Quick Summary
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Customer experience consulting companies have proliferated as businesses are increasingly focused on ways to drive growth by maximizing customer loyalty, retention and referrals.
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As the market has been flooded with firms branding themselves as customer experience consultants, it’s become increasingly difficult to identify those who possess true expertise in this domain.
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Fortunately, there are litmus tests that can help you narrow the field and select the best consulting company for your needs — but it requires probing on the firm’s heritage, organizational structure, operating model, and resourcing approach.
Customer experience consulting companies can help businesses with a variety of challenges — from building a better understanding of their customers’ needs, to identifying sources of customer frustration, to redesigning entire customer journeys, to cultivating a customer-centric work culture.
With more and more organizations staking their future on customer experience (CX), lots of consulting companies have cropped up to help them. As a result, finding the best customer experience consulting firm for your needs can be a difficult task.
Indeed, with so many business advisory firms flying the customer experience consulting banner, it can be challenging to select the right partner.
At Watermark, we’ve been doing customer experience consulting and training for nearly 20 years, and we’ve learned a lot about facilitating the right match between clients and consultants. Below are 5 questions that we encourage potential clients to consider as they navigate their choices of CX consulting companies and work to identify the one that’s best suited for their needs.
Question #1: What is it I really need from a customer experience consulting company?
Depending on where you are with your customer experience improvement effort, you’ll likely have distinct requirements that should help narrow down the field of consultants.
You can ask yourself a few binary questions to help in this regard:
- Am I looking for a technology solution or for strategic advice?
- Do I need a comprehensive customer experience evaluation or just (re)design of a specific touchpoint?
- Am I trying to first launch a customer experience improvement program or evolve one that’s already in place?
- Do I need to educate employees about customer experience or just equip them with better tools to deliver it?
- Do I need to cultivate greater insight about our customers or just capitalize on the insights we already have?
By contemplating parameters such as these, you can pinpoint the type of assistance you really need. Then, by drilling into the core competencies of the consultancies you’re exploring (not by reviewing their marketing materials, but by asking them pointed questions), you can start paring down the list.
Depending on your specific needs, companies that are technology providers at heart might move to the top of your list, while those stronger in customer research might move down – or vice-versa, and so on.
In this way, you can begin to “bucket” consultancies based on their areas of focus (technology suppliers, training providers, strategic advisors, research firms, design outfits, process engineers, etc.), thereby making it easier to narrow the search.
Question #2: Is the firm’s customer experience consulting practice just a rebranded version of a different specialty?
Consulting firms tend to latch onto the latest business buzzwords to capitalize on the management fads of the day.
Back in the 1990’s, when corporate reengineering was all the rage, many consultancies simply rebranded their existing operations as “reengineering practices.” Similar shape-shifting was evident when Six Sigma boomed, and then Big Data, and it continues today with AI-oriented solutions.
The customer experience consulting arena is no different. Consulting organizations have slapped the “customer experience” moniker onto everything from Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software implementers to Website User Experience departments to Digital Marketing units to Customer Research teams and more.
But none of these rebranded entities really qualify as true customer experience consulting firms (though what they offer might ultimately be one component of a broader customer experience strategy).
Ask probing questions of candidate firms to understand the origin of their customer experience practice, as that can help reveal their true core competency (which may be different than what their marketing materials proclaim):
- Have you always been a customer experience consultancy?
- If not, when did you start that practice?
- Was your consulting practice formed through acquisitions of any other firms?
A great way to validate the answers you get is to browse the consulting company’s website on the Wayback Machine. Use this internet archive to view the company’s website from years past, and take note if their advertised core competency has shifted over time — or if they’ve truly always positioned themselves as customer experience experts.
Question #3: Is the firm’s customer experience consulting practice truly independent — or is it part of (or affiliated with) some other entity?
Another well-worn strategy among consulting companies is to acquire smaller consulting firms who have specialized expertise that the marketplace is increasingly demanding. This acquisition activity shifts into high gear once a particular business discipline becomes buzzworthy.
It should come as no surprise then that, in recent years, many large consulting companies, research outfits, and software vendors have gobbled up smaller customer experience consulting firms.
So, what’s wrong with that, you might ask?
The risk is that the acquiring company is bringing the customer experience consultancy into the fold primarily to create a new pipeline for the acquirer’s core products and services (be it software platforms, market research, or something else).
That creates a potential conflict of interest, in that the guidance offered by the now-acquired customer experience consultancy may not be as independent and objective as you, the client, would have expected.
A similar dynamic can emerge if the customer experience consultant is a partner or affiliate of some other business. Customer experience software companies, for example, often create “affiliate programs” whereby CX consultants get compensated for recommending those partners’ solutions.
This is why it’s important to understand the ownership structure of the customer experience consulting companies you’re exploring, as well as the partnership programs they may participate in.
Ask them questions such as:
- Is your consulting firm an independent organization, or part of a larger parent company?
- Do you currently participate in any affiliate or partner programs with other business service providers?
- If so, how are you compensated as part of those arrangements?
- Does your compensation vary based on what solutions you recommend to your clients?
Only with this type of information in hand can you make an informed judgement about whether the consulting company will bring a truly independent perspective to your project — or if their opinions might be colored by the interests of a corporate parent/affiliate.
Question #4: Who will really be working on my project?
The operating model used by virtually all consulting companies is one where senior partners sell you on the consulting engagement but then disappear once the project actually gets started. In their place are newly minted MBAs and junior consultants who essentially pitch tents on your premises and train on your company’s dime.
This is a recipe for buyer’s remorse, which is why it’s important to ask up front just who will be doing your actual project work and what credentials they have:
- Who will be assigned to my project and what is their background?
- Where did they get their work experience and expertise in this domain?
- Are they career consultants, or have they actually led organizations through change from within?
- If the latter, then how senior were the corporate roles they previously held?
- Who will be my day-to-day point-of-contact on the consulting team?
The answers to these questions will help clarify not just the quality of the individuals you’ll be working with, but also how they’re likely to approach the engagement. Will it be from a more theoretical “ivory tower” perspective, or will it be from a more practical angle that’s grounded in real-world considerations.
Question #5: What kind of experience is the customer experience consulting company actually delivering?
If you’re looking for a company that’s skilled at creating highly positive customer experiences, it’s worth considering “what kind of experience are they delivering to me?”
It doesn’t matter that you’re still a prospect (and not a customer) for the consultancy – because a well-engineered customer experience should cover the entire customer lifecycle.
Be deliberate in evaluating how various customer experience service providers interact with you: the clarity of their communications, the personalization of their pitch, the quality of their proposals, the responsiveness of their people.
These are all examples of markers that can help reveal how adept a particular provider is at designing and delivering a competitively differentiated customer experience. Because if they can’t do it for their own company, what’s the chance they’ll be able to do it for yours?
Ready to Turn Your Organization into a Customer Experience Leader?
As Watermark’s widely cited Customer Experience ROI Study has illustrated for nearly two decades, few things are more important to a company’s success than the quality of its customer experience. That’s why it’s critical to make a thoughtful, well-informed decision when selecting a customer experience consulting partner.
Watermark is a boutique customer experience consulting firm. We’ve worked with some of the world’s leading brands, helping organizations impress their customers, inspire their employees, and accelerate business growth.
Tell us — what’s your challenge?
- We need to make the case for CX at our company. Our executive education programs will help demonstrate the value of customer experience excellence to company leaders, and show them how time-tested CX design techniques could be applied to your business.
- We don’t really know what customers think of us. Our consulting services include quantitative and qualitative tools which help bring the voice of your customer to the forefront, revealing game-changing insights that will drive your business forward.
- We need to rally our employees around CX. Watermark founder Jon Picoult is a widely respected keynote speaker. Invite Jon to your next all-employee meeting, sales conference or corporate event – he’ll inspire your team to deliver CX excellence, and show them exactly how to do it.
- We need to improve our CX, but we’re not sure where or how to start. Watermark’s proprietary “CX Reality Check” is like a CAT scan for your customer experience, providing an in-depth evaluation as well as a future state roadmap to guide your CX improvements for years to come.
If you think Watermark might be a good fit for your customer experience consulting needs, please contact us. We’d welcome the opportunity to learn more about what you’re trying to accomplish, and then discuss how we might assist.