Authors: Katalin Varga-Toldi; Zoltán Veres
Perceived quality within a client-consultant relationship in business and project marketing literature is still largely unexplored. This is particularly the case for management consulting projects where project scope is often indefinite, consisting of draft directions and initial ideas rather than concrete specifications. For that reason, the buyer organization must face need, market and transaction uncertainty and measuring the quality of management consulting projects remain a thorny issue. This paper advances an empirically grounded approach to the study of utility preferences and perceived quality of management consulting projects by identifying the clients’ underlying utility preferences and quality dimensions. Based on empirical qualitative data from 22 in-depth interviews, the paper defines generic consulting purposes, describes utility attributes at each organizational level, and demonstrates a conceptual model of perceived quality dimensions and how these dimensions influence the clients’ perception of client-consultants interactions. Qualitative research has revealed that there is a significant ignorance of official interim and final assessment from client side. Consequently, quality evaluation in practice generally ends with an informal yes/no decision as clients tend to make “we like working with them”, “we never want to work with them again” statements. The question is when, and more importantly how, do clients get to this point? What factors influence their ultimate judgements? In the last section, the paper suggests further research in this field for development of both project management and professional service marketing theory and practice.
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Publish Year: 2018
Conference: Marseille, France (2018)