LEADERSHIP CONSULTANT AND CLIENT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Phuoc D. Nguyen

Consultant-client relationship management is the process of using a variety of consulting tools and business tools to build, maintain, and develop long-term relationships with clients. Walton (2000) proposed “The consultant-client relationship is an ideal management challenge. On the one hand, it is about creativity, unanticipated connections, and innovation. It is about people and communication. It is about finding ways to convey insights and make discoveries.” (p. 6). The outcome of consultant-client relationship management is creating value for the client. The purpose of consulting services is not only to maximize values through individual transactions but also to build a lasting and long-term relationship with clients. As such, consultant-client relationship management requires consulting firms that understand the process by which clients create value to help them improve the value that they will receive from the consultant.

Fincham (1999) stated, “A strategic perspective focuses on the practice of consultancy and regards as problematic the achievement of consultancy activity; a structural view stresses the constraints on the consultant-client relationship and the demand for consultant ideas created by macro/external forces.” (p. 349). Based on the outcome of consultant-client relationship management, it can be seen that the provision of customer service must be seen as an operational process through which the capacity of the consulting firms is partially shifted into the process of creating value for the client. As a result, consulting services in this view are seen as a process in which consulting firms create new value for their values. Nikolova, Mollering, and Reihlen (2015) indicated “Clients preferred consultants who were easy to deal with and would do the job without wasting clients’ time and effort and who allowed them to concentrate on their other responsibilities.” (p. 238). The amount/percent of consultant’s time to spend working on client relationships based on the consulting project’s complexity, kinds of consulting services, geographical distance, the timeframe for the whole consulting project, training, coaching, and instructing to clients.