Thursday, September 22, 2011

Client sign-off crucial

This is one of those times that you go "that sucks - bet you wish you had client sign off before you made that decision huh?"

So yesterday I was away sick and an email arrived in my inbox about a survey. All good - I like providing feedback. So while I was eating my lunch today, I decided to do the survey, only to think it was a little strange that the screen I landed on had 'Your Progress 100%'.




For those who can't be bothered clicking to enlarge, it reads:
"Survey recall 

The Seed was commissioned recently by Adshel to run an online survey, assessing the opinions of media agencies and clients.

The survey was intended to be an anonymous survey, but unfortunately, due to an error in execution by The Seed, Adshel's identity was revealed which could compromise the findings.

In discussion with Adshel, we have therefore agreed to recall the survey and will not be proceeding with this research.

Please therefore disregard the message sent yesterday.

For anyone who has already completed the survey, The Seed will honour its commitment to the prize draw and will inform those who were successful in due course."



Stink huh? Shows the importance of ALWAYS getting client sign off on everything - unless AdShel did and then later went, 'hang on... crap'.


This has effectively killed the research for AdShel (as now any survey's about Outdoor will have an immediate association with AdShel, even if they change companies) and The Seed have lost the income from the contract with AdShel.


Hard lesson. Remember: Always get clients to sign everything off in writing. (That way you have proof that they're wrong.)

1 comment:

Kat said...

Having worked for a survey company I can wholeheartedly agree with this. We used to get sign off on the survey and the invite. Then, to make doubly sure we did a pilot of around 10-15 responses to make sure they were happy with the results before we pressed 'go' with the rest of the respondents. It's far better to disregard 10 responses from a limited pool of people than to disregard 500 possible respondees. This sounds like it was just sloppy.