Wednesday 24th Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Does anyone who designs consulting firms’ websites and/or writes the content for them actually think about clients?
I was on a conference call with a firm a couple of years ago. It was a particularly difficult situation as we’d been asked by the senior partner to look at how effectively the firm was marketing itself, and this call was to explain and defend our findings to the marketing team. Some of what we had to say was positive, but at the heart of their efforts was a shiny new website that was difficult to navigate, appallingly badly written, and almost certainly guaranteed to put off all but their most loyal clients (who probably wouldn’t be looking at the website anyway). As people started to argue, I played what I guessed would be our trump card: “What kind of client input did you get?”, I asked innocently.
Tuesday 2nd Oct, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
My husband, a mild-mannered but physically imposing man, once ripped up an IKEA catalogue in front of the store’s checkout assistant.
To be fair, we’d been waiting in the queue for two hours, having inadvertently visited the store on a morning when it started a major sale, but in our defence I’d plead that only a small number of the checkouts were manned, and that it was a long time since we’d had breakfast. We’d done the usual things—eyeing up the shelves of lingonberry jam, discussing whether that pot plant was just what was needed for the study, wondering why Swedish is the language it is. But two hours was still two hours, and by the time we started to load our heavy boxes on to a conveyor belt clearly designed for professional weightlifters, my husband had clearly had enough. “There’s no way we’re ever going to shop in Ikea again*,” he said, letting rip literally and figuratively.
You’re probably thinking that this doesn’t have much to do with consultants. Premium consulting, all expensive suits and business travel, seems a world away from cheerful flat packs, but pause for a moment.
Friday 28th Sep, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
I recently interviewed a consultant who was telling me about a digital transformation programme he’d worked on with one of Britain’s police forces. As part of the programme, each front-line officer was given a tablet to replace the traditional policeman’s notebook. The technology would mean accurate digital records, fewer hours lost to paperwork, the ability to update cases on the go, and myriad other benefits. Except that it didn’t. The consultant went out on the beat one day and watched as an officer took out his tablet … and proceeded to use it as a clipboard to lean his paper notebook against while he jotted down his notes with an old-fashioned biro.
It’s just one of many examples that illustrate how the success of transformation depends on people, not just new technology. So what do HR clients—the people in charge of the people—make of the consultants trying to help them?
Wednesday 19th Sep, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
Another day, another announcement. In this case it’s that law firm Allen & Overy plans to start offering regulatory consulting later this year in addition to the legal advice it already offers in this area.
Four factors have upped the ante where diversification is concerned. Buyers have changed: To use the Allen & Overy example, regulatory work isn’t just being bought by the CFO but has become an area over which every functional head has some responsibility. Services have changed: Most of the high-growth markets right across professional services are those that combine traditional capabilities in new ways—look at the way cybersecurity work now involves behavioural change, strategy and—no doubt—legal advice, to name a few.
Wednesday 12th Sep, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
“The consulting firm,” said a senior executive we were chatting to, “is like a public library, packed to the rafters with the best books on the planet, but it’s often hard to find exactly what you’re looking for.”
A library’s business model is founded on access. Catalogues allow readers to see if a specific book is held; classification and coding systems allow them to browse shelves of similar books. But all of that infrastructure still depends on something else, knowledgeable people on the front desk. The internet gives us unprecedented search range, and the algorithms that govern search results allow us to browse, but much of the internet’s technological and commercial development has been focused on finding ways to replace the librarian...
Friday 7th Sep, 2018
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.
Wednesday 5th Sep, 2018
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.
Wednesday 21st Mar, 2018
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.
Friday 23rd Feb, 2018
By Fiona Czerniawska.
The Trusted Advisor is probably the single most influential book on the client-consultant relationship published in the last two decades. More than 15 years after it appeared, you can still find it on the shelves of senior partners right across the professional services sector. What made the book especially powerful was simplicity: Trust, it argues, stems from individuals’ expertise, whether they can be relied on to do what they say, and the extent to which they can go beyond the conventional supplier-customer relationship. Truly “trusted” advisors, says the book, also avoid the pitfall of self-interest: they put their clients’ interests ahead of their own commercial imperatives.
But “trust” has become a problematic issue. In all the many, many conversations I’ve had with clients, I don’t think a single one has used that word. It’s true that many describe the relationships they have with their advisers in terms that imply trust, but that’s not how they’d articulate it. “Trust”—like “loyalty”, again a term you never hear—has become associated with dependence and the suspension of critical judgment. A loyal customer buys the same product because they feel they should, because they don’t want to or can’t be bothered to change, not because it’s the best product. Even the clients we talk to who spend a lot of money with the same firm on a regular basis don’t equate that with loyalty: “Our procurement team would kill me if I said that,” one observed.
It’s tempting to shrug our shoulders and blame the zeitgeist. After all, this isn’t just an issue confined to professional services: The global financial crisis taught a generation not to trust banks; we shouldn’t trust the media, and we can’t trust politicians. But automation will put trust back in the limelight.
In the traditional world of professional services, your adviser—be they a lawyer, an accountant, or a consultant—would turn up and talk to you. You, as the client, would be able to gauge their level of expertise by talking to them (which is why, incidentally, the best clients have always been experts themselves). By working with them, you’d get to know whether they could be relied on to do what they promised, and by getting to know them you might—this was always the hardest bit—decide that you shared the same set of goals and values. But supposing it’s not a person who turns up, but a machine. That third aspect is clearly out of the question. “Intimacy”, the perhaps slightly unfortunate term used in The Trusted Advisor, is clearly a non-starter: Machines don’t have values. But you can probably be fairly confident about “reliability”, because a key advantage of a machine is that it won’t make mistakes, and you’d think you’d be able to judge “expertise”, assuming you’re one of those good clients who knows your stuff. But can you really be sure of the latter?
Wednesday 31st Jan, 2018
By Alison Huntington.
Conventional wisdom tells us that McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain only really compete with each other.
But as the tectonic plates of the consulting industry are shifting, there’s mounting evidence that this is simply no longer true. Sure, the MBB firms might still retain an aura of differentiation through the prestige of their brands, but as client demand changes, and as firms of all stripes converge around digital transformation, there’s a serious danger that McKinsey, BCG, and Bain’s obsession with each other is blinding them to other threats.
Take McKinsey’s clients. We asked current users of McKinsey which firm they’d pick as their first choice in a range of consulting services, if they were given free reign*. Unsurprisingly, large proportions of its clients are loyal--on average, 20% say they’d pick McKinsey as their first choice firm regardless of service. But, looking at the table below, we can see that their loyalty varies considerably depending on which service they’re thinking about. And the arms into which they’re likely to drift are anything but the familiar foes.
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