Client-consultant relationship

By Alison Huntington.

Consultants are supposed to tell clients what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. If a client wants to grow into a new market, but isn’t investing enough in its infrastructure there to succeed, the role of the consultant is to make that clear. Likewise, if a client thinks a flashy new digital system will solve all his woes when it actually won’t, the consultant who puts her clients’ interests first tells him to stop. Trusted advisors tell it like it is.

It seems only fair, then, that when clients are asked for feedback about the work of consultants they should be able to do the same. The absence of this option in the FT’s ranking of consulting firms in the UK published this week is one reason why it’s a limited measure of client satisfaction and brand impact.

By Alison Huntington.

This week the Financial Times published its ranking of management consulting firms in the UK, in partnership with Statista. It’s based on a survey of both senior executives in industry and management consultants themselves, and covers 15 sectors and 14 different consulting services. The top-ranked firms are the ones with the highest number of recommendations across different categories.

By Alison Huntington.

Our recent report into digital transformation laid out some compelling reasons why strategy firms should be ideally positioned to win in this market. Clients say they want to use digital transformation to grow their businesses, and to do that, their investment is starting to shift away from using digital to facilitate and accelerate existing business priorities, and towards more fundamental change to their business model. This sort of existential, burning platform-type of issue is exactly what you’d want some of the world’s cleverest people working on; indeed, over half of respondents at the largest companies we surveyed* say they plan to use strategy firms for this type of work.