Client-consultant relationship

By Alison Huntington. 

What drives a great client experience? You’d be forgiven for thinking that there was one rule that applied to everyone. After all, we’ve written extensively about convergence in the consulting market, and how clients struggle to see much difference between firms, which kind of suggests that everyone has figured out the same winning formula.

But our data paints a more nuanced picture than that—the drivers of high scores (by which we mean a high proportion of people speaking positively in our client survey) can vary significantly from one firm to the next. Let’s take firms that people often lump together—McKinsey and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG hereafter)—and look at the drivers of positive perceptions about their digital transformation work. 

The greatest driver of high scores for McKinsey is the extent to which it’s seen to have an innovative approach to its work.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

“They’ve done it again!”, said a recent client we interviewed. “They’ve sold us on promises about brilliant new technology and streamlined processes, and they’ve ignored the fact that success depends on people.”

In case it’s not clear, the “they” he was referring to are consulting firms. With two years of digital transformation under the industry’s collective belt, clients are starting to ask for hard evidence of results (a point I covered here). They’re also complaining that consultants aren’t engaging sufficiently with what they have increasingly come to believe is the main obstacle to delivering genuine transformation in practice: changing people’s behaviours. And they’re worried that, as robotic process automation becomes embedded in transformation work, more and more investment cases will depend on reducing their workforce in some areas, and redeploying people in others. “I want to know how consulting firms are going to help deal with the collateral impact of new technology and processes,” continued my irate executive, “but no one is talking to us about that.”

New research by Proudfoot suggests that this client, and all the others who’ve talked to us in a similar vein over the last few months, are right to be concerned.

By Fiona Czerniawska.

Imagine you’re walking down the supermarket aisle looking for breakfast cereal. Bored with the one you’ve been eating all these years, you’re in the market for a change. You pick up the first one that catches your eye. “MEGAPOPS”, the package shouts in an unnecessarily lurid colour, “THE BEST WAY TO START YOUR DAY WITH A ZING!!!!” You look for the small print, some tentative indicator of what a zing is in this context—but there isn’t any. “SUNNYNUGGETS,” screams the next, “GOLDEN! DELICIOUS! FAST!” But is it healthy? Well, there’s nothing to tell you that. As consumers we wouldn’t—and don’t—put up with this. Decades of regulation and government intervention ensures that we’re in a position to make informed choices about our breakfast cereal. Sure: We can—and many of us do—choose to ignore them. Sure: There are still improvements to be made to the labelling. But on balance, as consumers, we’re the best-informed generation in the history of humanity.

If only that were true for consulting.