Looking ahead always makes us reflect on the past, and consultant Cathy is heading into the new year with a sense that consulting has changed a lot. Having worked in the Big Four at the start of her career, she has been running a mid-sized consulting firm in Toronto for the last eight years. But the last few years have seen her company lose several clients to both larger firms and independent consultants due to complex client demands. Her case isn’t a one-off; technology has revolutionized information access and client expectations from consulting partners.
As clients demand more value at lesser costs, mid-sized consulting companies are the most impacted – globally, the top 10 companies have a 56% percent share in the industry business and when we consider the top 200, this number goes up to 80%. Surviving and growing your business in such a highly competitive environment demands putting Customer Experience (CX) at the center of your consulting business ops.
CX imperative #1: Be perceived as a long-term partner
Easy information access, low-code SaaS solutions, and automation have made it easy for clients to manage standard transformation projects in-house. Increasingly, clients want you to partner with them to drive strategic and innovative impact. In a highly fast-moving and unpredictable business environment, delivering on this front demands being constantly attuned to the client’s changing priorities over the mid to long term. You must build deep relationships that win and retain client trust – they must be able to confide in you as well as rely on you even when you are in between contracts. The fast pace of your work, coupled with project-specific interactions, doesn’t lend to this easily. It requires you to integrate CX lifecycle management into your operations.
This is where tech-led CX management solutions can help. For instance, Cathy invested in SogoCX to enhance customer relationships despite a lean team. By leveraging the latest tech in her consulting practice, she was able to:
- Regularly stay in touch and collect customer feedback on industry trends, ideas, and her own team’s performance
- Consolidate data from every touchpoint in the customer journey of every stakeholder associated with an account to identify pain points and preferences
- Equip herself and her team with insights for timely catch ups and high-impact interactions
CX imperative #2: Emerge as a worthy investment center
There is only so much you can do in terms of keeping costs under control for the client to beat the competition. At the end of the day, you need to shift the narrative – be seen as an investment center rather than a cost center. How? Go beyond delivering business results for your client; deliver a CX that sparks delight and leads to an invaluable relationship. Right from understanding your clients’ general sentiments to aligning every interaction in the project lifecycle for seamlessness, you must build an AI in consulting to create a tech-led ecosystem that prompts you with clear, exceptional cues.
Cathy relied on the natural language processing features offered by SogoCX along with our omnichannel listening and feedback management to identify and act on key drivers in the promptest manner. She also invested in a Voice of the Customer program. This, in turn, led clients to appreciate the intuitiveness she and her team brought to the table. At a business level, she was able to:
- Always have the pulse of every stakeholder, across client accounts, for sharp insights and precise solutions without stressing resources
- Identify top pain points and favorites in the context of her ops and make prompt tweaks without struggling to make sense of big data
- Foresee defining moments in the client journey and planning for them well in time to meet the moment for clients; emerging as a proactive partner over a project-focused vendor
CX imperative #3: Drive consistent impact
At the end of the day, your best relationships cannot help you win business if you fall short of communicating the business impact you bring to the table; this is easier said than done owing to multiple factors – business priorities are fast-changing, there is too much to catch up on for your team, and clients are too busy to go the whole hog regularly. In such a scenario, you need sharp insights to make sense of evolving pursuits and drive impactful results. For Cathy, end-to-end CX management delivered on this front by:
- Facilitating insights into every prospect’s intent by tuning into the omni-channel universe
- Streamline workflows and enable integrations with ERP and CRM solutions for cohesive data and faster impact
- Enabling access to visually powerful reports that could be leveraged to make winning presentations; link team progress/project results to key client feedback or sentiment
AI-led CX and business resilience
Investing in CX management is the only way to thrive and even grow in a highly competitive business environment. As B2B customer journeys across industries get digital-first and involve self-serve, your customers expect personalization and customer-centricity across the board.
By leveraging an AI and tech-led solution such as SogoCX, you can build a customer-centric ops ecosystem without stressing your resources. It can help your team get more effective without losing hundreds of billable hours in understanding the client at a company, team, and individual level. It can also help you transform project efficacy and results; an improved CX is key to better collaboration with customers and swift alignment on decisions and perceived value.
Lastly, end-to-end CX management can lead to insights and growth opportunities before top competitors uncover them. For instance, pro bono work has increased significantly in the last couple of years as clients expect consulting companies to be driven by a purpose. Insights like these are unlikely to come up in standard, transactional interactions. However, when discovered as part of larger, comprehensive client listening and CX management exercises, they can help you work towards building a distinct market advantage before word gets out and things get mainstream.
