Do you know what makes UK clients smile?

By Edward Haigh

Readers of our latest UK consulting market report will doubtless have been interested in the section at the end, where we showed how likely clients were to mention each of the world's leading consulting firms, and how likely those who did so were to be happy about them.

We expressed happiness as a range - or rather as an interval within which we could be 90% that the proportion of happy clients would fall, should we conduct the same survey again with a completely different set of people. The size of the interval was affected by two things: the number of comments we received, and how consistent those comments were (in terms of being positive or negative).

Most attention will, quite understandably, have been centred on how one firm compared with another (we grouped them by firm type to make this easier). What many readers won't have been aware of, unless they're were amongst those who have bought other reports, was how the situation in the UK compared with the situation elsewhere.

Let's forget about the number of times people mention a specific firm here - that's not as interesting. What's especially interesting is the proportion of happy clients. Specifically, what's interesting (particularly to anyone who has seen our other reports) is how unhappy UK clients are. Let's compare them, for instance, to German clients (in fact German, Swiss and Austrian clients, but if you'll forgive the clumsiness we'll call them German for now because most of them were). Here are some numbers:

• Taken as an average across all Big Four firms, somewhere between 65% and 91% of UK clients are happy with these firms. In Germany the interval is between 84% and 100%.
• For technology firms the differences are more stark: here somewhere between 52% and 85% of UK clients are happy, whilst in Germany the interval is between 88% and 100%.
• But the greatest differences are for strategy firms. Somewhere between 29% and 78% of UK clients are happy with strategy firms, while for German clients the interval is between 73% and 95%.

Of course those are just the averages - there are even bigger differences from views about one individual firm to the next. The point is that UK clients are significantly unhappier than their German counterparts. So what's causing it. it seems to me that there could be any number of reasons:

• Consulting firms might be doing a better job in Germany than they're doing in the UK (not entirely convincing, frankly)
• German clients might just be more comfortable with consultants than their UK counterparts (more convincing - in fact we have data to prove this)
• The UK, a market that's been bigger than Germany for some time despite its economy being smaller, might have a bit of consulting fatigue where Germany doesn't (fairly convincing, assuming you buy into the idea of consulting fatigue)
• UK clients might be less willing than their German counterparts to sing the praises of consultants (yep, we buy that, too)
• UK clients might just be a bit more miserable than German ones, full stop (again, quite possible - at the time of going to press our biggest cultural export appeared to be the boy band "One Direction", and even if the one about the girl who's more beautiful than she knows is kind of catchy, anyone who isn't a teenage girl will find their success a terrible blow to morale)

So it rather behoves us to work out what would make UK clients happier (an unfortunate accident involving One Direction, a large inflatable banana and the white cliffs of Dover notwithstanding). And there we have some answers, too, because we asked clients two questions about it. Clever old us.

The first question was about the things that consulting firms did (or could do) that would have a significant impact on the amount of consulting they bought. The second was about the qualities they found in the firms with which they'd had the best experience. We won't go into a huge amount of detail here because there isn't room and we want you to buy our report, but here are a couple of highlights:

• In terms of the things that would have a significant impact on the amount of consulting UK clients bought, one of the things that featured most prominently (28% of clients said it would have a significant impact) was more transparent pricing. You won't be surprised that they mentioned quite a few things to do with pricing but transparency is arguably one of the more interesting because it speaks to a lack of trust; to the need for honesty. The absence of which is likely to corrode anyone's happiness.
• As for the qualities of firms with which UK clients have had the best experience, one of the most prominent was account management. Indeed nobody rated the best firm they'd worked with as 'poor' in this respect (something they did for many other qualities, even amongst the best firms). Our conversations with clients back this up: lots of firms pay lip service to account management but few do it really well, and it really matters.

So there you have it: to make UK clients a bit happier make your prices transparent and invest in really understanding (and delivering) what they want from an account manager. Oh, and do the thing with the inflatable banana and One Direction.

There are 17 more factors impacting the use of consulting, and 12 more qualities of the best firms, discussed in the report. In addition to which, of course, there's all the data about how happy clients are with individual firms. And remember, UK clients might be a bit miserable generally, but there's every chance they're happier about you than they are about your competitors. If that doesn't make you happy, we're not sure what will.