Richard Pinder
Introduction
"Publicis Worldwide is one of the world's larger advertising networks and part of Publicis Group, one of the world's largest communications companies. At Publicis Worldwide we have 10,000 people in more than 200 hundred locations around the world and we service a whole host of clients from Europe, US, Asia and Latin America."
Why Publicis decided to independently audit its client relationships
"It was crucial for us to find out what our clients were really thinking. When you go and visit a client and ask them how you're doing, if you're from that company, the chances are they don't tell you everything that is going on, they tend to sugar coat things - this is normal, it's human interaction, but we needed to know what was going on underneath.
"There were two reasons for that: we wanted to know exactly what the clients felt so we could address the issues; we also wanted to know what areas they would value in the future and what areas they did not believe that we could perform in, so we knew what to invest more in and what to invest less in. Such learning has become very much part of our strategies going forward."
Why Publicis appointed Relationship Audits
"After a comprehensive pitch involving a number of different providers in the space, we decided that Relationship Audits had the best balance of a fast to use reply system (because our clients don't have much time), with very easy online results that we could pass around the world - we're a global company we can't keep sending pieces of paper everywhere - and also all done within the right pricing structure so that we could afford to keep this thing going, rather than just do it once and then regret the inability to invest in the future."
What Relationship Audits delivered
"Relationship Audits provided us with not just benchmarks against our own offices and against ourselves but against the industry. This was incredibly valuable for us. It taught us the things that we really hadn't noticed that were slipping and it taught us the things that maybe we were valued for that we hadn't appreciated. It also told us that there were certain things we were doing as an industry that clients were increasingly not valuing and that we should pull out of those and start focusing on the things that they did value. I have to say it was an incredibly valuable exercise for us"