Digital transformation has a number of benefits for consultants. From establishing new revenue streams to data management to collaboration, digital capabilities transform every part of the consulting workflow, and consultants can see clear benefits at every step of the way. We recently facilitated digital transformation at a top-tier consultancy that helped the organization improve margins and accomplish more in less time.
According to a research by Capgemini and McKinsey & Co., the payoff for digital consulting is astronomical. That is why, we’re eager to present you with the top 12 benefits of a Digital Consulting approach.
1. Decreased Time to Value
The market for consultants to come in to a client organization and spend weeks of billable hours just getting to know the business is dwindling. Digitization of the client discovery process allows consultants to gain this knowledge in a fraction of the time, enabling them to bring the client value in the form of initial recommendations from day one.
2. Create a Knowledge Library
Rather than allowing knowledge to stagnate, consultants can use digitization to build on their expertise. By using a digital platform to house their questions and frameworks, they can easily track their performance and identify the best options. Thus firms can continuously improve on those questions and frameworks, thereby improving their thought leadership and credibility with clients.
3. Scaleable Engagements
Today’s clients expect consultants to increase speed to insight without sacrificing the quality of the outcome. As a result, consultants will need to use digital capabilities to make engagements scalable. Digital interview platforms can help consultants ask detailed questions in a structured way while still querying thousands of people at once. Digital analytics platforms can help consultants quickly turn that data into useable insights. With these digital tools, consultants can do more work with fewer resources.
4. Business Growth
By making engagements scalable, consultants free up resources that can be used to grow the business. For smaller firms, digitization may allow consultants to take on more clients than resources previously allowed. For larger firms, digital capabilities can help them bid more competitively and win more business.
5. Differentiation from Competition
On that note, consultants can use digitization as a distinct differentiator. Because the majority of the consulting world has yet to go digital, digitization is a prime way for consultants to set themselves apart from competition. Many clients today expect consultants to use digital methods, particularly when the consultants themselves are helping their clients to go digital.
6. Increased Margins
By using fewer resources to accomplish more, firms are effectively increasing their margins. By using 9Lenses to digitize the discovery and analysis process, for example, one of our clients reduced time spent from eight to three weeks and the number of analysts needed from four to two. As a result, the firm raised the margin for that engagement by 10%.
7. Repeatable Engagements
Digitization of content allows for easily repeatable engagements, allowing consultants to build recurring “pulses” into their service offerings. Consultants can track client progress with little additional effort and cost, creating recurring revenue streams.
8. Better Collaboration with Colleagues and Clients
Multitudes of tools are available today to help ensure that teams are communicating effectively with each other. What many consultants are missing, however, is a single platform that allows them to actually work together on analyzing a data set, rather than analyzing data in disparate spreadsheets. Moreover, most consultants lack a means of collaboration with the client. Clients are usually only privy to the presentation that the consultant delivers at the end of an engagement. If they cannot understand it, the likelihood of retention is slim. With Digitization, consultants can create a traceable path of client data and frameworks edits to improve relationships with their colleagues and clients.
9. Increase Efficiency
Similarly, digital capabilities that allow consultants to better collaborate will end up increasing efficiency overall. Consultants working in silos frequently end up duplicating work, creating a framework or a set of questions that has already been created in another practice or even within the same practice. A digital platform that houses all frameworks and data sets will allow consultants to create digitized service offerings that can be deployed again and again across multiple practices without duplicating work or recreating the wheel every time.
10. Increased Client Stickiness
Client stickiness must be listed as its own separate benefit, since there are so many ways that digitization can boost it. Collaboration, speed to value, and better results all play into the likelihood of whether or not a client will stick around. Digital Consulting benefits include extending relationships by speeding time to value and assessing + monitoring progress after an implementation.
11. Make Confident, Data-Driven Recommendations
Digitization allows consultants to examine more data in more intricate ways than manual methods allow, which in turn allows them to delve much deeper into the data. Successful digitization of the analysis process will allow consultants to easily slice and dice the data in order to quickly find the root causes of issues and identify appropriate solutions.
12. Secure IP
Data security is an area of consulting that is vastly overlooked despite the data breaches that have occurred in several industries within the past few years. Consultants today may be overlooking the potential breaches of their clients’ data exists solely on spreadsheets and hard drives, which are notoriously insecure. Not only is client data susceptible to malicious attacks, but it can be easily misplaced or lost when an employee leaves the firm. Data stored in a central cloud can be far more easily monitored and its usage tracked.
Here are the quick takeaways in the form of an Infographic –
These are just a taste of the benefits consultants can reap from digitizing their practices.
We hope these will help inspire you towards digitization.
Want to learn more about how your consultancy can go digital? Get in touch with us here.
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