Happy Clients September 2024 – event post-mortem

The one thing I’m glad we do as a business is ask people for feedback after they come to our conferences.

We never really want to do this, because it’s stressful seeing the results come in. But we always do, and it’s always useful. We like to make the results public, so here’s the latest write-up.

We asked the people who attended our agency client services conference Happy Clients for their feedback, and we got 32 responses.

This isn’t a huge response rate (we had 155 people there) but at this event most of the people were first-time Agency Hackers delegates.

(Generally, once people realise we do public feedback posts like this one, they are more likely to fill in the feedback form.)

The results were decent: on average they rated the event 8.1 out of 10.
That’s good! But not as good as our last event (Clockwork – which was aimed at agency operations people). That one took place in June 2024 and scored 8.9 out of 10.
However, it’s still better than the two events before that – which got scores of 7.7 out of 10 (Agency Growth Summit, March 2024) and 7.5 out of 10 (The Robots Are Coming) so we’re still up.

Let’s get into the feedback…

“Sadly for me, this event was too much like a whinge fest.”

We did get a lot of positive feedback – which I will get to – but since I want to make this post-mortem interesting to read it makes sense to start with the most interesting piece of feedback we got!

One delegate gave us 5/10 (the single lowest score we got) because they felt the tone of some of the conversations was too negative.

Here’s what they had to say:

“Sadly for me, this event was too much like a whinge fest. There was a big focus on negative aspects of agency life which at times, felt rather soul destroying. The comperes were encouraging speakers to share negativity and the event title ‘Happy Clients’ was very misleading as it was more about ‘unhappy agencies’ which is a real shame.”

They also didn’t like the moments we spent eye-rolling about juniors who hate making phone calls:

“I felt the constant derogatory comments about so called ‘junior’ team members was very sad.“

It’s genuinely very interesting to get feedback like this. Are we really too negative at our events?

The Agency Hackers community does (we think) have a different tone and “vibe” to other events. It’s something people comment positively on a lot.

One of the things we value more than anything is realism. When you come to one of our events, we want you to hear real and “raw” stories and anecdotes from other people doing your job at different agencies.

The grittier is is, the more it will stick in your mind as part of your mental library.

Whenever I go to other conferences I always feel like people are holding back.

People will stand up and talk about problems in an abstract and ‘businessy’ way. Just as you think it’s getting interesting – oops, they pull back. You’ll hear somebody talk about “team challenges” and then they’ll dart off in another direction. Wait – what “team challenges”?

I need to know!

In Agency Hackers, our team are trained to dig and dig until you reach the bedrock of who on the team did something wrong, what they did, and what happened next.

Obviously when you are building a business around stories, a lot of those will have some pain or challenges in them. Do we risk becoming “negative”?

It’s hard because we get so much feedback from people seemingly saying the opposite:

“Loved how honest, open, and unfiltered the event was. CS [client services] can sometimes feel like an island as you attempt to appease client and agency so it was great to hear from peers with similar tests and experiences to my own. I now know I’m not the only one with these challenges! I would encourage the event to remain this way in the future.”

Overall, I think we will keep an eye on this one. At the moment we are not actioning this feedback, but we’re seeing it as a potential “straw in the wind” to monitor.

Because I’m selectively quoting parts you might not appreciate that this feedback is written very thoughtfully and in the spirit of being helpful. (They’re being nice, in other words.) It’s amazing when you think about it – this busy person took several minutes out of their day to help us make our business better, for free.

Feedback is a cheat code.

“I wanted to go to more of the breakouts and felt I was missing one or two that I would have liked to have attended.”

At our events we use a lot of breakout rooms.

You spend some time in the main theatre, and then you spend the rest of the time moving between different rooms exploring different topics.

It costs us more to do it this way (hiring all the extra rooms costs a lot) but we think it’s better because you get to stand up, move around, and meet different people at round tables.

Some people felt we need to make these small breakout sessions more interactive:

“I wanted the break-out sessions to be a bit more interactive, not just more talks. The facilitators did a decent job of leaving gaps for questions, but I’d preferred more interactive/workshop-y sessions”

One person – contrary to our belief that moving around is good – felt that it would be better to not have to move rooms at all:

“Also lots of moving around compared with previous Shoreditch venue which was quite faffy!“

Making the breakouts better is a big focus for us at the moment. We are sometimes letting simple things like timekeeping get the better of us, which we need to watch:

“Time keeping – a lot of the sessions overran and in one session it was already 5 mins over and the MC asked if there was time for more questions and your team member in the audience said yes, even though the session was already overruning.”

“No more sitting down for speakers”

This bit of feedback doesn’t come from a delegate, it comes from me.

One thing that hit me as I was walking around the event was that any time the host or speaker is stood up, the energy in the room is much better. The conversations are crisper and people are more engaged.

And any time they are sat down in a chair, the whole room just feels a little bit “slumpy”. The answers are a bit longer and people seem sleepy. This is especially true for panels.

So in future we’ll have everybody stood up at a podium, unless there’s an obvious reason they can’t.

“Genuinely probably the most useful event I have ever attended.”

Overall though, the feedback was just really positive.

We’re starting to see people noticing the feedback loop, where the comments they make are reflected back into the product.

“Perfectly executed – I attended the AI one in November and could see tweaks you’ve made to this type of day set up from what I experienced yesterday. Really great line-up, format and logistics.”

Thank you to everyone who attended Happy Clients and provided us with such valuable feedback. Your insights and suggestions are so important in helping us make our events better.

We look forward to seeing you at our next event – Pipeline, The Agency Marketing & New Biz Summit – at The British Library on Thursday 17th October 2024 – where we’ll try to do the same again and give you a really useful day of learning and inspiration.