For some years now, business & management consultancies have been confronted with the challenge of the digital transformation of their industry. This is often described as the virtualization of consulting services. The outbreak of the Corona pandemic reinforces the need to deal with this constructively and accelerates the trend toward virtualization.

Consultants see virtualization as having rather pragmatic advantages. On the one hand, a significant reduction in travel time allows the valuable time of first and second level management to be distributed among a larger number of parallel projects. For another, the workload of all consultants can be further optimized. An accompanying reduction in the ecological footprint is a readily communicated side effect.

At the same time, however, the lack of direct customer contact is viewed critically, making it difficult to build long-term customer relationships.

Together with the EBS University of Economics and Law, we took this development as an opportunity to conduct a survey on the topic of “virtual management consulting”. This white paper presents the results of the survey and provides insights from practice as well as a basis for discussion that may be helpful in the future use of virtual consulting services.