One of the beauties of being an in-house creative agency is that you interact with your clients every day, even after a project is over. Building those relationships outside of a work product gives clients the opportunity to provide informal feedback on a daily basis, whether you’re meeting about something unrelated or chatting by the coffee maker.

There’s also something to be said for collecting feedback more formally, however. A pat on the back or a suggestion for how to do something differently next time may be helpful in the moment, but it’s easy to forget those remarks when setting team goals for the future.

We’re Team IDEA, the in-house creative and events team at Cars.com. As an internal agency with dozens of very different clients across the organization, we’ve made it a priority to solicit feedback from our colleagues semiannually to see how we’re doing, what people like about working with us and what opportunities exist for improvement. What we’ve found is that the best way for us to solicit formal feedback is through the IHAF Performance Evaluator.

Every six months, we ask our clients to spend 10-15 minutes filling out IHAF’s online survey, enabling them to rate us on things like knowledge of our brand, level of expertise in our given fields, ease of working with the team and quality of creative work. There’s also an open-text section that encourages respondents to tell us, in their own words, what it’s like to be a Team IDEA client.

By giving our clients the opportunity to share their degree of satisfaction working with our team, we’re able to gather candid, specific feedback on what’s working and what isn’t. From these surveys, we’ve made changes that have benefited our team and our clients—things like implementing a more robust project management system, communicating more frequently while a project is underway and partnering better with external agencies.

One of our team’s KPIs has been to score an average of 4.0 or better on our semiannual surveys and we’re happy to say that we’re hitting it out of the park every time. In fact, we recently sent an email asking our clients, once again, to share their thoughts with Team IDEA via the IHAF Performance Evaluator—and we’re looking forward to another round of honest, actionable feedback. We’ll let you know how it goes!

The IHAF Performance Evaluator is a free tool for IHAF members to use as often as they like, on whatever schedule they choose. For more information about how to take advantage of this invaluable member benefit, contact IHAF. And if you’re not yet a member, join us.