This talk by designer Michael Bierut on clients reminded me of an experience I had a few years ago when my office had the opportunity to work with the seriously smart people at Bain & Company. (Bain, Mckinsey & Co. and Boston Consulting Group are considered the “big three” strategic consulting firms).
At the time, we were working on a redesign of the Bain & Co. corporate website. It had started off well enough, but we began to hit some snags and bumps as the design and development went along. As in so many cases, the client and the agency had different expectations going into the project, and frustrations began to mount as these expectations were not met.
In most cases, I think these frustrations would simply have gone unspoken; we, the agency would have complained about the client “not getting it”, being unprepared to meet deadlines, etc., while the client would most likely have thought that we were not communicating and listening effectively.
Fortunately for us though, the client was Bain. And with their encouragement, we decided to tackle the problem head on by drafting two documents. The process was a revelation. We simply put down on paper all the things we had always expected of a client, but had never specifically asked for–at least not all at once and collected in one place. And they did the same. These started as a list of “client Expectations” and “Agency Expectations”, but over time we came to think of them as the Client and Agency Bill of Rights.
These are documents that we continue to put in many of our proposals and we find that they can be great aides when we are considering beginning a relationship with a new client. Watching Michael Bierut’s talk, it suddenly struck me that some of our peers out there might find these useful as well.
So without further ado, here is our Client Bill of Rights. Feel free to use it as you wish. If you do so, please just consider passing it onto others and linking back here to the original as a courtesy. Also, if you have ideas on how this can be improved, we’d love to hear about it.
Download a PDF version of the Client Bill of Rights
Update: Here is the Agency Bill of Rights.
