the research process
• what clients expect from interim and final debrief stages
• what clients want to see from research outputs
• how you could do things differently once back in the office

Trainer

Jennifer Roberts

Jennifer is the owner of Think Category Ltd, a small category strategy & shopper marketing agency based in Edinburgh working with a wide range of clients across branded and own label food & drinks.  Jennifer commissions and manages research for many of her clients.

Prior to setting up Think Category, Jennifer gained over 16 years’ supplier-side experience in senior category, insight & customer marketing roles working for global branded businesses, such as Heineken and Pernod Ricard, to own label fresh food producers such as Natures Way Foods.  Jennifer has managed shopper and/or consumer insight for much of her client-side time running research programmes from £5k to £300k in size.  Jennifer has also worked with most major UK Grocery & Convenience retailers managing their category partnerships and running joint research studies.