Quality and value

By Alison Huntington

Here are two striking statistics.

Forty-nine percent of clients globally say they get the value they pay for from consulting firms. Their experience is a transaction—nothing more, nothing less.

Fifty percent of clients say their use of consulting is mostly driven by a shortage of internal capacity.

By Alison Huntington.

We recently ran some round table sessions in London with marketers from some of the world’s leading consulting firms, examining some of the more surprising results that emerge from our annual survey of consulting firms’ clients.

Every year we ask clients to rate firms’ quality and estimate the value added by their work. Puzzlingly, we’ve noticed that sometimes clients describe quality as poor, yet say the value added by the consulting firm was worth many times the fees paid for them. Eh? Surely value equals quality divided by price? Well, no, and lots of our research points to a highly complex relationship between the two.

By Edward Haigh.

Value = quality divided by price, right?

Possibly, but not according to our data. At least not always. Our survey of clients (to which we had over 9,000 responses) reveals their views about value to be far more complex than you might imagine. Before we go any further we should be clear that we asked them to describe value in relation to the fees they pay. Our question was: Do you get more than you pay in fees (if so how much more), about the same as you pay in fees, or less than you pay in fees?