In a previous post we spoke about the genesis of Yarno and our plan to validate the work we'd done to date with digital agencies. Our theory being that agencies are feeling the impacts of the digital skills gap and that they would be interested in reducing this gap by educating their clients through video.
We decided that the best and fastest way to do this was via a landing page that we would email out to agencies. They could watch one of the course videos and give us feedback both on the video and their experience of the digital skills gap via a 7 question survey.
We sent the survey to around 130 people and received 24 responses, which is an 18% response rate. Given we were asking for 6 mins of people's time, we were really happy with this.
I've grouped the results into 3 questions, which are below.
1. Is the digital skills gap a problem for agencies?
Based on our experience working in agencies, we had a pretty good idea that it was. But we wanted to understand specifically how it was was impacting agencies.
Insights
The top 3 pain points (accounting for 40% of responses) were:
- Unrealistic budget expectations
- Frequent scope changes
- Expectation mismatches
The most popular pain point was unrealistic client budget expectations. Respondents stated that clients often don’t have the budget required for what they want to do. And they have difficulty in defining value or ROI for the project, which would provide context to the project cost being quoted by the agency.
Close behind budget was frequent scope changes throughout a project, after signoff. A number of respondents made the point that scope changes can have big time and cost implications over the life of the project. And when these scope changes are combined with the budget pain point above, difficult conversations ensue.
The third key pain point was broader than the first two; expectation mismatch. This manifests in a few ways. Respondents mentioned that clients often want the full cost of a project before the project requirements have been fully defined. And respondents believed this was due to a lack of knowledge about the complexity and time investment required. And that there was often a lack of appreciation of digital lead times.
2. Are agencies training their clients currently?
We assumed that the majority of agencies weren't offering their clients any form of training and we were keen to validate this assumption.
Insights
The majority of agencies don't offer any formal digital skills training to their clients. A few respondents made the point that they try to educate clients informally as they work together. This is often done through the pre-sales process and requirements workshops, with mixed results. More agencies are doing face to face training than we had assumed. Although this may refer to the pre-sales and requirements workshop interactions with clients.
There was concern that some clients are too busy to do training, especially training sent to them by their agency.
3. Would agencies send our training video to clients?
We wanted to test our assumption that if agencies were being impacted by the digital skills gap, they would be happy to send our training video to their clients.
Insights
63% of respondents said they’d share the video with a client which was a great result. There were some areas of concern however.
A few respondents felt that sending a video to a client could come across as patronising. This is a big concern for us, since it's the absolute last perception we want clients or agencies to have of training.
And secondly, since the client relationship is so vital to an agency's business model, a few were reluctant to send a 3rd party's training to them.
Key takeaways
Although we're still digesting the results, there are a few takeaways for us:
There are some common big sticker pain points being experienced by agencies
There is appetite for agencies to send our training videos to clients as a potential solution to these pain points
The positioning of any training being sent by agencies to clients is critical
Where to from here?
It's clear to us that we need to speak to agency clients directly now, to hear their side of the story. And to understand how the digital skills gap is impacting them.
