Customer Strategy Consulting?
Hey folks,
Long time reader of WSO, first time poster.
Lately, as I've been perusing LinkedIn, I've been seeing Customer Strategy Consulting (or variants of it --- Customer Analytics Consulting, you get the picture) popping up quite a bit. Typically these roles are at Big 4 Consulting firms.
I've done a little bit of digging into the area and it seems like this job consists of the following:
- Providing advisory to clients on how they can modify their strategy to improve customers' experiences
- Discovering consumer pain points
- Performing financial and competitive analyses to discover areas for profitability improvements
- Owning change management
- Product Management for clients' new products
- Gathering actionable insights from journey maps
That is all high level and I'm sure I'm missing things as I don't actually work in this area. If I'm way off base on any of these points, please correct me.
With that being said, I think this type of role is very cool and it seems like the exact type of work that I'd be interested in.
My questions are below:
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How are these practices at Big 4 firms regarded in terms of prestige? From within the firms and, perhaps more
Importantly, from outside the firms? -
What are the exit opps for these types of roles? Off the top of my head I would think internal customer strategy at F500 companies but would really appreciate your opinions. Is Product Management at tech firms a realistic option?
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Also related to the above, would this be a good path to place into top MBA programs?
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What do these individuals actually do on a daily basis? Is it more PMO or are they actually conducting strategic, competitive, and financial analyses that they then act on?
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Salary: Would it be expected that one would make the average Big 4 management consulting salary? Is there any reason for concern here?
It would be fantastic to hear from someone with actual experience in this area at Big 4 firms or elsewhere.
Thank you in advance!!
It seems to be quite a broad term differing from company to company but from what I've seen it also captures sales, marketing & pricing work as well as setting up customer shared services (e.g. call centres etc.). Better firms in that space such as OC&C Strategy, Simon Kucher & Partners, Bain will typically do the sales growth, segmentation analysis and pricing work. Big 4 will often do that too (EY & PwC teams in Customer are pretty good) however it will focus more on customer journeys design, change management, customer shared services, salesforce effectiveness. The latter can still be interesting work. Additionally, you can also find Innovation / Ideation boutique consultancies that work in that space (see Bow & Arrow) but they focus more on the creative / product launch work - the others don't do much product management work.
All in, regardless of which firm you look at, I think it is a really cool area to work in and would definitely be my Top 3 pick in terms of specialisations in consulting. In my opinion typical exit would be F500 companies within sales/marketing and sometimes strategy functions (but with less focus on corporate development or operations work).
Also - check out customer strategy & marketing service line within Bain, you can find quit a few interesting articles there on the topic.
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