Five Ways To Improve Your Consultancy Recommendations (a real-world example)
Five Ways To Improve Your Consultancy Recommendations (a real-world example)
Far too many consultants make the same mistakes which undermine their work and reduce the value they deliver to clients. Let's explore how to do it much better.
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Stop Delivering Vague, Generic, Recommendations
A while ago a client sent us the work of another consultant in our space as background on a project.
The research was generally solid, but the recommendations were terrible.
The recommendations included things like:
Implement UX best practices.
Build a group of top members.
Create an engaging experience for customers.
Improve the gamification system in the community.
Remove the inactive sub-groups.
The ideas themselves aren’t bad, but as an actionable piece of advice, this is unhelpful and lazy.
One of the principles we hold dear at FeverBee is to be as actionable as humanly possible in our recommendations.
I want to share some examples of what this means and why it’s a good practice to adopt.
1) Avoid Sharing Recommendations Which Would Apply To Every Situation
Stop sharing advice that would always apply.
For example, ‘creating an engaging experience’ or ‘implementing UX best practices’ is generic advice.
Can you think of a situation where that advice would not apply?
No. Me neither.
Worse yet, the client is going to read that and think ‘what do you think we’re trying to do?!?’
You’re not delivering value for money if you’re creating generic recommendations. A client can read a book or a blog post for that knowledge.
2) Be Precise In The Outcome Of The Recommendation
Let’s look at the initial recommendations again.
Implement UX best practices.
Build a group of top members.
Create an engaging experience for customers.
Improve the gamification system in the community.
Remove the inactive sub-groups.
Are these goals or actions? It seems to be a combination of both.
How will a client know when they have accomplished any of the above?
For example, the first recommendation can technically be achieved by anything from tweaking a single feature or revamping the entire website.
Building a group of top members sounds more concrete - but what qualifies as a top member or even a group? How many people do you expect to be participating in it to know you’ve accomplished the goal?
Removing inactive sub-groups is slightly better, but what is your definition of inactive?
As a general rule, you should never use phrases like ‘improve’ or ‘increase’. Those phrases lead to subjectivity in the outcome. They will almost certainly invite more questions from the client. Your goal here is to answer questions upfront.
So let’s take a shot at improving (aha!) each of the recommendations above.
Reduce the average time it takes a member to complete a task by 15%.
Create a Slack group for the top 1% of members (by community activity).
Reduce static content to 25% of the community homepage.
Improve our gamification benchmarks from level three to level four in the FeverBee maturity score.
Archive any groups which have received less than 10 posts in the past year.
These are still a confused mixture of outcomes and inputs, but we’ll tackle that in another post.
As a client, you can see how the recommendations we’ve shared above are now a lot more concrete and easier to understand.
3) Get Granular About The Steps Required
Handing a client a of list things you want them to achieve with a good luck message doesn’t really help anyone.
The client needs you to outline what the journey ahead looks like as specifically as possible.
So let’s use our revamped recommendations above as examples:
Implement UX best practices.
(revamped) Reduce the average time it takes a member to complete a task by 15%.
Revise website taxonomy by user intent to ensure all pages are a max of 3 pages deep in the navigation.
Use a single, consistent, navigation menu across every page.
Add a breadcrumb trail to every page so audiences can easily find their way back.
Audit existing community pages for inconsistent brand colours and ensure the same colour scheme is consistent on every page (especially for CTAs).
Identify the top 10% most-visited pages and position them at the top of the page.
Use #trendingtopics to highlight the posts that are most visited at any given time.
This is about the specificity of the recommendations more than identifying the best UX improvements - but hopefully, you get the idea. We can do this for each of these.
Build a group of top members.
(revised) Create a Slack group for the top 1% of members (by community activity).
Extract the list of members in a CSV and filter out members by those who have not made a contribution in the past three months. Then list the remaining members by the number of posts. Create a list of the top 1%.
Use the template we have provided to send a message inviting them to join a webinar about the group.
Host and run the webinar on Zoom to gather feedback on what they would like to see in the program.
Launch a Slack group using a company account and invite members to engage and participate.
Use our template to plan a calendar of events and activities to engage in.
Again, now we have a much clearer and cleaner set of recommendations to provide a client.
Create an engaging experience for customers.
(revised) Reduce static content to 25% of the community homepage.
Install Hotjar on the community site to identify how people explore the community homepage.
Undertake UX research with members with clear tasks and identify where and how they get stuck.
Identify the 25% of static content which is seen by newcomers.
Replace the remaining 75% of content with areas that would help members get unstuck in their tasks.
Improve the gamification system in the community.
(revised) Improve our gamification benchmarks from level three to level four in the FeverBee maturity score.
Create a series of awards for top members to earn considerably more points to overcome the exponential curve problem.
Replace the confusing current ranking naming system in favour of numerical changes.
Integrate the community with the customer loyalty program whereby points from one scheme are added to the other.
Create a weekly review to identify potential cheaters.
Remove the inactive sub-groups.
(revised) Archive any groups that have received less than 10 posts in the past year.
Use the available analytics program in the data to select each group and check the number of posts in the past year.
For each group, review if the posts have been primarily created by members or by administrators.
If the group has less than 10 organic posts in the past year, remove it from the navigation system and prevent further posts in the group.
Create a final post in the group explaining the group has been archived and inviting members to use the community’s tagging system for the topic.
Send an update to existing group leaders letting them know the importance of keeping sustainable groups and provide them with access to our training courses.
Prevent future groups from forming unless there is a clear group leader and a list of 25 committed person(s) eager to engage in the group.
As a client, this is the level of granularity which will make everything so much easier.
You want the client to have a very clear idea of what the steps you’re describing look like in as much detail as possible.
The best way to tell someone who truly knows what they’re talking about from those who are pretending is how specific they can be in their recommendations.
The more specific you are, the more likely you will achieve the outcome you want.
4) Prioritise Your Recommendations By Effort And Impact
Some of your recommendations are more important than others.
This is why you want to prioritise your recommendations by effort and impact.
The effort is simply the resources required to implement the recommendation and the impact is the potential outcome of the project. You will never know either for sure, but you should have data you can point to to estimate both.
Typically we would present this in a table, but since Substack doesn’t seem to like tables, we will use bullet points.
Reduce the average time it takes a member to complete a task by 15%. [60 - 80 HOURS || HIGH IMPACT]
Reduce static content to 25% of the community homepage. [25 - 35 HOURS || INTERMEDIATE IMPACT]
Archive any groups which have received less than 10 posts in the past year. [7 HOURS || LOW IMPACT]
Create a Slack group for the top 1% of members (by community activity). [32 HOURS || INTERMEDIA IMPACT]
Improve our gamification benchmarks from level three to level four in the FeverBee maturity score. [24 HOURS || LOW IMPACT]
When you make a recommendation, you should have an approximate idea of the resources required (we’ve used time vs. budget in these examples) and the possible impact.
The best way of estimating impact is by asking around and looking at others who have taken this path.
5) Structure Your Recommendations Into Work Streams
It’s important to understand how a client is likely to utilise your recommendations.
Most of the time (although not always) the person you deliver the recommendations to isn’t the person who will be implementing them. It’s more likely they will have a team they will manage who will undertake the execution.
This is why it’s good, where possible, to structure your recommendations as independent work streams (i.e. they have no common dependencies or overlapping areas of responsibility). This lets your contact easily assign them to members of their team.
In the example above, it’s clear we have three work streams. One related to what will appear in the community experience, one related to configuring features, and one which involves setting up a new platform.
Workstream 1: Community Structure
Reduce the average time it takes a member to complete a task by 15%
Reduce static content to 25% of the community homepage.
Both of these will require technical capabilities to implement. There is likely to be some overlap and shared resources needed for them both.
Workstream 2: Feature Configuration
Archive any sub-groups which have received less than 10 posts in the past year.
Improve our gamification benchmarks from level three to level four in the FeverBee maturity score.
We’re grouping these together as they are about adjusting the settings of existing features.
Workstream 3: Set Up New Experience.
Create a Slack group for the top 1% of members (by community activity).
Given this uses a new platform entirely, we’ve split this into its own workstream.
Now when you present your recommendations you can also share the best way to group and assign them to staff to undertake.
Make It Easy For Clients To Utilise Your Recommendations
Consultancy projects obviously differ greatly from one another. Management consulting is different from advising on local website improvements. But the basic principles above should be useful.
Avoid sharing recommendations that would apply to any situation.
Be precise in the improvement which needs to be undertaken and/or its outcome.
Get granular about the implementation process.
Prioritise by resources and likely impact.
Structure the recommendations into distinct work streams.
If you can abide by those principles you will be doing much better than most people.
Aside: When you’re creating thought-leadership content you can apply many of these same principles too.