What’s an Implementation Consultant, & What Can They Do for Your Business?

Dec 16

When adopting new SaaS and CX/CS tools, the process can feel overwhelming without the right expertise—especially for small and midsized businesses.

This is where an implementation consultant can be a game-changer. These professionals specialize in understanding software solutions and aligning them with your unique business needs—saving you time, effort, and the potential pitfalls of trial and error.

In this post, we’ll explore the role of an implementation consultant and why they’re invaluable for streamlining your software adoption journey.

What is an implementation consultant?

An implementation consultant is an expert in one or more enterprise software solutions—so much so that they can help your business use that software to its fullest potential. They also have a wide breadth of experience with implementing the tools in various industries, making them a potent resource for learning best practices.

The consultant’s ultimate goal is to help their clients tailor their use case to the software they have chosen, not tailor the software to their use case. Doing the latter may work in the short term, but it is unlikely to be scalable, and clients that have processes that don’t fit well should work with a consultant to either:

Re-evaluate the software they have chosen in the first place to determine if there another one that works better.
Re-evaluate their processes overall. If the software they chose is correct, why does their use case not fit well?
- Most of the time, it’s because the process isn’t industry standard and may need to be adjusted. Companies should ask themselves why their chosen software doesn’t have the features they need - is it because the software is bad? Or is the process bad?

For example, a customer relationship management (CRM) consultant focusing on Salesforce would be an expert in all Salesforce products and services and have a wide swathe of experience in many industries implementing the tools. Not only are they a wealth of knowledge for how to implement a product, but they would be able to advise on the best practices you should adhere to for scaling your business around the tools your company is using, rather than the other way around - where your business could potentially need tons custom solutions for every one of your use cases (which may be difficult to scale and maintain).

Key Responsibilities of an Implementation Consultant

The key responsibilities of an implementation consultant can be broken down into three different areas:

Customizing workflows to match business needs

Consultants understand the complexity of the solutions they are working with and can tailor them to your use case. They can also advise on tweaks to your own internal processes to ensure your process, paired with the tool, will scale.

Onboarding client’s team to new software
- Ensuring on-staff employees are trained on the implementation is essential, unless you want to pay the consultant on retainer indefinitely.
Troubleshooting and ongoing support

If needed, some consultants may offer to stay on retainer after completing an implementation or will provide ongoing support for questions or improvements.

If you hire an implementation consultant, the general relationship process will likely look something like this:

Learning & Scoping

Before building anything, a few onboarding sessions for the implementation consultant will need to be scheduled with key stakeholders in order to become an expert in your company and to answer questions like:

What does your budget for software and implementation look like?
What does your current process look like?
What are the biggest challenges in your current processes?
What metrics would you like to track to ensure success?

Implementation

Once the consultant has a good understanding of the client’s use case and processes, they will build out an implementation plan which will be sent to key stakeholders to review for accuracy and approval.
Once approved, the consultant can begin working on actually building the solution with regular stakeholder check-ins throughout the process.
Depending on the implementation complexity, volume size and customization needed, the implementation process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks or more.

Training

Once implementation is complete, the next phase is to transfer the knowledge of the changes made and the new system’s maintenance to the internal on-staff team at the client’s company, which often needs to be split into 2 trainings for separate groups:

Users of the solution - Whoever will actually be using the process day-to-day will need to be trained on what the software looks like and how to use it going forward.
Admins - An IT team or manager should be trained on how to maintain and update the system as you scale, at least as a basic level.

Ongoing Support & Offboarding

Once training is complete, a consultant may provide the client with a few months of ongoing support (depending on the contract terms) to ensure things run smoothly, training sticks, and minor improvements can be made.
At the end of the consultant’s contract, a transition should occur where the consultant is fully offboarded and your users and admins fully onboarded. It’s at this point that your relationship with the consultant officially ends (at least until you have another project for them).

The Benefits of Working with an Implementation Consultant

Now you know what an implementation consultant is, what they do, and what it’s like to work with them. If you’ve read this far, then I’m sure your next question (and what you’ll need to pitch this to your boss) is what benefits can implementation consultants bring to your team.

Well, the big ones are that these consultants can:

Save your team’s time - Rather than learning the solution yourself, or designating someone on your team to, implementation consultants can hit the ground running immediately after a few scoping sessions.
Dedicate as much time and effort as necessary to complete the job right - Consultants can create your ideal vision for you, taking effort off of your plate. They can also do the implementation faster and (likely) better than you’d be able to do yourself. They are tapping years of experience, dozens (or more) of implementations and may even have resources from the service provider to ensure they can build you a process that works.
Provide scalable solutions - With their years of experience, you can be sure a consultant has the knowledge to set up a process that should scale with you for years, rather than needing to be evaluated every few quarter or year.
Adhere to best practices - Years of experience working in companies with unique use cases means they’ve seen it all before. As novel as you may think your own processes are, it’s likely that an implementation consultant has seen a similar one before, and they can advise on how best to utilize the software.
Reduce use-case friction and accelerate internal adoption - Tapping consultants to build the product often shortens the software adoption time since less time and effort was spent by your team to set it up. This also can decrease employee dissatisfaction with a software because, by the time the system is ready for adoption, everything’s already been established and in a good place—ensuring your users should be able to adopt it easily.

Signs You Need an Implementation Consultant

Even though implementation consultants are very specialized in a specific type of software, the amount of business issues they might be able to alleviate is quite extensive. By nature, these consultants have an acute eye for identifying workflow hang-ups, fixing system inefficiencies, and finding creative solutions to logistical issues.

As such, here are a few signs you might benefit from giving one a call:

The users of your process are getting stuck or are unclear what next steps are
- Your “process users” are essentially anyone who uses the software in question, such as internal support team members, contracted support agents, cross-functional teams, external third parties, etc.
- For example, if your company has an unclear support process, support agents may be unsure about how or when to move tickets along in their lifecycle, or may have no way to escalate cases to managers or cross-functional team members. Additionally, your managers and cross-functional teams may not know what to do with a ticket when it’s passed to them. In short, your process is not well-documented or understood, and tickets often get “stuck” at certain points in the ticket lifecycle because of that lack of clear understanding.
You have scalability concerns or volume changes that don’t mesh well with your current system
- For example, your company might be taking off, and you’re realizing that your current email volume is too high… and growing. Since your process users are getting frustrated with ever-growing case volume, you’ll need some automation tools like Zendesk to help keep everyone organized, on-task, and comfortable with the new, faster pace.
You’re outgrowing your current system, but you don’t have the expertise or time to make the proper changes
- Companies may realize they need to change their process. Unfortunately, either no one on-staff has the expertise to take a critical look at their process and come to valuable conclusions, or anyone that does have that expertise is too busy with the current scale and volume to do anything about it.

Risks of Hiring An Implementation Consultant

As with any business decision, there are a few downsides to consider when evaluating whether or not you should reach out to an implementation consultant. Let’s talk about them.

Cost - A good consultant can be expensive.
- Companies should attempt to estimate the time and effort required to do an internal implementation. This should be done by estimating the work required for their team to execute it and assigning a value to those tasks.
  - For example, if you pay one employee $35/hour, how many hours would it take for them to:
- Additionally, consider the opportunity cost of re-assigning this employee to this project versus what they would have been doing otherwise.
- Once you have considered the internal cost implications, it’s time to evaluate a few consultants. If their estimates are close (or cheaper), then hiring a consultant may make more sense.
Wrong fit - As with any full-time employee, it’s key to do your due diligence during the interview process before committing to a consultant.

Most times, this situation can arise innocently, but some of the most common scenarios we see include, but aren’t limited to:
- The consultant not having as thorough knowledge on your use case, industry, or preferred software(s) than originally portrayed (either because they misrepresented their skills or the interview questions weren’t specific enough to vet certain skills)
- The company’s ideal process end result changes after the contract has already started (either because they misrepresented - or couldn’t clearly describe - their goals or business objectives changed unexpectedly)

The biggest consequence with this one is, if the consultant (or your chosen software) is the wrong fit, or they implement a bad process, you may be dealing with the financial or process implications for years to come to untangle the web they built.

Dependency on the consultant - Make sure you leverage their knowledge to train your team before their contract ends.
- You don’t want the have the consultant working for you indefinitely. Ideally, you want a <12 month relationship with them with a clear end-state in mind. However, you want to make sure in that time, someone internal is learning how the tools and integrations work so they can be maintained after your relationship with the consultant is over.
- If you and your team are depending on the consultant for too long, it will reduce any cost savings you got by going with them to begin with.

Conclusion

Deciding whether to hire an implementation consultant requires weighing the costs, benefits, and long-term impact on your business. While consultants bring industry expertise and scalable solutions to the table, it's essential to align their role with your goals and resources. By understanding the value they provide, you can make an informed choice that ensures a smoother transition, faster adoption, and a foundation for growth.

Stay tuned for more insights into optimizing your support stack implementations—and reach out via the contact form on the About page if you have specific questions or need tailored advice!

John Walsh