On December 2, we published “The Forrester Wave™: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Practices, Q4 2020,” which is a continuation of the Forrester customer experience (CX) team’s study of the consulting market that supports CX professionals. These consulting services are critical to CX leaders trying to foster innovation and support CX transformations that help their companies keep pace with changing customer priorities.

The landscape of consultancies providing these services is large and can be confusing. To that end, we described the CX strategy consulting space earlier this year in the Forrester report, “Now Tech: Customer Experience Strategy Consulting Practices, Q3 2020.” For the Wave evaluation, we looked at a subset of the practices outlined in that report.

This evaluation looked at 12 prominent CX strategy consulting practices — Accenture, Bain & Company, BearingPoint, Capgemini, Deloitte, EPAM, IBM, KPMG, McKinsey & Company, North Highland, PwC, and Rightpoint — using a 28-criterion evaluation. What we saw was that the standout consulting practices:

  • Connect the CX vision to the brand. Businesses create devoted customers by designing experiences that deliver to customers the value they were guaranteed in the brand promise. The standout consultancies support this design process by helping clients analyze and understand market trends, research customer behaviors and needs, and develop a vision and roadmap that uses those insights to create solutions that meet or exceed customers’ expectations of the brand.
  • Back that connection with data and analytics. CX leaders often struggle to connect customer experience to business performance and brand expansion. The consultancies at the top of our evaluation can step in here with benchmark data and analytical frameworks to help CX leaders show the business value of CX. Additionally, they’re able to support businesses with researchers, data experts, and data scientists who can develop insights into how CX is both improving and expanding the business’s relationships with its customers.
  • Help facilitate workplace changes to support the vision. Redesigned touchpoints alone won’t improve customer experiences; businesses must create working environments that enable employees to create good experiences. The consultancies that set themselves apart can help CX leaders enable employees through training, redesigned jobs, new organizational alignments, and reconstructed business cultures.

I’ll be hosting a webinar on January 12 to discuss this Wave and how CX leaders can use it to find a consulting partner. In the meantime, I encourage you to have a look at the report, and if you have questions or want to discuss the report, feel free to submit an inquiry.