Agency-Client Interface: Where Quality Arises or Gets Lost – Dr. Florian Bresler

A network of four parties

The dissertation begins with an extended sender-receiver model. It shows a network of agency, client, the client's customers and the public, whose relationships are more layered than the marketing literature assumes. The interface between agency and client is only one of several in it, but it is the one where a project begins and where it is judged.

The survey records only the clients' view. They rated the enablers of their agency and the effect of the project in their own company. How agencies experience the interface was not collected in the main survey; the preliminary study with executives of two agencies gives only hints at how they weight the categories.

Where gaps arise

The service quality gap model traces quality deficits to four deviations, for instance between the customer's expectation and the specification of the service or between promised and delivered service. Follow-up studies found causes mainly in deficits in communication and control, unclear roles and role conflicts. Part of the gaps therefore arises in communication within the provider.

The gaps act on both sides of the interface. The briefing defines what the client expects and what the agency promises; feedback after the project shows whether the two match. As a transfer, the interface can therefore be checked at two points, at the start and at the end of the project.

What the survey shows about participation

In the strategy factor, the two-way participation of clients carries almost everything (weight 0.87). Client commitment and trust were significant in the initial model at p = 0.06, the agency's information competence was not. The strategy factor as a whole did not reach significance (0.12; p = 0.17).

A difference in perspective stands out. In the preliminary study, agency executives considered client integration the most important of all enabler categories (2.00 out of 3). Clients rated it 3.45, the lowest among the six strategy and resource items, and the resource factor remained without significant effect.

The strategy factor is understood as a relationship with clients and the public. Behind the weak values of information competence, the study suspects a shift from rational to emotional factors: clients, it holds, care more about feeling part of a committed network than about receiving specialist information. This was not tested.

The agency head as the face of the interface

Leadership efficiency reaches a weight of 0.98 in the final model. What was measured is how clients experience the agency head. As a transfer this means: the interface is above all a relationship with the people at the top, less with processes. The study sees trust as placed in a specific head of agency rather than in the network behind it.

What can be derived for practice

The following points are a transfer of the findings, not a result of the study:

• Name contacts, decision paths and approvals on both sides, so that role conflicts do not arise in the first place.
• Plan the client's involvement explicitly instead of presuming it, and ask in between how it is experienced.
• Keep the agency head visibly in the relationship, not only at the pitch.

All values rest on the judgments of clients from the customer circles of two agency networks. No data from the agencies themselves are available, and cross-relationships between the enablers are not modeled.