Best Agency above £20million: C Space

The company was founded as Communispace in 1999, and acquired Promise in 2012, when it began operating under the name Promise Communispace in EMEA. It rebranded to C Space in June 2015, and has offices in London, the US, Shanghai and Mexico City.

Part of the Omnicom-owned Diversified Agency Services (DAS) group, C Space’s clients include Jaguar Land Rover, IKEA, Bose, Nissan, Tesco, Orange and Philips.

The company achieved strong financial growth in the most recent financial year, with its top 40 clients spending more in the first half of 2017 than they did in 2016 as a whole. Client retention is at 90% for ongoing subscription accounts, which are underpinned by online communities. Additionally, this year saw the agency acquire 37 new clients.

Currently undergoing a three-year period of brand transformation focused on ‘customer inspired growth’, C Space has focused on: driving growth for the business, clients and talent; elevating the role of the customer; and raising the profile of customer-centred strategies within the wider industry.

Recent projects include work with Jaguar Land Rover to understand the car company’s customers: what they value and what they’re looking for in the future. Part of this involves teams from the brand joining customers in co-creation events and obtaining insights from private online communities.

Recent years have seen C Space focus increasingly on this concept of placing customers at the centre of business strategy. In the past year it has launched its Customer Quotient – a framework for measuring customer centricity – globally. C Space has established the Outside In podcast looking at customer centricity and featuring interviews with C-suite executives. The podcast now has 12,000 listeners.

The company also launched an insight community, ‘Speak Up Britain’, to take the measure of the British public and tackle spin ahead of the general election in June, ran its annual ‘Client Advisory Board’ and held round tables with guest speakers from Twitter and Uber.

Additionally, C Space has promoted a third of staff in its 100-person London office and halved attrition in 2017, while pride in working for the agency has increased from 56% to 86% since its rebrand.

“The team works so hard to deliver value for a set of clients who challenge us to think differently and constantly innovate,” said Phil Burgess and Felix Koch, joint managing directors of C Space in London.

“Building a fantastic agency has been a real journey for our team. There’s no magic formula. It’s the result of all the little things our people do for our clients and their colleagues day in and day out that add up to something really special.”

The judges said: “We were incredibly impressed by C Space – there was real evidence of positive change with tangible results. Impressive new business wins, outstanding client retention and improved staff morale all made the agency stand out from the crowd – a great example of the very best our industry has to offer.”