This study set out to establish what clients want from their consultants. The objectives were to understand what matters to clients when dealing with management consultants and to communicate the results to consulting firms so that they can better respond to client issues. What is it about management consultancy, and about the make-up of the client organisation that fuels continued growth? As such, the research question was: “What matters to clients as they buy consultancy services?”
The question was deemed important for two reasons. Firstly, there is a contradiction between a widely-espoused perception of consultants as charlatans and rapid industry growth. Secondly, an understanding of the features clients seek from their consultants can be used to make the provision of consulting services more directly relevant. It is this that the research output seeks to address, since much time and effort is spent by buying organisations and management consulting firms on the commissioning process. In an environment where pressure continues to mount on profitability, it seems worthwhile to seek to improve commissioning outcomes, and indirectly thereby improve internal performance (for both client organisation and consulting firm) and external perception. The underlying premise of this work was that once what clients look for when choosing a consulting firm was more deeply understood, a structured approach could be developed for consulting firms to adopt when developing their service offerings for clients. One feature of particular interest was to consider if being customer-driven implied a focus on good customer service and continuous improvement, particularly since growth hinges on customer satisfaction.
Consequently, the second research question was:
‘What can management consultants do to better serve their clients?’
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established. The aim was to develop a structured, systematic approach for consultants to more clearly identify and articulate client needs and thereby serve them better. This systematic approach, a Customisation Blueprint, will enable management consultants to personalise responsiveness to client issues. By simultaneously driving solution-tailoring in a way clients recognise, the firms which successfully adopt the Customisation Blueprint will see an increase in the number of projects they win rather than being the runner-up. An approach which guides activity towards greater fulfilment of client needs can help a consulting firm achieve sustainable growth in a continually evolving market where margins and customer choice create increasing operational pressures, and helps clients by
facilitating their decision-making. 8.2 Summary of Chapters
This thesis is presented in eight chapters. Chapter 2 explores the history of Management Consultancy, examining the factors that have shaped the industry’s growth. It considers how the industry developed and the current pressures influencing its continued evolution. Chapter 3 presents a review of the relational literature, comprising the fields of Sociology and Organisational Behaviour. Chapter 4 studies management consultancy through multiple Operations Management sub-sections. Here, the constituent parts of consultancy are examined by exploring concepts such as knowledge, innovation, service design and delivery and customer satisfaction, providing the focus for an overall examination through a Behavioural Operations lens.
Chapter 5 discusses the research rationale, explains the approach adopted, describes data collection and analysis methods, and highlights ethical implications and their handling. The subsequent chapter presents the process of data analysis and the findings. Chapter 7 discusses the implications arising from the analysis of the data and the consideration of the behaviours and processes described by participants with a view to developing a Customisation Blueprint. It uses the evidence from the research as well as theory and findings from Chapters 3 and 4 to provide the detailed content which makes the Customisation Blueprint useable. This leads to a consideration of the implications for practice, and the chapter discusses the impact for management consulting firms in adopting such an approach. From this a Customisation Blueprint is proposed, and an explanation of how it works is provided. Chapter 8 summarises the findings from the research, provides perspectives on this research’s possible contribution to knowledge and practice and offers some recommendations on areas for further research.
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The findings were used to develop a Customisation Blueprint to help consultancies better serve their clients.
Having explored what clients seek and avoid from consultants, a Customisation Blueprint was developed to help deliver better project specification and through that, enhanced customer service. This study establishes the feasibility of a structured approach to respond to fluid and varied contexts in order to identify the spoken and unspoken factors which can help identify underlying client needs.
Key conclusions are that:
Buyers have productised the procurement process, making it more formal and transparent
Buyers see ‘relationship’ in terms of responsiveness and value-add by project, not longevity
Consultants continue to commoditise their work
Consultants view a long-term relationship in terms of duration and financial value of account
Based on these conclusions, it is necessary, not just useful, to structure an approach to tailor knowledge to a specific audience if the mutual, but differently defined, goal of long- term relationship is to be achieved.