Why—despite everything—do clients continue to rely on external support?
Clients have many good reasons for not using outside help: the uncertain environment that makes investment decisions difficult; the expense at a time when clients want to cut costs; the uncertain return on investment; the disruption. Yet just over half clients tell us that they expect to use more consulting and other professional services next year.
Over the last three years, we’ve asked clients to tell us the top two reasons why they need external support.
Two years ago, in the buoyant aftermath of the pandemic, 43% said that one of their top two reasons was that they were dealing with new issues of which they didn’t have experience. That percentage has been falling, down to 36% in 2022 and to just 26% this year, perhaps because some of the innovation that took place during COVID—hybrid working being the most obvious example—has been assimilated into the everyday, or perhaps because the issues clients are now facing are more familiar—rising costs, for example.
Clients are also less likely to cite an increase in their workload as a reason to bring consultants in: Only 23% said this was one of their top two reasons this year, compared to 33% and 36% in 2021 and 2022 respectively. Our research elsewhere shows that clients are just as likely to say they feel overworked as they were in previous years, but it appears that this in isolation is less of a justifiable reason to bring in outside help. By contrast, not having sufficient specialist expertise is a more common reason, cited by 22% of clients this year. The one thing that hasn’t discernibly changed is the use of outside help to get work done more quickly, which has stayed around the 35% mark for all three years. Staff augmentation remains important, we infer, but the key to its importance is speed of delivery.